SDS 550: Daily Habit #6: Write Morning Pages

(00:19):
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today. Indeed, having covered most of my morning habits already, namely: starting the day with a glass of water, making my bed, carrying out alternate-nostril breathing and meditating, we’ve now reached my final morning habit, which is to compose something called morning pages.

(00:50):
I learned about the concept of morning pages from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It may seem hard to believe now that I’m releasing two podcast episodes and a YouTube tutorial every single week, but five years ago I had staggeringly little creative capacity. I excelled at evaluating other peoples’ ideas and I could execute on ideas very well once they were passed to me, but I self-diagnosed that if I was going to flourish as a data scientist and entrepreneur, I’d need to hone my creativity. If you too feel like you struggle with creativity, the good news is that it’s a learned skill like anything else. For me, The Artist’s Way book was my catalyst — it was written specifically for that purpose and is filled with exercises to help you along the way. Done properly, the book will take you at least several months to work through, but by the end of it you might find yourself outputting creative ideas at a remarkable pace relative to your former self.

(01:41):
For me, my creative juices began flowing so wildly that I have yet to have the opportunity to finish The Artist’s Way! About two-thirds of the way through it, creative pursuits that I’d begun such as lecturing on deep learning quickly snowballed into being invited to create 18 hours of deep learning video tutorials for the publisher Pearson and to write my accompanying book, Deep Learning Illustrated. Creative opportunity after creative opportunity followed and, while I may now never find time to finish The Artist’s Way, it seems clear to me that it’s already worked!

(02:12):
In any event, one of the central processes of The Artist’s Way is to compose what the author Julia Cameron calls “morning pages” every single day. What you do with these pages is entirely up to your whims on the day — it could be prose, poetry, a journal entry, maybe even a drawing — but the idea is that by forcing yourself to sit down and write something every day, your creative capacity is stimulated. On some days, you’ll feel uninspired and nevertheless generate an inspiring idea through your morning pages — such as, in my case, to create a public lecture on deep learning. On other days, you’ll feel excited to write but might nevertheless produce drivel. Like any other daily habit, the key is to keep at it — doing at least the simplest-imaginable variant of the habit — every single day. For the morning pages, for example, I today set a minimum threshold of writing at least one solitary sentence wholly unrelated to my work.

(03:07):
Like the habits I’ve already covered in this recent series of Five-Minute Fridays on my daily habits, I choose to log writing morning pages as a binary habit — either I wrote a sentence or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced in Episode #538, I set the min column for this “morning pages” row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. An alternative approach could be to log, say, how many pages you actually wrote on a given day — this might gently nudge you in the direction of writing longer morning pages — but I choose to keep it as simple as possible for myself with a binary flag.

(03:42):
All right, that’s it for today. In a Five-Minute Friday in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be back with another daily habit. In the meantime, keep on rockin’ it out there folks and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.