Photo by Sticker Mule on Unsplash

Recently, I started writing a post about the effects writing and meditation had on my life, especially on sleep quality.

So I wrote down ideas, and started putting them into form.

It was not feeling quite right.

I did not understand where this was coming from, so I read it again and again, for a few days.

And as I got down to it once more, it hit me

What I was writing was not actually true ! It was something I convinced myself of !

Maybe I wanted to just publish an idea I had of what may work. Or that I never really thought about it.

I don’t really know…

But I realized that I kept writing about this just because I was so much in it that I did not realize what was around it. And that it was straight up wrong.

Understanding came from writing

But coming to this realization would not have been possible without writing all those drafts.

I wanted to say was that free-form writing right before bed helped me sleep better.

To make sure of that, I had to reflect back on what I had been living.

And I noticed that I actually have a harder time falling asleep now than I did before I started free-form journaling.

But this reflection was not done in a single shot.

It was spread over a few days, of reading again my previous ideas, examining them from an other angle multiple times, and writing down new ones.

It took reading it again in different situations to make new connections.

It took time.

It took discipline

You could also say it took faith.

Faith that working on it would actually lead to something interesting for you.

And this is the result.

Result not indended

This article is the result of this reflection.

The completely unexpected result from the constant effort that went into my writing.

And while I had to scrap an entire post because it was straight wrong, I wanted to share the process that got me here.

It feels to me taht this is what happens when you put enough time in an activity.

You get to a point where what you do is bad. But if you keep on push forward, even if only so slightly, you move past the obstacle and get a little bit better.

Maybe others don’t do it the same way.

Maybe they do.

But it is one of my first times noticing this clearly that I used an apparent failure and made it a personal success.

The success of sharing an other piece of my mind.

Thoughts mutation

What took the most time in this process what stopping and coming back the next day in an other state of mind.

I love the idea developped in the amazing coursera course Learning how to learn about the two different brain modes, the focused and diffuse mode.

They are introduced in the course as a way to link ideas together to end up remembering them better, create chunks of thoughs that help understand much higher level concepts.

It seems the creative process works quite the same way.

You first focus on a very precise part of your work, then go to lunch. Your brain will pick up different elements from around yourself and associate them to what you worked on.

When you come back to it, you suddenly have more ideas, and see them more clearly.

But you need this interim period of not trying to be creative. Or be creative on something else.

And when you come back to it, new links will have formed.

Maybe you won’t make a breakthrough right away.

But you build more and more connections.

And when the path clears up in your mind… There you have it !

Well, maybe it won’t be your best ideas, but at least they’ll be clear. And they’ll keep evolving, from an ugly and blurry monster to a magnificent creature.

So keep it up ! Everything you do, even if it doesn’t feel useful, can help you learn something if you give it enough attention.

This makes me think I want to read The obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday, it feels like a great addition to this post. And an other unintended side-effect…