Digesting delicious advice we give to others.

I recently had a conversation earlier where I was offering nuggets of guidance based on my own experience to someone far younger than I am.

I was compelling her to get started. To create things. To pollinate relationships and ideas regardless of the certainty that they would lead to anything fruitful within the horizon she could see.

I’m familiar with this long game. I know the rhythms of the process: the nadirs and apexes of excitement and (to be sure) self-belief. But buying into (potentially) long and slow feedback loops is maybe something we can never quite get comfortable with. Especially in a world where everyone and everything is seemingly screaming now now now.

…

Giving advice to others is easy and a helpful reminder to ourselves of the words that we (at least strive to) live by.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about losing the weeks.

I’ve been fighting what I know would move me forward: consistently sitting down and capturing more than a fleeting thought.

Why? (Usually) I was afraid to get going in a direction—on a topic, really—that I didn’t think would be fruitful.

Eating my own words of advice above, I would tell her to keep going even though she’s can’t clearly see the stops and stations that line the route ahead.

So, in the case of my chicken scratch, setting just three days of writing up in flames has a certain outcome: nothing. Writing something, … anything does not. The outcome is uncertain.

It’s just a matter of convincing myself that there’s only upside to that uncertainty.