Today was day 80 of my new habit. A heard about a concept called morning pages a few months back, and it seemed like something worth a shot. There was something about writing that I always loved but could never get into a confident rhythm with it.In honor of the 80th straight day of writing 750 words, it felt like it was time to go back and see. Today was the first time that I dug into these writings in detail. I wanted to see what could I learn about me. What could I learn about how I see the world? Also, is this an activity worth keeping up.The first few days were rather awkward getting going. A blank canvas can be uncomfortable and scary to start.I had a few rules that I wanted to build this habit with, and one was I wanted to begin with a blank screen. I wanted to get my thoughts out of my head every morning. At the risk of making it seem like a journal. I wanted just to dump and not to worry about the content.Naturally, a lot of my early documents started off with “I am tired” or the amazing “I am not hungry right now am I ok?”Also, I wanted to try to do it as close to the same time every day as possible. That was the one rule. I want the constancy plus the time. If I knew 6 am to 630am was just time for that. It would help me build that habit and get it into my day.Finally, I did want to write more, and I thought I could use this to get that process going and maybe even generate some new ideas and thoughts.I think that it was hard early on to get into a rhythm, so just the process of doing something made me count those as a win.The quality of the content seemed to range from a particular number of factors. If I had a “bad” day the day before the writing turned more into a rant and an exploration of the problem. It was going back so that I could go forward that day. It helped me sort out of the issue.There were days when the creative juices were flowing, and I was almost doubling up on my word count totals. There are a list and detailed ideas and concepts that were worth extracting and getting into their records for future examination.It was interesting going through all this content because at times it felt like a journal and at times it felt like it was an insight into my mind and what was going on at a time. Things I was thinking and things I was feeling. The journal stuff is also cool to see because it puts everything into a little capsule. I now have this backlog of dated files where I can piece together the Secret History of Me.I think the most important thing that I learned is that practice and more practice can only help. I feel like I could write and write with a sense of confidence now. I think it is good to get into your head that hey 30 minutes or and hour a day. You are going to be creating. It is not going to be golden and it, won’t be pretty but sitting down every day and showing up and producing.John Siwicki