Recently, I’ve been thinking less about Inherited Wil.
Don’t worry, I’m not shutting things down!1 However, when I reminisce about the kind of writing I was doing back in October, or even January, and I compare it to today, it feels a bit different. Specifically, I feel a little less creative, like the posts are harder to write and especially harder to write well.
Of course, I’m still the over-analytical guy who hacked his fantasy basketball league, so I decided to do a little bit of data collection:
The post you’re reading right now is my 156th for Inherited Wil,2 meaning that I’ve averaged ~4.3 posts per week since I started last July. It’s funny how this graph tells a bit of a story about my year:
I was pretty bored in August, started this blog, and took off running.
September centered around my and Nadia’s vacation to Europe, so posting was variable.
Once I got back and settled in, the five posts/week schedule worked - up until my job got crazy busy in mid-November.
I managed to get back on track (although this graph doesn’t reflect the many short Brief Week posts), up until I took it easy during the birthday week in the second week of January and took the entire week off around my vacation to Chapel Hill in February.
Finally, in the beginning of March, as work started to pick up again, I officially made the move to commit to four posts a week.
In some ways, this graph validates my sense that I’ve been changing. Through the last week of February, I averaged about 4.5 posts. Since then, I’ve averaging about 3.4. I really am writing less.
Why? What’s going on here? I can promise you that I didn’t wake up one day and actively decide to write less, so I did a little bit of reflection.
These three reasons are my best theories:
This is peak basketball season. As dumb as that may sound, a lot of my summer and fall hobbies stem from the fact that a bunch of time has opened up on week nights. In November and December, I’m watching most Warriors games, and, as the season progresses towards the playoffs, I spend more time checking out other quality games.3 If I’m watching basketball, I’m probably not writing.
I still love creating these posts, but they’ve become part of my routine. Hobbies have seasons in our lives, and blogging just isn’t the shiny new thing right now (that would be the Alumni Council for UNC’s Entrepreneurship Minor, which I’ll be writing about next week!).
Where I was previously constantly looking for blog content, I’m now more content4 to let it come to me. Given that I’ve let basketball and politics (things I’m not going to write much about on Tuesday and Thursdays) take up a lot of my media consumption, it’s obviously going to be tough to get inspired. Intentionality is critical to identifying new topics, and I haven’t been very intentional.
As I read these back, they kind of feel like excuses, but I think that I need to become a little more okay with thoughts that feel like excuses.
I’ve written about discipline and perseverance because those are virtues which I truly hold dear. I definitely believe that keeping promises to myself is central to things like my sense of self-worth. Paradoxically, this is why I try not to set a lot of intense goals for my health or professional development; if I’m going to commit to something, I need to REALLY commit.5
The point is that this determination can be a powerful tool to help me focus and be successful. It can also weigh me down if I become overly fixated on some arbitrary metric I created for myself. Who am I actually failing if I write three blog posts in a week instead of four or five? I’m definitely not failing myself - writing even a few posts is much better than just quitting.
When I ran track, we used to fixate on “negative splits”, or the goal of getting faster with each lap ran during a long-distance race. I liked negative splits a lot. Getting better, even as things get harder, feels like the ultimate goal.
The issue with Inherited Wil is that I started off so gung-ho that any change at all feels like a big step backwards. But it’s not!
I’m still adjusting and figuring out how to sustain this kind of project over the very long-term. One obvious fix is to continue to work on my brainstorming process. Another is to add some culture back into my media diet - a little less sports and politics, a little more music, fiction, and philosophy. If anyone has recommendations, I’m all ears!
The truth is that I’m confident that my best blogging days are right around the corner. Presumably after the Warriors win the 2025 NBA Championship in June.
What a relief, right? I could tell that you were beginning to panic.
For instance, I was up until 1:30 AM on Monday night watching the Nuggets lose to the Timberwolves in double overtime, despite Nikola Jokic’s 61 point triple-double.
Pun intended.
For instance, it’s been three months, and I’m still (mostly) not eating past 10 pm.
I admire the intensity with which you do things. Publishing 4-5 times a week for the last 8 months is an incredible feat. Especially when job and other priorities spontaneously take space.
If you think you are falling behind, than maybe you are based on the standards you have set for yourself.
But I am damn sure, you are going to figure it out and knock out all those troublesome thoughts. Write banger ideas. And have fun again.