In this world, it’s too easy to seek approval for everything. You install a dishwasher, buy a car, get a promotion, make a cake, or heaven forbid write a first draft of a novel, and there’s a part of you that wants the world to split wide open and grant appreciation for your accomplishment.

The world as a whole never does this, so don’t expect it and don’t work toward it.

If you are working for appreciation outside of your own, then it might be time to stop. Or at least, take a break and reassess. Appreciation sought rarely matches appreciation obtained, often even from those you love and care about. It’s not their fault. It’s a product of how the human mind works. Perhaps it’s a primal drive. Some promised reward to push us forward even though it will never trigger the chemicals in your brain the way we hope.

You have to work for your own satisfaction. You have to reinvent accomplishment. Why does beating a level in a video game provide more of a sense of accomplishment sometimes than writing a page? On the surface it shouldn’t but under the surface, one of those experiences has been designed to give you an artificial sense of accomplishment. Sadly, writing a page hasn’t, and I don’t think there is any gamification app or metric that is good for the writer and provides that designed sense of accomplishment.

I’ve written on this a bit before. The trap of being motivated by word count and WPM encourages bad writing fast and not good writing done right. Those metrics have their places but don’t make them your fuel.

That’s my challenge to anyone reading, build a sense of accomplishment in your writing or in whatever you do. How to do this will be different for each person, each craft, and perhaps even each project, but once it is done, any approval you get will be merely a bonus instead of the goal.

Quote of the Moment:
 

“Our brains are so terrifically oversized, we have to keep inventing things to want, to buy.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson