For work, life, and whatever I’m doing, planting two dots a day is good enough for me. 

That’s my take on how to write a book or accomplishing anything in life. No, I’m not writing a book. I’m referring to a recent (not anymore though, as I procrastinated to post this until now!) essay by a successful writer, Ryan Holiday. In it, he explains we often misunderstand what success entails. We tend to romanticize the rapid rise and glamor of it. Instead, he talks about how he actually manages to craft a book: Sit down and write every day. “Write two crappy pages a day,” was the advice he heard somewhere and he even has Hemingway’s quote, “the first draft of anything is shit,” hanging on the wall. 

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The whole point is, things add up. 

It’s the simple truth everybody knows. Because it’s so simple, it even sounds almost moronic. But it hit me so hard to the point that I was reading it again. Then again. And then I went back to re-read it out loud the next day. And the day after that too. Even more amazing is that it triggered me to write this. For a person like me without strong writing habit, it was a windfall indeed. 

So, will I be able to write two pages a day like Sir Ryan? Nope, I don’t think so. I need to get real. I must be deluded to think I can just copy and paste the bullet-proof habit of the bestselling author. Sure, two pages seem like a small, manageable chunk for him and many people. But I happen to remember what I saw from his previous post—Photos of books towering over his desk. Of the millions of pages he read, he got thousands of ideas extracted into notecards which then distilled down to the two pages of diamond-grade wisdom. Give me a break. The two pages are too much for me. 

What should I do then? A while ago, I wrote about the importance of safety first. I still believe in prioritizing physical and mental safety over other things, but hey, I need to do “something” actionable if I want to get things done. Feeling safe is fine but, it won’t make me feel any better if I don’t do anything. 

Back to the square one. I’m not a writer, so while I can definitely learn something from him, I don’t exactly have to follow his recipe for success. He breaks down his work into small pieces. In a nutshell, a book is a collection of pages. Makes sense. What are those pages made of? Sentences, of course. And they are made of words and the words are from letters. Can I go further? Well, the letters are made of lines and the lines are made of dots. I’ll stop here before things get too molecular but you see where I’m going.

When I began designing, I started using software like Photoshop and Illustrator. On top of producing professional-grade images, they helped me see the world from a different perspective. I became more aware of how two-dimensional things we see every day are made: They are all collections of tiny dots.

When a random group of microscopic dots comes in a direct path to each other, they become a line. When we have three groups of dots, each lining up straight and decide to hold each others` hands at the end, they would become a triangle. Or, they could go back to a single group and the first dot and the last dot decide to meet up, they would form a circle. What I’m trying to say is that everything 2D is made from a dot.

As far as our eyes could tell, everything we see boils down to a single dot. So for now, I’m content to start out from carving out a couple speck of dots. They could be some carbon dots on my paper notebook, or digital dots on my monitor. The forms of the dots don’t matter much. What matters is that I plant them so that they’d add up. 

A dot may not be visible at all, but if a second dot is placed next to the first one, it would become a line. When the line is born, it clearly shows a direction. If the direction I’m heading suits me, great! Let me welcome another dot next to it to build up a momentum. If the direction doesn’t work, no problem. It’s always easy to start over. 

I often feel I’m too coward to take a small step. Change is hard. I feel like I don’t even have the guts to take a baby step. As a grown man, that sucks. But that’s me and I have to live with that. I appreciate Holiday’s work and his encouraging essay but I need to accept that I’m not him. Two pages, or maybe twenty, or even two hundred pages a day for him are way too much for me. For me, two tiny dots a day is good enough. Or, when I’m not feeling very ambitious, a dot every other day will do. 

The point is, things add up. 

And if I could begin to feel a sense of direction and meaning to what I am doing, it’s even better. Maybe that’s called being content.