Optimism: a Two-edged Sword for a Writer

When I was so pumped up with motivation and optimism, I did planned to write 10 articles a day. Since it was already 1 a.m at that time, I decided to use 5 minutes to prepare topics I am going to write the day after. I managed to list about 20 topics during that 5 minutes, not really something impressive if you can put your full focus on it.

In reality however, things are not always as smooth as we planned it. When we are too full of  optimism, we tend to set unrealistic goals. In such condition It is very easy to be too full of ourself and become proud. I can tell you that proudness left unchecked can kill your actual skill really fast. In any case we have to remember that we are creatures that have their own limit.

Making any goal statement when you are optimisitic is not recommended

It is very easy planning to write about something, but to actually write them down is not as easy as that. Some topics that I thought is going to be interesting the day before, didn’t look as interesting to me the day after. I even found out that in the hype of motivation, I put several topics that I don’t really understand but plan to study and write anyway.

It is totally alright to write something as you do some search and research about it. In fact, writing things down as you learn it is a method of learning recommended by most teachers and lecturers. But we have to take into account that writing topics we don’t know anything about before is going to consume a lot of time and energy. Unless we plan to simply write a conspiration theory about the topic we have at hand, we have to do some search and research about the facts.

So there I was working from 10 am to 3 pm not even close to finish an article at all. Now the question is “How would someone feel after setting a target to write 10 articles a day, realizing that there are only 24 hours a day and had been working for 5 hours just to write half an article?”

In my case I feel that I am not going to meet this quota anyway and get really demoralized. That day (two days before this article was written), I only finish one article and a half. Just for your information, that half finished article is still in my draft folder when this article was written. I even feel reluctant to call that article half finished, since that article was far from completion.

Don’t blame anything, do some introspection

Later that night, I sit down on my bed and asking myself “what the hell am I doing today?”. For some time I blame myself for not working seriously. I feel guilty for not completing my quota and feel really depressed. Then I realize that I have been in this situation many times before and wonder why I still don’t learn from experience.

Blaming anyone even ourselves is not going to do us any good. No matter where we want to put the blame on, what we actually do is simply scapegoating. Never in human history a problem was solved by the means of scapegoating. If scapegoating has anything to do with a problem, it is to add the severity of the problem. So I started to do some introspection and to see where I was being unrealistic.

Make a realistic plan based on careful observation

Problems have to be solved by works directed by careful and realistic planning, combined by continuous observations and experiments. Believing that oneself is a super-writer capable of coming up with countless interesting articles in no time, regardless of what observation result tell us is not a realistic way to work. If not kept in check, such believe can destroy our reputation as a writer.

There are many example in history telling us about people who had unrealistic views about themselves. People who see themselves too high are going to face reality very soon. If they keep being unrealistic after reality was put in front of their eyes, they are going to start doing the wrong things. In case of writers, we could start writing a lot of low quality articles just to prove to ourselves that we can fulfill our quota.

While I am not going to suggest anyone to write only perfect articles, writing a lot of low quality articles are not going to do any good for a writer in the long run. It is useless to write lots of articles that people only visit once and forget. A smart work is better than hard work.

Be realistic but try not to lower your goal

We have to realize that our goal here is not really to become a super-writer. We are here to share knowledge and make some fortune. Fortunately, that fortune is proportional not only to the number of article we wrote but also to the number of view each of those article get.

Here is where we should understand what is realistic and unrealistic. Expecting $10 a month by writing only one article and expect 10,000 views a month on that single article is not realistic, because articles need time to become popular. In the other hand, planning to get the same $10 a month by writing 1,000 articles in a month is also unrealistic, since we only have so much time each day.  We always need some moderation in life.

Therefore it is wise to divide our effort between creating new articles and marketing them. The best way find ideas for marketing your articles, is by reading articles written by other writers. There are a lot of articles about article marketing in Triond. In fact there are lots of way for anyone to market their articles. Each of us are different, so no one can give us detailed instructions about how to market our articles. Different article marketing strategy may work for some of us and don’t work for the others. We have to find out by ourselves what work best for us.

Conclusion

Writing goal statements when we are too optimistic to be realistic is not a wise thing to do. We are going to be demoralized once we realize that we can’t fulfill the quota we set to ourselves. It is better to set a realistic goal but try to exceed said realistic goals on daily basis to maintain our level of motivation.

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