Muscle memory

Rapid failure leads to increase capabilities

It’s one thing to develop a process. It’s another thing to practice it. The iteration of a process is a clear path to refinement.

One thing about striking out your own claim on the Internet is learning new skills, especially how to put yourself out there.

In the early days, the lucky few who knew how to build web pages would write and watch their server log analytics. It also became common to update your site consistently, so people would check back regularly.

Being consistent was a sure way to grow. Active sites with updates would get more and more attention. This lead to user-generated content (UGC) in which users of a web application can generate more content than authors of a site could.

In the age of social media, all we have are feeds of people’s updates. It’s one of the global discovery mechanisms to find new and exciting things. People will publish all sorts of mediums on their various platforms, and getting people to check out their work takes effort to cast a net to pull in eyeballs and attention.

There are several topics I refer to as a black hole. Like most skills, there’s an infinite ability to improve, and once you get down a skill tree too far, you can’t escape its gravity. So even though there are diminishing returns, you’re compelled to find out how far you can take it.

Writing is a black hole. But if you get good enough to call a writing project finished with its drafting, then editing rears its ugly head. Editing is another black hole.

Those have always been with us, but modern times and tools allow us to rely on something other than institutions to distribute our work and to build our own direct marketing pipelines. Now I have to find stock images to punch up my writing to put in a content management system (another black hole to go down). Now I have to make summaries for various social media, and I may use a tool, I also have to learn, to help make those postings easier. These are all additional steps.

Since I’m learning all these steps to direct market, I will be failing a lot. If I set a goal to publish every day, the chances I do so in the first month are not likely. It took a lot of time to figure out questions around each stage and the tools I liked for each step. Sometimes it helps significantly to borrow from someone that’s done the research themselves, and you can adopt their stack and ask questions when you get stuck. It’s a major milestone once you know how you’re going to publish.

So you publish your finished piece, and your consistency timer starts. The next day, a tool breaks, you run out of things to write about, or you didn’t get enough sleep; something inevitably happens somewhere in your process. You’ve now broken your consistency and have failed at your goals. This can be hard and devastating, but these are major decision points. Is it worth trying again? Should you try something else? Do you get sucked down this black hole of direct marketing?

If you choose to continue, you can adjust your expectations and tweak how often your consistency goal is. You could still write every day, but ultimately you may only get across the finish line at your target rate. So you estimate the speed you can achieve and maybe even perform poorly for a bit. But after you have that estimation, you continue on. As you get better at the process, the tools don’t seem to break as much, and you learn how to manage the other aspects that interfere. One day you find you did manage to pump something out two days in a row. You can queue that work so you have a buffer. That buffer helps even out that consistency. And eventually, your consistency gets better, and your queue fills up. You can adjust your targets. It’s like your experience of doing these things before gets integrated into your muscles, and it can make the process more and more successful. Muscle memory will help carry you to the next level.

The repeated practice of trying, failing at it, and getting back up to try again is how you become more and more capable. However, this is not inherently obvious to all. People tend to look out to successful creators and marvel at their reach and think those creators are built differently than themselves. They say no one is an overnight success; there’s usually ten years of hard work behind them. You must try and continually work in a direction that’s right for you.