Tag Archives: writing

The struggle is real

Leave a reply

Today I wanted to quit. I’ve procrastinated for over an hour and a half, and my morning routine will be incomplete. Doubt kept circulating in my head. I feel like I have absolutely nothing to say. It’s been six plus years of writing every day… maybe today it ends. Done.

Well, the fact that these words are written here says that I beat today’s demons. That said, it feels painfully cliche to write about how hard it is sometimes to write. Trite.

It’s a day to remember that if every day was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing. A day to remember that it’s not every day that we can do our best work, and in fact 50% of those days will be our worst 50%. You can’t do better than that on average, the math doesn’t math.

My fingers are moving, words are appearing before me, constructed from thoughts in my head, and another Daily-Ink will be published. I didn’t quit. I also didn’t add any real qualitative value, but I didn’t quit.

Tomorrow will be easier. I say that rather unconvincingly, but with honest hope. Sometimes the blank screen is daunting, and painful to look at. It’s a prison wall more than a screen. Today was one of those days. I’ve scaled the wall, not step by step but word by word, flowing better now because the page is no longer blank. The prison break was successful.

But am I really free? Is my choice to write daily an opportunity for artistic expression, or is it a life sentence? Today it feels like the latter. When that feeling comes more than 50% of the time, I will need to consider freeing myself, but for now I’ll keep writing.

Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.

AI Assisted Letters of Reference

1 Reply

As principal, I frequently get asked to write letters of reference or requests to fill out reference questionnaires. Something that I’ve always done is asked for a ‘brag sheet’ so that I don’t end up forgetting something about the person I’m writing the reference for. An example is that I might forget that a student was a major organizer of an event we ran, or I might have forgotten about their service they do for the community outside of school.

Recently I have been using AI to assist me, specifically Google’s Notebook LM. What I did was I took 8 old reference letters that I wrote and changed the names so that there was no reference to the actual student I wrote them for, and I inputted these into the notebook as style references. For one of them I also included a brag sheet.

Now when a student gives me a brag sheet, I write a prompt that says to write a reference letter for the scholarship I specify, giving criteria for the scholarship, sharing the brag sheet, and asking for it to be written in the exact style of the 8 examples I shared, using the information from the brag sheet.

At this point the reference letter is over 90% complete. A few changes by me and the whole process is done in about 10 minutes (this includes a name change because I don’t put the new student’s name in either). Normally, this would take me over a 1/2 hour and sometimes longer to ensure that I’m hitting all the chords relating to both the brag sheet and the scholarship requirements.

Most of my minor changes are either up or downplaying something from the brag sheet or editing to ensure the reference is in my voice, although this is often already evident based on the examples I provided. My last part of this is copying the text as plain text onto letterhead.

In all honesty, I think these new letters of reference are better than my originals. I often focused on fewer items that I knew about and didn’t give the full scope of the brag sheet. Now I just add a sentence or two about the parts I really know about the student to highlight my connection and understanding of them, and what they do at the school. I feel like my voice comes through and the AI provides more detail than I normally do. So not only is this a great time saver, I’m actually doing a better job to support my students.

It took almost 9 years

Leave a reply

15 years ago yesterday I started my second blog, this one called Daily-Ink. The plan was to write my ideas down on paper, in a leather bound book, and then photograph the page and upload it to the blog. I admitted in my first post that I held no promises because my previous attempt at taking a photo a day for a year failed. And sure enough, this idea didn’t last long.

It was September 28th, 2010, I was living in China at the time and starting my second school year there as principal of a foreign national pre-K to Grade 9 school. I did a few posts in my intended format then ended up using the blog when I wanted to share experiences and ideas that didn’t fit onto my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog, with the byline: Reflections on Education, Technology and Learning. I used Daily-Ink to track some articles I found interesting, comments I made on other blogs, to participate in a MOOC, and to record some travel experiences.

It was almost 9 years later, July 6th, 2019 that I decided I was actually going to write daily. I said on that day,

“I’m not getting younger and more than ever, NOW is the best time to start.

I tried over a decade ago, now I’m going to do it – a short daily blog.”

And here I am, 2,276 days later, still writing daily. So, whatever it was that you were planning to do but didn’t get around to it… it’s not too late. It’s not too late to write a book, to get in shape, to pursue a different career, or take up a new hobby. The years missed matter less and less once you actually get started.

Blog post recipes

Leave a reply

I’ve been struggling to get writing this morning and so I went into my drafts folder. There I found a series of half-baked ideas that I hope to expand on at some point. But not today. Each idea is a rough recipe for a post, but missing some key ingredients that would take too much time to expand on. That’s usually what gets them stuck in my drafts.

This is a challenge when I have to squeeze my writing into the time frame of my early morning routine. It’s easy to shorten a workout (another part of my morning routine). I can do a walking meditation on a treadmill, instead of sitting for more time to meditate before my workout. What I can’t do is write on the treadmill, or while meditating.

I can’t rush writing. So on days when I really struggle to get going, writing becomes a challenge. The baking of an idea takes time. Sometimes I can just get started and let the ideas flow, but it’s the getting started that is the hard part.

