One Apple A Day is my daily writing practice. I started it over five years ago to improve my writing, but it quickly became more than that.
It's my morning anchoring ritual, a moment of writing meditation and reflection, a way to fix things that are spinning in my head, a tool to create clarity in my chaos.
Why does it work so well for me?
I often ask myself this question. I'm not a very disciplined guy, and I get bored quite quickly. Yet, here I am. Still doing it five years and over a thousand posts later.
Yesterday, during the last session of a fantastic programme created by Ten Directions (if you facilitate in any form or context, you should definitely check out their offering), we talked about practices.
The team of facilitators shared a few characteristics that an effective practice should have. Things like being daily behaviours, being specific and simple, having a clear start and end, and being observable and being delightful for you. All characteristics that One Apple A Day has.
But there's one more that really hit me.
An effective practice must keep you at your edge.
Because it's at your edge that growth and learning happen.
That was a vital point of this practice when I started. It wasn't just writing something. From the very first day, I made the commitment to publish everything I wrote. No matter how good or bad I felt it was, it had to go out there.
And so I did, and I still do.
Hitting the "publish" button makes me still nervous every time. What if it's crap? What if people won't like it? There's a lot of "what if" every morning.