Public blogging commitments
After ten years with WordPress I am migrating my first blog over here to Bear. It's become quite an undertaking, primarily because feelings and thoughts flood over me with each post I dig up from years past and move over here. The migration is a rollercoaster. I feel pride, nostalgia, embarrassment, wonder, gratitude, sadness, all at once.
Of course, going through each old post (some of them almost ten years old!) leads to comparison with today. Here I am in the present-day, committing to writing one blog post per day (until Dec 31, 2024 at least). But when I made this commitment, I'd forgotten how many times I'd said something like this in the past on my blog. I keep uncovering these old posts that public commitments, some of them pretty specific, for example, "I'm going to get to 100 total posts, by publishing 3-4 times per month." There's about 5 posts with some type of commitment like this. Back to the present-day commitment I've made, it's very clear that writing something online is not enough to make it happen.
I'm surprised that I'm not harshly judging my past self. I commend her consistent desire to write and create. I know now that she didn't understand how things happen. What I can see now that I didn't know back then is that once the goal is set, feelings of motivation and desire need to be put aside in favour of planning consistent actions and doing them regardless of what I feel on a given day.
I also know now that when I tell myself I'm going to do something, the stakes are higher than I realize in terms of both potential upside and downside. If I say I'm going to do something and then don't do it, historically I've taken this as evidence that I am a failure and can't do something. Stories like this have downstream effects on choices, behaviour, and beliefs. Something I am working on these days is trying to internalize the idea that if I have motivation to do something, say I'm going to do it, and don't do it, then the flaw is in the process rather than with me on some fundamental level. With this mindset, "failures" can be more like data. As far as upsides go, making commitments and seeing them through is about much more than the thing itself. On December 31 I will have dozens of blog posts but that's not the best part, not by far. I will have more confidence, and a sense of integrity; that is, feeling a compatibility between beliefs, desires, actions, and results. And this is priceless.