Half-baked ideas can be a great inspiration, but they can also be a recipe for delay and procrastination. Writing is tricky that way. Sometimes you just need a single spark, just the right ingredient, and the whole post comes together. Other times you need all the ingredients clearly in front of you or the ideas don’t get fully baked.

So on these slow days I reflect on my past few days and search for inspiration. This can again be a spark for an idea, but it can also be a recipe for negative thinking. ‘Have the past few days been that un-inspirational?‘, ‘Do I really have nothing to share?’

These thoughts are a recipe for starting my day off poorly. Often it’s not that I have nothing to say, but that I have nothing to say publicly. For example, I have an old post draft from many months ago about how kids avoid seeking advice from adults, and end up seeking bad advice from other kids. I wrote the start of this draft in late 2024, but if I shared it now there are at least two students and their families who might think they are the recent inspiration for that post… when they aren’t.

It’s a good idea to share, but maybe in August when I haven’t been in a school for over a month. That’s the challenge sometimes. I have the ideas, the recipes for a blog post, but feel like I can’t share without seeming to reveal something too personal to others, or sometimes to myself.

So the drafts sit unbaked, and I’m left wondering what I can share this morning, or tomorrow morning? The challenge on these wondering-what-to-write days is that I can leave myself wondering why I have nothing to share? Do I hang up my daily writing hat and retire this practice?

No. Not yet. But I must admit that days like today really make me wonder if this cookbook of writing ideas hasn’t reached its last page.

Writing a grad speech

Leave a reply

It would be easy to repeat a previous speech, but I can’t. It would be easy to get AI to do it for me, but I can’t. I enjoy writing. I like to personalize what I say to a group of grads. I want the message to be uniquely from me.

This year I mixed an unrelated story and a quote together. This made it a lot tougher to do. I think I’ve got something that will work and be appreciated. But in the end our grad is about the kids performing and that’s what students will remember.

A grad speech is a tribute not a lecture. It’s a small part of the celebration… but it’s still something I like to make unique every year, and this year is no exception.

Just keep blogging…

I came across this post, via a Facebook memory, which was posted 5 years ago today. ‘Journaling Out Loud’, in which I stated, “I’m sure there are some people that wonder, ‘why would anyone want to do this anyway?’ That’s actually not a bad question. For me, I love to write and I wasn’t doing enough of it. The self-created obligation to do so inspires me to make the commitment.”

And I also shared this quote,

“For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.“ ~Seth Godin

I think my total readership has gone down in the past few year. Social media shares used to get a lot of clicks but I don’t pay and I’ve noticed that organic visits to my posts have dropped dramatically… while I’m simultaneously seeing my feeds full of items from people who pay subscription fees. Membership has its privileges.

But I’m not worried about readership nearly as much as I am about the act of writing… as well as clarifying and developing my ideas. I take pride not in accolades but rather in commitment. I write Every. Single. Day. Some days are really hard. Many days I’m just going through the motions. But I hit that publish button every day.

I get to share my artistic expression, my imagination, my thoughts on interesting topics. I also keep my commitment to healthy living by frequently referencing my routines and challenges on my blog.

And sometimes the words just flow. They dance from my brain, to my keyboard, to the screen and say exactly what I want to say with just the right word choice. On those days I hit the publish button with delight. It doesn’t matter if this flow state comes to me once a week or once a month, that’s enough to remind me of why I journal out loud every day.

And so I’ll be back tomorrow. For now I’ll just end with my blog byline, shared in a post many years ago:

“Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”

So absolutely unique

I’m listening to some music I enjoy listening to in the background while I write. I have songs on a ‘Writing’ playlist that I’ve heard many, many times. I know the music and it doesn’t interfere with my thought process. The weird thing is, despite hearing these favourite songs of mine hundreds of times, I don’t know the lyrics to any of the songs from start to finish. They really are just a background thing for me.

I think about my use of music in this way as an example of how unique each of our brains are. My daughters would know every lyric by now. My wife would be able to play the piano parts in her mind the way my daughter could replay the lyrics. And even my daughters would appreciate different aspects of the songs from each other.

We actually don’t have a clue what music appreciation really means to another person. We don’t really know how they experience the tone of a note, or for that matter the tone of a colour…. Is my experience of the colour red the same as yours?

What about how we experience pain? Or the way we feel emotions? How unique is my experience of these things compared to yours? How alike are my sense of joy or sadness like yours, or like anyone else’s?

Some of these experiences might be, probably are, similar. But I know my experience of music is drastically different from my family. I know that when some people feel sympathy others feel empathy. For some people going through a similar experience could result in anger, frustration, futility, disappointment, or some other emotion that I would not feel in the same situation. Because my felt experience is not like yours, and yours too is one-of-a-kind.

The great mystery is that we can never truly know another’s felt experience, and they will never know ours. This is it, we each get this one, incomparable, absolutely unique experience. And no one will ever know how ‘this’ experience is experienced.

