Monday Motivation: Hard Work, Hard to Surrender

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.
- Vince Lombardi

This is one of the reasons that I, personally, write every day and why I think many writers benefit from some sort of structured approach to their goals, whether it be a daily writing routine or some other routine.

There were times in the past twelve months when it would have been really, really easy for me to get frustrated at a lack of visible success with my writing and give up. I could have gone back to watching more movies each month rather than writing. And, if I'd timed my giving up just right, I might never have known what was coming around the corner.

The thing that kept me moving forward each day was in large part having built up the long daily writing chain and the inertia that this gave me to keep on writing. Between that and the encouragement I received from friends I'd made through various social media and my occasional initial acceptances, I made it through that time when I could have easily given up.

I'm certainly pleased with how things have worked out in my case, but there also could be a dark side to this quotation -- it's the same reason that people press on sometimes with an absolutely futile effort, ignoring the concept of all the work before as a "sunk cost." Sometimes there's something -- maybe a specific story/novel, maybe something else -- that you simply have to let go of and acknowledge that it wasn't going to work out, at least not at that time. And, yes, the harder you've worked on that thing so far, the harder it would be to give it up.