Today is my son Ezra’s birthday, he’s 25. He is in the middle of a challenge - self-imposed, to produce 100 original videos in 100 days. I think he’s on day 39, you can watch it all unfold here or on any other social media that whets your whistle.
The Persistence needed
to accomplish something like this is obvious. New ideas, new execution, day in day out, even if you’re tired, even if the lighting isn’t great, even if it’s your birthday.
But there’s another side, too
which is that challenges like this one keep the persistence alive. Like, you can’t forget that you’re an artist if every single day you need to create something.
At a certain point
last year, writing for me felt like slogging through mud in molasses with sticky tape on the bottom of my sneakers. I couldn’t figure out how to keep going, until
Lara (writing partner in crime) and I
started sending each other accountability texts (like what we had accomplished that day and what we were planning to accomplish the next day or week) and we would say encouraging things to each other like every word counts, and baby steps are still steps. Which turned into
The Snail Challenge.
The point of the challenge was to write every single day for a month, even if the best you could do was squeak out 10 or 15 words. And there were several squeaky 10 or 15 word days for me. The prize - I need a prize - was at the end, we would buy ourselves a piece of snail merch.
It’s not like
writing ten words led me to 10,000 the next day. It’s more like I had the pressure of sitting down to my project which kept me engaged, and I had the fun of texting with a friend to make sure we both got our words in, and then at the end
I got a snail sweatshirt
(which I promptly stained, and is no longer in circulation). Lara got a snail ring. Snail merch is harder to find than you would think.
The point is though that if you are feeling the opposite of persistent right now, it might be time to embrace your inner snail. You don’t need to produce 100 videos or get in thousands of words or reams of new poetry to achieve your objective. We can take the motivation from Ezra and make it your own. For us snails, even a few words count. Forward movement is still movement.
I invite you
to the snail energy. Please let me know how it goes.