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Working Faster Makes You Better
Daft Punk had the right idea
There’s a commonly accepted idea that proficiency takes ten thousand hours. However, for some skills (such as writing) hours are a very poor measure of work done. You can write for an hour and end up with three lines, or you can bust out five hundred in fifteen minutes. The better measure of what you need to do to achieve proficiency in writing is how many words you’ve written.
And, to be completely honest, you have to write a lot to become great.
However, to take the sting out of the statement let me say this too — even though it takes a lot of work to become great, being good comes a lot faster. And you only need to be a good writer to start making a career, or at least a side hustle, out of the words you produce.
So try to just write more. Write faster. A perfect sentence that takes you ten minutes now will be something you shrug at in two years time, so don’t spend that time on it — spend that time writing a dozen sentences or more. Don’t take shortcuts or publish anything that you are genuinely unhappy with, but focus on writing more rather than writing perfectly. I guarantee you’ll get closer to perfection in time…and when you’ll get there you’ll even have a body of work to look back on. It might not be great but it will be good, and that is enough.
