Assertive writing

“What you most want to write is what you should be writing”

One of the best tools I have ever encountered. If you only do one challenge this year, do this!

Your task is simple and you only have one: WRITE FOR TWO HOURS.

There is no guidance on topics, no rule, except you cannot stop writing for two hours. The important thing is that within those 2 hours, you cannot have any external disturbance. Turn your phone off, no music, no TV in the background and no people bothering you; just you and your thoughts.

It doesn’t matter what you write about, you can literally start like, ‘Okay, I’m writing this and there is nothing on my mind, but this wall is white…”. The first 10-15 minutes will feel pretty weird, then you start writing about things in your mind, then an hour goes by and the magic happens. Your mind or hand or something will start writing things that you never thought of from that perspective. You will discover issues that you had and connect with your personality on a deeper level.

The Story

My mentor, who told me about this technique, is leading projects that can take years to complete. He found out about himself that he doesn’t like things that he can’t see the end of, so if there is an ongoing project with no end goal, he gets frustrated. Ever since then, he’s cut off those projects or cut them into parts with ends, his efficiency and mood raised.

In my late 20s, I went through something we could call a crisis.

That was the time when I did this exercise. It seemed like I almost had everything. I had a profitable venture, an amazing downtown office in my hometown Budapest (literally, my dream office), cool people to work with, nice projects, we ended a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere, even if there was deep love; I was building up my dream startup and basically I could do whatever I wanted. But I felt sad, I felt demotivated. It was Christmas when I did this exercise and thanks to that I figured that I had been in the same spot for too long, had some toxic people in my life and I’d just become unhappy if there was no change, even of location, in my life. This was late December. I decided I wanted to move somewhere else, but have the freedom to visit Budapest whenever I felt like.

In the space of three months, I closed the downtown office, cut off all the poisonous people and projects, moved to Germany, managed to work on international projects, got to travel all across Europe, from Bratislava, to Amsterdam and Paris, and started exercising at a level that I had always wanted. Most importantly, I now feel way happier, satisfied and confident in my life.

I owe my thanks to this exercise and to my mentor.

The philosophy behind asserive writing

Let’s get back to the beginning. How does this technique work actually? My first thought about this was that it must be fricking hard to do; it requires so much concentration. Just the fact that you can’t do anything else when you are exercising is tiring. And anyways, isn’t it a waste of time dealing with this?

Someone might not need this at all. But I think often we just live our life like machines. We are so busy getting our jobs down each day that we don’t even have time for thinking of any kind of other perspectives in life.

Then I thought, why couldn’t I allocate some time for this after all? This is just kind of a deep talk with myself that improves my self-awareness. That might be handy for me and my future. With these thoughts in my mind, I finally dedicated two hours from my life to this exercise and I didn’t regret it.  
I believe that this is something that is worth experimenting with, only for having the experience of being lost in your thoughts. Yes, it’s a bit hard and feels weird in the beginning, but once you start it, you will realize that you have much more inside of you that you have ever thought of. It helped me a lot in moving forward and finding new ways. You can give it a try too.

Finally, let’s see 5 interesting facts about writing, you might get a little motivation:

1)   Everyone has the capacity for creativity and being innovative, it is scientifically evidenced.

2)   While you need skills for craft, creativity is intuitive. for writing both of them are required

3)   There are many misconceptions about writing e.g. people are either creative by nature, or they aren’t. / Writing is easy, for people meant to write.

4)   Believing in limitless abilities enables you to work harder

5)   The “right” way of doing things is very subjective, look for your own way.

Read more here: http://www.writingcycle.com/the-writing-process/10-rules-for-creative-writing/

Did you enjoy this tip? YES or No. I would love to know if you want me to write articles like this or not!