Sculptors and Writers Treat Blocks Very Differently

I’ve been trying to write this one article for literally about four months now, and it’s not working.

I’m not excited about it, which means I’m not writing it well, which means I don’t make any progress, which means I get frustrated. I know I should just give up on it, but it’s 80% of a publishable piece… I feel like I should be able to brute-force my way through to a blog post, at the very least, so I keep pushing.

But that is dumb. I have it in me to write a bestseller. I even have a bestseller in me right now – so why am I wasting time worrying about Medium?

Writing is hard, and I always forget that. I keep expecting to sit down at my computer in the morning and create something amazing by evening. That has never happened, and will never happen, so I’m not quite sure why I think today will different. Rome also wasn’t built over a series of ten Pomodoros.

Half of any art is knowing what to remove – like excess rock, stumbling blocks, and sunk cost fallacies.

But I do think today will be different! And I keep chipping away at this block of granite because there’s something in there, I just haven’t quite figured out how to free it.

I know, rationally, that I’m being irrational…so I need to left-brain my way out of this. Half of any art is knowing what to remove – like excess rock, stumbling blocks, and sunk cost fallacies. When the stone you’re staring at makes you feel more like Sisyphus than Michelangelo, it’s probably time to give it a rest.

At least until tomorrow.