Make the Same Thing Every Day
Published on 2023-02-08
The Problem
If you're anything like me, you have a whole slew of projects you've started but not finished. You get very interested in an idea, take a deep dive into it for a few days, and have a blast. For one reason or another, though, you end up moving on to something else.
The hard truth is that, no matter how curious you are and how much you think you know, your body of work (and thus your real, verifiable experience in that field) is only as good as the projects you finish. One must finish projects and make them usable or seen.
I was made aware of this problem for myself & my professional journey so far when I went through a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad interview. The interviewers were fantastic, asking thoughtful questions about technical details of my experience & past projects. I stumbled through almost everything I said, realizing that I was not only rusty with interviewing (a whole skill in itself), but that I also had very little to pull from outside of the few projects I had worked on and completed with my previous employers in my relatively short career. There were topics I wanted to discuss that I had discovered while starting short-lived personal projects, and many more that I had read about online or watched countless video tutorials about, but I had only surface-level knowledge about most of the material we discussed.
The Problem More Fully Realized
The specifics of the problem I want to solve were unexpectedly found before fully understanding that it was a problem. I found this video by Struthless on YouTube, who had at one point struggled with a similar issue, specifically with honing his artistic skills.
Campbell Walker (the guy in the video who called me out) consulted his mentor, Marc Schattner (of the dynamic duo Gillie and Marc), complaining that he couldn't make his art his full-time gig. Marc clapped back with this:
One day you write a song, the next day you write a poem, and then the third day you do a drawing, and none of it adds up to anything.
The Solution
Campbell then asked Marc how he can fix his problem. The solution? Draw the same thing every single day.
Campbell eventually (via the magic of the universe) landed on the subject of the ibis for his daily drawings. As he continued drawing ibises, he began to feel more free to flex his creative muscles, to the point that the ibis took a backseat role to the rest of the drawing most days.
Now, Specifics
I am going to apply a similar principal to my web development skills. I enjoy working with this tech, and I want to improve it. I want to develop the skill of finishing projects, too, so this sounds like a good path forward.
I'm going to build a testimonial component on this site every day. This is a simple enough web component that it can be knocked out in a matter of minutes (to at least build & continue the habit every day), but it's open-ended enough to not limit my creativity by any means. I anticipate building larger sections or even full pages around some testimonial components when I have more free time on a given day. I'm excited to get started!