Next week, I’ll have been publishing this newsletter each week for one year. And I never thought I’d be doing it this long. Or this consistently.

Learning new habits is hard. And so, getting into the habit of writing even a fairly short newsletter each week turned out to be way harder than I thought. Initially, I assumed it would be easy going – “How hard can it be to write a few hundred words on anything?” – only to be running into problems almost immediately.

Some weeks, I had a topic I wanted to write about, the words just flowed from my hands. Most weeks, though, I was a few hours from publishing away, and was staring at a blank page, unsure of what to write about. Inspiration hadn’t struck, and I was paying the price. In other words, writer‘s block was rearing its ugly head.

Except writer‘s block is just an excuse to not write. A deadline (even a self-imposed one), works wonders against it. Just starting to write, no matter how crappy it is, gets your brain going. And as it turns out, if you break through the block often enough, it becomes easier.

So my lesson from almost a year of writing a newsletter is this: It’s okay to stumble around. Doing it is more important than anything else. And doing it consistently, just doing the work, even knowing it’s not going to be your best every time, beats waiting for inspiration to strike.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• What If You Never Ate Fruits And Vegetables? (YouTube)
• Older Japanese women are shoplifting to find community and meaning in jail
• Is India’s Aadhaar System Really “Hack-Proof”? Assessing a Publicly Observable Security Posture — Given the persistent claims of various companies (cough) that their security is so good, they can ignore common security practices, Troy Hunt explains why such claims will never hold up.

📖 Weekly Longread 📚

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

🦄 Unicorn Chaser 🦄

Incredible photos of lava flowing in Hawaii’s national parks (via)