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Back in August, I was feeling really stuck with where I was at in life.
It felt as if I was moving through wet cement, trying to get somewhere but I wasn’t quite sure where.
So, as one does late at night, I decided to search on YouTube for the phrase ‘how to transform your life.’
I knew I needed some form of change, but I wasn’t sure what.
The younger me would have thought I needed to do something drastic: move across the country, chop my hair off, get a new job, or just generally stir things up.
The slightly wiser, current-day version of me realized that perhaps I could see how other people had transformed their lives without burning everything to the ground first.
(That alone is growth, right?)
The Butterfly Effect
One video that piqued my curiosity was by Tina Huang called How to Completely Transform Your Life in 6 Months (the butterfly effect 🦋).
In the video, Tina shared a story about a man who felt as if he simply couldn’t get things straight in his life.
No matter what he did, he still felt as though nothing was going right.
Money was one of his main problems, so when he saw a poster for a study that offered to pay him for his time, he took the chance.
The only thing he had to do for the study was keep a daily journey of the money he was spending.
Simple enough.
Well, that small action had a compound effect that trickled down into the rest of his life.
He started eating better. His relationships improved. He even cut down on smoking.
None of those things were done intentionally, but they became a by-product of one small action.
By writing down how much money he spent each day, he transformed his life little by little.
The Keystone Habit
This butterfly effect, or the compounding impact of small changes, led Tiffany to experiment with changing just one thing in her life: her morning routine.
She knew that if she had a good morning, this would have a positive effect on the rest of her day.
She called this a keystone habit.
All of this led me to think about the one keystone habit that could potentially change my life if I stuck to it for long enough.
I thought about the things that were weighing me down the most and taking up space in my brain.
The one thing that came up for me was writing.
If there was one thing I could do every day that would have a positive effect on everything else, it would be writing.
For me, writing is the way I process my thoughts. It helps me uncover things I didn’t even know I had floating around in my head. Writing is my love, my enemy, and my soul’s work.
I thought that if I could write first thing in the morning, especially when my brain is quite limber after sleep, I could accomplish anything.
That might sound as if I want to prioritize busyness or productivity first thing in the morning (which goes against my moral values of taking time for yourself in the morning), but this isn’t being productive for the sake of being productive.
This would be doing the thing that’s on my mind 24/7, the thing that I’ve been avoiding for so long, the thing that scares me but also brings me joy, and the part of my life that feels like it’s been missing.
Could writing be the thing that changes everything?
That’s what I’ve decided to find out.
I know committing to writing every day will mean facing that voice that says ‘I have nothing to write today’. It will mean facing my fears about my writing not being good enough.
But change comes from diligence. Change comes from careful and persistent effort.
I can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing, which is hoping things are going to magically change on their own.
I’m going to have to face my fears if I want to transform my life.
So I’m going to explore what happens when I commit to writing on a regular basis, and I’ll let you know what I discover in a future post.
