During their four collegiate racing years, crew members Joe Rantz, Roger Morris, and George Hunt had been undefeated. In 1936, they led their University of Washington team to an Olympic gold medal.

In one of the most mentally and physically grueling sports on the planet, each had taken nearly half a million (469,000) strokes with his oar. Each had rowed approximately 4,344 miles—nearly the equivalent of Seattle to Japan. Of the 4,344 miles rowed, only 28 were during an actual race.

28!

In other words, more than 99% of what they did was practice.

In many ways, rowing was their practice—work done for its own sake and shared with the world.

Painting a picture for a big payout is not a practice. Painting a picture, selling it, treating the money as a nice bonus (a “preferred indifferent”, as the Stoics would call it), and then getting right back to painting another picture—that’s a practice.

You can have a practice of gardening or jiu-jitsu or cooking or pretty much anything. A practice is spiritual. There’s no room for ego. But you also must be a warrior and fight every day against boredom and despair and apathy.

I’ve kept a writing practice for a few years now and noticed recurring roadblocks—always mental, of course—like guilt, unreasonable expectations, and self-consciousness.

Below are some things I’ve learned that have helped me to keep a practice and stay (mostly) sane along the way:

It’s supposed to be hard, not stressful

Every evening, after the day’s work and responsibilities, I play fetch with my dog.

It’s one of my favorite times of the day. I cheer Riley on, reminding her, unequivocally, who the best girl is. I breathe in the crisp Arizona air. I gaze at the trees and the birds and the clouds. When the colors in the sky are especially vibrant, I pick my jaw off the ground and run inside to grab Courtney.

It’s usually around this time, when I’m fully engaged with my surroundings and having the time of my life, that the tyrant in my brain activates. You have an awful lot of time on your hands, it points out. Why don’t you work a little more so you don’t waste your life.

I used to let this voice get to me, my joy darkening to stress. Maybe I should work more, I’d think.

But I realized that if keeping a practice is going to cause me unnecessary stress, I don’t want it. If I’ve done my work for the day, I shouldn’t feel pressured to do more.

Of course, this doesn’t mean keeping a practice isn’t hard work; it’s some of the hardest work there is: self-directed and largely unacknowledged. But that doesn’t mean it has to be stressful. And it certainly doesn’t mean it’s allowed to bug me after I’ve put in my time for the day.

So now when the tyrant starts, I’ll think, remember the first rule for everything: don’t stress. There needs to be balance. If there’s not, I don’t want it. Then I discard the tyrannical thought and get back to rolling around in the grass with Riley so I don’t waste my life.

Just show up

This quote from Steven Pressfield has motivated me more than almost anything else when it comes to sitting down every day and writing:

“How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is that I put in my time and hit it with all I got. All that counts is that for this day, for this session I have overcome Resistance.”

I’ve learned that writers don’t get writer’s block. Writers get caught up thinking about whether their writing is good or bad.

It’s okay to feel like a jerk sometimes

I do a lot of my writing during my lunch hour.

This was easy when I worked remotely but it got tricky when we switched to a hybrid schedule. On office days, my coworkers would invite me to lunch and I would accept because they’re my buddies and I like hanging out with them. Plus I didn’t want to feel like a jerk by declining. So I would forgo my lunchtime writing, promising myself I’d write as soon as I got home.

But writing at home meant cutting into time with my wife, which I wasn’t willing to do. So I’d end up not writing anything and feeling frustrated about not having enough time. I realized if I wanted to stick to my practice I had to decline lunch invites.

I felt like a jerk at first, but taking lunch to myself has become the norm and, as far as I can tell, no one thinks anything of it.

Except for me. I think everything of it. The extra hour I’ve given myself has allowed me to stick to my practice.

Protecting your time for practice might make you feel like a jerk sometimes, and that’s okay. It’s probably a sign you’re on the right track.

If it’s not exciting, don’t do it

I’ve learned that if I’m having a tough time motivating myself to write, it’s usually because I’m not excited about the subject.

The daily job of writing the article or newsletter may not be exciting, but the initial idea should be. It’s still hard work. But if the subject is exciting, at least it resembles play in that it’s fun hard work. Like Wordle. Or children playing cops and robbers. 

Play can be serious business.

Set a timer

Here’s a fantastic way to torture yourself: work without a stop time. 

Focusing is easiest when it’s only for an hour or two. When the timer on my phone dings, I get to stop. Not after I’ve written something “good”, not after banging my head against the wall sounds like a better alternative. Just ‘til my phone dings.

