So, at the beginning the week I wrote an article called "Active visualization of desired task" where I talked about a concept I read about in a book I recently started reading, "7 habits of highly effective people" written by R. Stephen Covey. The concept focuses on the idea that you can visualize a task before doing it in order to get an idea of how you want to do it, or visualize yourself in different situations to get an idea of how you want to act or behave.
And so, with that in mind, I decided to take the same concept and apply it to something I do, in this case writing, and see if the act of active visualization could motivate me to write more, and if it can give me the motivation to be more consistent with posting articles.
Well, this little "experiment" was surprising because of two things: first, the experiment helped me get what I want - I've been more consistent with my writing. I actually posted something every day. I was also more active in other activities, such as reading and learning new things. However, and this is the second surprising thing, I really doubt that the active visualization was of any help.
The goal was for me to visualize myself writing more, to think about writing and to ultimately gain the motivation to write more. And, well, it didn't really happen. I didn't feel motivated by the act of visualization itself. Honestly, it didn't really do much for me.
What motivated me was the act of posting and seeing myself being productive again. In short - consistency. Being productive again made me want to be even more productive, and made me want to do more and more. And I did.
In the previous post I mentioned how I'm gonna try to "help" the visualization process by changing external things that might help me think about writing more, such as change my desktop and phone wallpapers to something related to writing.
Well, I did that, and I honestly felt no different. The wallpapers kind of faded away. They were simply out of focus images present on my devices. I never stopped to look at my wallpaper and think "man, maybe I should write something today". I just forgot about the wallpapers, completely ignored them despite me being on both my phone and my computer most of the time. Instead, I just focused on the things that I actually wanted to get done.
In the end, this little "experiment" did result in a quite surprising conclusion. The experiment "failed", because the act of visualizing myself writing didn't give me any extra motivation. However, it did prove to me, once again, that consistency is actually more important. Writing and posting is literally what motivated me more to continue doing it.
There are obviously things that need to be taken into consideration, such as burnout, and how consistency over a very long period of time can actually ruin your motivation. But those are topics for another post.
For now, I'll just be happy with the fact that I managed to get some of my motivation back through consistency, despite the fact that the initial goal of the experiment was a failure