Milestones: Routines & Practice
5000! (June 2013)
10,000! (April 2025)
Seth Godin always has a book or three in the works... but he clearly approaches writing a short blog post on a daily basis as a part of his routine. Much of the time, it's also fairly organic. You can tell because some of these posts are "flops" or "throwaways", in my opinion and, I imagine others would agree. Not everything is going to be gold if you commit to sharing daily for years and years. But, there's something important about the practice, routine, momentum, and what happens when you push ahead and do something like this for a long period of time.
Seth comes from the old internet and has purposefully not taken up the most shiny new marketing campaigns that come and go.
I remember a few years back Seth was talking quite a lot about frustrations with the loss of RSS feeds over algorithmic curation. He was right. We all lost because of the "black box" algorithms that serve us algorithmically-curated content with the "simple" goal of maximizing advertising returns (for companies and shareholders) as well as keeping you on the app / platform as long as possible.
The attention economy is not what we, consumers / digital citizens, asked for or wanted.
If given the opinion, most of us would much rather pay for a subscription at a reasonable rate and have a more seamless and desirable experience engaging with our friends, family, acquaintances, communities, network. Netflix has shown that this is an appealing alternative even when you can get all the content for "free" in the chaotic realm of YouTube. Jaron Lanier talks about this at length. Netflix's success, and other large companies such as Amazon, Hulu, HBO, Disney, have created enough healthy[ish] competition to show the way capitalism can operate to provide something desirable.
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~ Daily Rituals ~
Rosemerry Wahola Trommer shares a poem a day. And Rosemerry is not the only poet who does this.
Or, take something like The Stafford Challenge.
Right now, for National Poetry Month, many poets have committed to try to write a Poem-a-Day.
Writer’s Digest – 2025 April PAD Challenge: Prompts
I’m sure there are many more!
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Not everyone wants to write daily poems. And no one is going to force your hand!
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What routine or practice can you start today that can build to something of value if you keep it up?
The only time I can manage to write every day is during a poetry residency. I wish I could develop the practice. When I get a walk first thing in the morning, I am more likely to find the poem at some point in the day. There is a fallow time between books--I am navigating that now, along with the state of the world and the distraction of maintaining an income.
Committing to write daily takes guts and perseverance. Just like sometimes I need to pencil in a break––or a ME day––on my calendar, perhaps, as a writer, I should pencil in a quick free-writing task to keep my writing-juices flowing…will you adopt a quick free-writing task where you just write and not make corrections?