There is no shortcut

It’s interesting how the top performers in almost every field can afford to give away their secrets. A world-class chef will explain step-by-step how she makes her famous dish. A celebrity makeup artist describes the exact technique that’s made him a fortune. How can they do this without worrying about instant competition?

Because they know the thousands of hours of practice it will take to get anywhere near their level. The subtleties and nuances can be learned only through experience, repetition, and consistent output.

Of course, competition is not what a practice is about. But you should want to be getting better, and there’s comfort in remembering that no one is exempt from putting in the hours.

There is no grand climax

Riding off into the sunset happens at the same place in every story: the ending.

Your work, like your life, isn’t culminating into some grand climax. It’s one continuous journey. So relax and get comfortable in the practice because the practice is all there is.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of life

When I was 19 and in my first year of college, I dropped out. I then did what every college dropout with no clue what they want to do with their life does: I moved back in with my parents and became a rapper.

My parents, bless their hearts, were supportive though confused. “Where are all these ‘haters’ you keep talking about?” my dad would ask.

But I wasn’t confused. With a knack for stringing rhymes together, I began making songs and marketing myself with astonishing reckless abandon. I made funny skits that I uploaded to YouTube. At one point I had something like 30,000 Twitter followers. One of those followers was Courtney.

Funny how life works.

I used to be uncomfortable sharing this part of my life. I would cringe when I thought about it. But I realized that not only should I not be uncomfortable, I should celebrate it. I shudder to think where I’d be without it.

Of course, I couldn’t have known at the time where it would lead. Stories told in hindsight can be deceptive, cloaked in a confidence that was never there. The truth is I had no idea what I was doing as a rapper, but I followed an inclination and gave it everything I had. As Courtney recently said to me, “No one ever knows what you’re doing, but you’re doing it like a motherf—er.”

It wasn’t that I overcame self-consciousness—it wasn’t that deep, I was just rebellious. But if I had been too self-conscious, there’s a good chance I never would have rapped. To me, that’s the saddest thought.

I bring this up here because self-consciousness can stop us before we start. And few things can make us more self-conscious than keeping a practice. We put our work, our heart, out in the world to be judged and criticized. We toil away while the world looks on, puzzled.

Maybe other people don’t “get” it. That’s okay. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: it’s you, not them, who will have to answer for your action or inaction 10, 20, 80 years from now.

No one is thinking about you, anyway. They’re thinking about themselves, about their own stuff.

Just keep going, keep practicing. Not because it may lead to something beyond anything you could have imagined, but because to not do so would be to turn away from not only your gift, but from life itself.

Besides, what else would you be doing?

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Books Read This Month:

-I found How to Be an Artist by Jerry Saltz while browsing the shelves of Barnes and Noble, and there’s some good stuff in here about keeping a practice. Saltz even quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose book I read last month: “My head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.” The work is already within you. You just have to listen.

-I read Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary, Stupid Goal and thought it was fun and surprisingly deep. She writes about growing up in New York in her family’s restaurant/grocery store, and the wisdom her Dad would impart to customers. His motto was to work hard and keep moving forward but also to enjoy the pleasant distractions of daily life. What I like most about Shopsin is the subtle wisdom she puts into a simple, declarative sentence. I’m sure I missed a lot, but the stuff I did catch was great.

–The Art Thief by Michael Finkel. Oh my gosh, this book is SO good. For 10 years, Stéphane Breitwieser brazenly stole more than 300 pieces of artwork from museums and churches, worth an estimated $2 billion. He’d walk into a museum and, aside from the larger items he couldn’t conceal on his person, take whatever he wanted. Unfortunately for him, there was one thing he couldn’t have: enough.

–What It Is by Lynda Barry is brilliant. I’d say it’s in my top 3 books about writing, along with Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. (If you’re curious, check out the list I made of my all-time favorite books.) I started What It Is in January and savored my way through. Each page is illustrated with her drawings and doodles, stuff that makes you think, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ and then you start your own collage journal. She taught me a new way of finding stories to write about—not by thinking harder, but by letting the stories come to me. The writing exercises were wonderful. I loved this book so much and I’ll be going back to it again and again.

-I was so entertained by Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief that I ordered The Stranger in the Woods and found it to be just as good. What makes a person wander into the woods and stay there for 27 years? What happens when you spend more than a quarter of a century without having a single conversation with another person? It’s a wild, true story that had me thinking about our conflicting needs of solitude and togetherness, and how differently we’re all wired.