Life rewards action, not intelligence.
An Epiphany - "Life rewards action, not intelligence."
Year-end reflection
This year has been a mixed bag of ups and downs. While initially in the year I lacked the courage and mental clarity to do things, pursuing the mundane, in the latter half—I've had the clarity and courage, but lacked action.
It’s true when they say—you cannot have everything.
Today, a video popped up on my YouTube feed - Life rewards action and not intelligence. I am not sure how the algorithm can guess that maybe this is what the person is looking for. But the video had answers.
Answers to the inner war that had been raging. It told me bluntly that no matter how much intelligence I think I possess, somebody taking action would be far ahead. And it’s true!
I’ve realized it sooner if not later. Maybe what I was missing were the words to articulate the feeling, which the video did for me. Right now, I am in the middle of trying to get mentally unstuck. It’s a phase where you know what the right things to do are, but you aren’t doing them. Maybe the algorithm judged that better than me and recommended that video.
They say writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide, and hence before the start of 2025, I want to articulate what I think. So that I can figure out what’s really going on up there and what needs to be done (and hopefully take action to solve it).
Getting Unstuck Before 2025 Part 1
I want to be a good writer!
If you’d ask me, what do you mean by a good writer, I won’t have a very concrete or well-thought-of answer. But maybe I can answer by sharing who isn’t a good writer.
A good writer isn’t someone:
- Who looks for synonyms and sophisticated words on the thesaurus.
- Who is a Grammar Nazi.
- Who loves to critique the words of others without having anything of their own.
- Who endlessly rephrases what’s popular and the advice of others.
- Who outsources their ideas from the internet.
- Who writes what would be read once but never thought about again.
I know I can go on, but this suffices the purpose for now.
I don’t want to be that kind of writer. But if I look at the other side of the coin, it feels like everything that needs to be said has already been said. And thinking for yourself is hard, with no immediate rewards.
I still hold myself back from expressing what I truly think or feel. Maybe because I am scared of turning into the kind of writer I just described above. But if I don’t think, write, and share, all of what I have to say would just be inside my head. And that’s way more scary.
So if the tradeoff has to be made, I risk writing poorly but writing, rather than worrying about if it makes sense or is useful. Because—life rewards action and not intelligence. And the only action I can take as a writer is to write.
Nothing else would help.
Also, to keep myself publicly accountable, I am sharing a word tracker. It would have the daily update of the number of words I jotted each day, including the few left in 2024 and then 2025.
Here is the link to the tracker - Daily Word Count