Peter Suhm shared a beautiful guide on how to build a writing habit. The guide isn't about good writing, or achieving success through publishing your work. It's about the small gains you get and compound from consistent writing for yourself. It's about building a habit, the quality will follow.

This is a guide about writing — not publishing. Publishing is the root of all evil when it comes to writing consistently. Publishing is uncomfortable, at times even scary. How will people judge your words? It’s publishing that causes writer’s block — not writing. It’s what makes writing hard. In the same way that talking is easy but getting up on stage and giving a talk is hard, writing is easy too, but writing something you feel confident enough to publish is hard. When the stakes are low, the writing is easy. Once I realized the key to building a daily writing habit was to separate the process of writing from the goal of publishing, it all clicked for me.

I love the pragmatism. And the goal is up to you be it 100 or 1000 words a day. There's no right or wrong amount of writing, the key is consistency.

A fun read on why we should spend more time creating, and less consuming.

The real tragedy of modern technology is that it’s turned us into consumers. Our voracious consumption of media parallels our consumption of fossil fuels, corn syrup, and plastic straws. And although we’re starting to worry about our consumption of those physical goods, we seem less concerned about our consumption of information.

We treat information as necessarily good, and comfort ourselves with the feeling that whatever article or newsletter we waste our time with is actually good for us.

(I suppose it'd defeat to point to add a comment here.)

Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the fluffy stuff about how excited you are to announce yada yada ya – just tell me what improved.

Boom! The text is lighter, faster, less wasteful.