I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s blog and been watching a few videos of him talking and I admire his way with words and how simple he makes everything seem.

One of the things that struck me was the idea of how the “writer’s block” isn’t actually a feeling that stops you from writing anything, but it is the one that stops you from writing something imperfect.

Elizabeth Gilbert shares her views on how after she wrote the international bestseller – Eat Pray Love – she was immensely bothered by her own success. She describes that the success of her book overshadowed her drive to write the next one – because she feared the next one wouldn’t be as good.

Seth calls the writer’s block a myth. He says that a person does not simply stop writing, his fear of writing something substandard overrides his will to write – ‘Oh, what if it isn’t good enough?’ – this is similar to what Elizabeth felt. Seth says, ‘show me 50,000 words of bad writing, then I can probably agree that you have a writer’s block’. He suggests: ‘Consider the alternative to writer’s block: the drip. A post, day after day, week after week, 400 times a year, 4000 times a decade. When you commit to writing regularly, the stakes for each thing you write go down’. And he has been doing this for several years now.

So the next time you are having a writer’s block, a coder’s block or a painter’s block, ask yourself this – the probability of success is higher when you do something than when you don’t, isn’t it? 🙂