A shockingly high number of these blog posts are thrown together around 11 pm because I feel like I need to get something published before midnight. Most of the time, if you ask me at 9 pm what I’ll be writing, I have no freaking clue.

But with just a few exceptions, I’ve figured something out every day. It’s amazing how if you force yourself to write something RIGHT NOW, you are able to liberate yourself from the stress of deciding what you should write about.

It’s all too easy to come up with all sorts of ideas that you plan to write sometime eventually. We’ve all done it. But until you actually write those ideas you have nothing. It doesn’t matter how good those ideas are if they’re just floating around your head. Whether it be the struggles of life or fear of writing something bad that keeps you from writing, the outcome is still the same. You’re still just a person with ideas rather than a writer.

But when you force yourself to just get something done within the next hour, you’re free. There isn’t a long term commitment to that project and that can make it less intimidating. When the goal to write anything now can supersede the goal to write something good eventually, that’s where the magic happens.

So I dare you to sit down and write something. Maybe it’s a script, a poem, a blog post, a short story. The catch is simply that you must write it in an hour. If you really want to light a fire under your ass, force yourself to publish your work when that hour is up, regardless of how good it is. What you can come up with might surprise you. If you force yourself to do this exercise everyday for an extended period of time, you’re bound to come up with something good eventually.

(The above blog post was only about half an hour. Not too shabby.)