Do Something Daily: The Creative Days Ahead

I’m going to assume you’ve selected your something, the thing you’re going to do daily. If not, let me remind you once again that it can be anything.

Make Your Selection and Proceed to the Starting Gate

Painting, drawing, writing, walking, reading, music, meditating, tinkering with a website, taking photographs, spending a few minutes every day working on a business idea: any one of these things will do just fine. So will anything else you come up with. Just make it simple, make it small, and make it yours.

Wait! Where the Heck Are We Going?

But you may be wondering what to expect. You’re just behind the starting line and your mind’s straining to get a clear view of the course.

Suddenly, you’re having suspicions about this doing-something-daily thing. It seems to have no end in sight, no clearly marked finish line, no exit strategy. There are only days ahead, one after another, for the rest of your life.

Your suspicions are right.

The Long and Looping Road

Doing something daily isn’t a project you can manage to completion and walk away from. It isn’t a goal you can achieve and commemorate with a plaque. It doesn’t lead to a specific destination. It’s a journey of growth and discovery, and a lifelong one at that.

However, if the lack of a project, goal, or destination concerns you, take a deep breath and relax, for should you take this journey, you’ll find not one but many of those things and more.

Roadside Treasures

Projects will emerge. Goals will arise. Destinations will be reached. If such things were gold, doing something daily would be the mine.

In some ways, you’re embarking on a treasure hunt without a map, maybe without a clue of what you’re even looking for. But I promise you this: there are treasures to be found, and find them you will if you simply venture out and do something daily.

Here, I believe, are some of the other things you can expect as you travel on this journey.

Things to Expect of the Days Ahead

1. You can expect to feel awkward in the beginning.

Beginning always feels strange. You’re doing something you’ve never done before, or at least never done consistently. It’s perfectly natural to feel out of sorts at first.

Give it time. Your something daily will eventually become as natural a part of your day as brushing your teeth or getting dressed.

2. You can expect to feel discouraged at times.

There will be days when you wonder why the heck you’re bothering. Things won’t go as well as you imagined. You’ll feel lost. You’ll be in one of those truly rotten moods where everything seems pointless.

In my experience, these things come and go. Expect them and prepare for them, but for the most part, ignore them. You’ll be amazed at what a difference a day can make.

Sometimes you just need to talk to someone, or grab some time alone, or get a good night’s sleep. More often than not, you’ll be back on track by the following morning or even within a few minutes or hours.

3. You can expect your something daily to change.

My twenty-minute walks turned into three-and-four-mile runs. My little, sentence-a-day blog experiment became a daily practice of writing on any surface I choose (notebooks, sheets of loose leaf paper, computer screens).

Your something daily will either evolve or become something completely different. You may begin by taking photographs and one day discover you’d rather be drawing. If so, go ahead and draw. Let that become your something daily.

I do suggest, however, that you give things time before making a big change. It takes a little while to get comfortable with anything new and you won’t really know how you feel about the thing you’ve chosen until you’re past the awkward stage.

I recommend you give it at least thirty days before you make a switch. Ninety days would be even better. It’s a time frame that’s short enough to endure should you feel you’ve chosen poorly and long enough to be certain. Besides, you’re going to learn something no matter what you choose, and that’s a good thing.

4. You can expect things to mingle and merge.

This is where your various pursuits come into play. Your something daily will become a Renaissance melting pot and you’ll find yourself pouring all kinds of things into it.

Puzzles, problems, and questions; bits of conversations held and overheard; things you’ve read; things you’ve seen and heard: all these things and more will find their way into your pot.

This is why I say choosing something to do daily is not a hindrance to exploring multiple interests. Instead, it becomes a channel for them. Somehow, I believe, devoting your attention to one particular practice on a daily basis becomes a way of devoting your attention to all the things that interest and amaze you.

Let’s say you have interests in poetry, painting, mathematics, and neuroscience. Should you decide to write poetry every day, you will find the other things showing up on the page.

You’ll be writing a stanza and recall a portrait you’ve been working on, a math concept you’ve been puzzling over, or a new discovery in the study of memory and perception you recently read about, and much to your surprise, it will have a place in your poem.

In reverse, you’ll be painting a landscape, working a math problem, or reading about the anatomy of the brain and recall a line from one of your poems.

In short, you’ll experience synergy, the effect of two or more things working together which is greater than the effect any one of them could ever produce alone. But it’s the doing something daily that provides those things with a regular meeting place: a studio, laboratory, and boardroom where they can come together, swap ideas, and develop new projects.

5. You can expect goals, projects, and visions to emerge.

All that mixing and mingling and melting is bound to produce something. Ideas will come to you. Your true desires will begin to surface. Real goals, your goals, will show up and look you in the eyes. Potential projects will present themselves and beseech you for an investment of your time and energy. A vision of what your life could be will start forming in your mind until one day it branches out and wraps itself around your heart.

Do I really believe this? I do. It’s inevitable.

Does that mean I think doing something daily is going to make you a millionaire or a movie star or a living legend? Nope.

The Riches of Meaning

But I believe that one day, should you do this, you’ll wake up and realize those things no longer matter to you (and that they never really did). Life, you will find, is full of riches for which fame and fortune are pale and poor substitutes. And you’ll be engaged in making meaning, an endeavor far more rewarding than simply making a buck or the evening news.

Stepping Back

Let’s step back and look at where we’ve been.

In the first chapter, we began with curiosity, the root of all creativity, and cranked it up with questions.

From there, we moved onto the second chapter where we gathered and collected our thoughts, capturing and sticking them in notebooks, jars, blogs, and anywhere else we could think to store them in order to get a better look at them, sift through them, play with them, and make some sense of them.

And in this chapter, we started doing something and doing that something every day.

So where do we go from here?

Moving Ahead

In the next chapter, we’re going to feed the muse. It’s an exciting thing to find good things for your muse to feast on, even more exciting now that you have a melting pot to toss them into.

After that, we’ll explore the necessity of living your life and avoiding the trap of thinking you must sacrifice your relationships, your health, your wealth, or your sanity to live more creatively.

Then it’s on to the crux of creativity, making things.

And last but not least, we’ll examine the most joyous aspect of leading a life of quiet inspiration: sharing and collaborating with others.

The creative journey continues. I hope you’ll be coming along.

Make the Days Ahead Even Better

One way you can join me on this creative little journey is to subscribe to these posts by RSS feed or by Email.