Take a moment to appreciate your uniqueness, and value the thoughts and lived experience that make you… you!

The double dip

A few months back I started doing my meditation on my treadmill. It started because I was in a writing slump and my blog post writing was taking too long to write… Not leaving me enough time to do 20-30 minutes of cardio, meditate, and do a full weights workout on one body part before work. So I started to double dip and do my meditation on my treadmill. (Yes, I close my eyes, I hold the handrail and also wear the emergency stop clip… not that I’ve ever needed it.)

I actually find this a great combination. I do a walk with a weighted vest on incline, so holding the rail I’m very stable. I get a really good (Zone 2) workout, it’s not like I’m taking it easy. And I find that with my body busy, I’m better able to focus my mind on the guided meditation. And the bonus is that I’m getting two great things done.

Today I was struggling to write, very distracted, and decided to exercise first. I thought I’d double dip and write while on the exercise bike rather than treadmill, where writing would be awkward. 15 minutes into a 30 minute ride, I realized I wasn’t going to write anything while riding so I put on a 15 minute meditation to get me to the end of my cardio workout.

Five minutes later this post came to mind and I spent the next 10 minutes of my meditation and ride bringing my thoughts back to the meditation and away from writing this in my head. Essentially I made the meditation almost impossible to focus on.

This is the first time in a couple years that I’ve tried to meditate before writing, and I totally remember now why I do them in the order I do them. I can’t meditate knowing that I still have to write. I need the sense of accomplishment of my post to help clear my mind for meditation.

Essentially, I can only double dip in the right order, with a physical and a mental activity, but there is no triple dipping! Nor is there double dipping of two mental activities. I’m the poster boy of ‘there’s no such thing as multitasking’. For me meditation while I’ve got a blog post to write is an invitation to completely ignore meditation, or to inconveniently and ineffectively task swap so that I do neither task well.

Write first, then double dip exercise and meditation. That’s my lesson for the morning.

The urge to quit

The value of writing every day is simple… I actually write every day. Skip today, well then skipping tomorrow is that much easier. Skip a couple days and suddenly a week is easy to miss… and then soon enough I’m not writing regularly. And then the love of writing and the act of writing get a divorce. Soon enough phrases like, ‘I used to write regularly’ become part of future conversations.

So I keep writing. But it isn’t easy. Even if I’m the only one reading this, I’m still a critic. ‘Am I being thoughtful or am I whining?’… ‘Poor Dave, writing is hard, isn’t it?’ Quite frankly, sometimes it is.

Sometimes life can be boring. Sometimes the things I want to write about can’t be shared publicly. Sometimes the creative juices just don’t flow. And sometimes I have to fight the urge to quit. I question how else I can push myself to write every day? I question if I should put this blog on hold until I retire?

The urge to stop is winning right now, but I know I have to fight it.

“Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”

~Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

I’m resisting the resistance. I’m doing the work.

Intersections revisited

There are some things I write here on Daily-Ink, and when I read my own writing a month or two later I barely remember or even recognize my own writing. I wrote that?

But there are other things I write and I remember. There is one post in particular that I think about regularly. Tonight on (another) walk with my wife we reached an intersection where we were crossing the road. Perpendicular to us, on the cross street’s sidewalk, were two men who reached the intersection exactly the same time as us. We all slowed down to let each other pass. They were the only other people walking anywhere near us and sure enough we intersected at the one place our paths crossed.

Despite thinking about the following post regularly, I hadn’t actually re-read it in a couple years. I didn’t consciously remember that it also started with a walk with my wife, but what I do remember, what I reflect on when it regularly happens, is that we are somehow drawn to these intersections.

~ ~ ~

October 27, 2021

Human intersections

Last night I went for a walk with my wife. Minutes from home we were walking on a quiet, empty street that doesn’t have sidewalks. Then a car approached from in front of us. We started to move to the side of the road, and noticed car lights coming from behind us as well. The cars crossed paths right where we were on the edge of the road, having had to slow down to cautiously make space for us and the other car. Then we continued our walk with no cars approaching us from either way until we arrived home.

I find it fascinating how we seem to be drawn, pulled to intersecting points with other people. For the amount of times someone walks by our house, or the front of my school when I arrive before any students, I’m amazed how often I have to wait for a pedestrian to walk cross the driveway before I can make the turn… amazed that as I wait, I can see no other pedestrians for an entire block.

In a car you are turning left and must wait for the one car coming the other way to pass.

At a shopping plaza you go to open a door to a store and the one other person in sight is coming through the door the other way.

On a path in a park, you are walking faster than the people in front of you, and as you go to pass them, other people are approaching from the other way crowding the path at your takeover point.

I think we find ourselves at these intersections at a rate that is greater than probability would suggest… The likelihood of such intersections happen far more than just by chance. Like magnets passing one another, there is a pull towards others, an unseen force that draws us into each other’s path. It isn’t a case of bad timing, it’s not that we are unlucky and forced to slow down, wait, or squeeze by someone else. It’s actually just the opposite. We naturally seek each other out on some unconscious level. We are drawn to human intersections.