There are a lot of sad words in the English language. But one of the saddest ones is “someday.”

How many dreams have never been fulfilled… how many books have never been written… how many great works of art have never been created… all because someone thought they would get to them “someday”?

That’s why I’m excited to have my friend Mike Brennan as a guest on today’s episode. Mike is going to share the importance of a daily creative habit that will help you bring your “someday” into the realm of “today” where you can start to make your creative dreams a reality.

Mike Brennan is a creator and communicator, telling stories on pages and stages. He inspires creators and entrepreneurs to show up consistently on their quest for creativity and innovation through a daily creative habit.

Mike’s childhood dream was to be a cartoon. When he realized that wasn’t possible, he became the next best thing: an artist. Mike loves sharing experiences and making connections through his art, and helping fellow creatives establish a daily creative habit of their own.

Mike is the host of the Creative Chats podcast, the author of the Daily Creative Habit Journal, which will take your creativity to new heights, and several other books. You can sign up for his free email newsletter at https://dailycreativehabit.com or connect with Mike on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

In this conversation, you’ll learn much more about Mike’s story, the importance of a daily creative habit, and why you must become a student of yourself. Mike also shares some great advice for those of us who have always wanted to learn how to draw but didn’t know where to start.

The post Artist Mike Brennan on Daily Creative Habits and Becoming a Student of Yourself appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Imagine it’s the day of your funeral. You’ve had a long, productive life. There is sadness, but also a warm remembrance at a life well lived. The funeral service is over and people are telling stories about your life. These are people who knew you personally over the years. They can remember your mannerisms, the tone of your voice, your personality, and your quirks firsthand because they knew you and spent time with you.

Fast forward 25 years after your death. Anyone who knew you personally as a kid is now an adult. Twenty-five years is a long time, and their memory is fading a bit. They still have pictures and videos, but those are probably archived on a hard drive somewhere or stored in the cloud on a server. There are still people alive who knew you personally, but the generation born after you died only knows you through the stories people tell about you, or things like pictures and videos that were left behind.

Jump ahead to 50 years after your death. We’re getting further away from those who knew you personally. The only ones still alive who knew you personally, knew you as kids or young adults, and now they are old, if they are still alive at all. Somewhere in a basement, someone might have some pictures or other mementos stored that were connected with your life.

It is now 100 years after your death. Several generations have grown up since you’ve been gone. There’s not a single person alive who knew you personally. Your kids and grandkids are probably gone, as well.

The technology and media landscape will have changed so many times that ancient video and audio files, and even social media archives, from over 100 years ago, when you were still alive, have either been erased or archived in some vast collection of human data. But even if your great-great-grandkids generations after you can access all that, what will they find? They’ll find birth and death records, legal documents, perhaps, and maybe a bunch of random social media posts if those are even accessible.

But how will they know YOU? What will they know about your story, your hopes and dreams, your ideas, and what your life meant?

There is only one way those future generations will know those things. They will know because you wrote them down.

Begin with the end in mind. Don’t leave your legacy to chance. Today, here on the first day of 2023, commit to writing down the story of your life so it won’t be forgotten.

Question: Your life will come to an end someday—what do you want to leave behind with your writing?

The post Begin with the End in Mind appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

One day, the threads will run out and your life will be over. When your friends and loved ones reflect on your final tapestry, what will they see? Will they see shadows and a hint of greatness that was never fulfilled? Or will they stand in awe at the bold shapes and bright colors that helped them see they could create a beautiful tapestry, too?

Which picture will they see? The choice is up to you.

Your words are the most powerful tool you will ever own. Don’t let another day slip away without using them to weave a better future for yourself and those you care about.

A master craftsman weaves one thread at a time. When you stand back and look at the complicated pattern, you wonder how in the world they managed to create something so complex and beautiful. How did they do it?

One thread at a time.

Years from now, people will wonder how you achieved so much with your writing. But it won’t be a mystery. Like a master artist who weaves a tapestry, you used each day as a thread to weave a life and legacy of words.

You will have done it because you were a Daily Writer.

Question: Are you using today—THIS DAY—to weave a beautiful tapestry with your words?

The post Weave an Epic Tapestry appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

This helps take the pressure off because we can easily get stressed out by feeling like we have to create a perfect article, social media post, email, or book chapter every time we sit down to write. But no single thing we write is the defining element of our body of work. It’s part of a much larger whole. If you’re writing a book, don’t think of it as one book, but many. What if you thought about writing a dozen books over the next ten years? How would that change your point of view? Fem Chelsey sydney sweeney nude gif It takes the pressure off. Whatever you’re writing, it’s just a snapshot of where you are right now in your learning and life. There is no end to your knowledge and learning. So just write it now and move on. Your legacy isn’t just one book. The one book doesn’t represent the end-all, be-all of your learning. At the Taylor Guitars company, they said, “The best guitar we make is the one we make tomorrow.” In the same vein, the best book you write is the one you write tomorrow. Always be improving and adding a bit each day to your body of work.Question: Does thinking about your writing as a larger body of work help take the pressure off what you are working on now?

The post Create a Body of Work appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Here, during the last week of the year, expand your horizons and think not just about this week, this month, or this year. Go beyond even the next five or ten years. Think a hundred years into the future.

How will people one hundred years from now be able to interact with your writing? No one can predict what the technology of the future will be like. That’s why I believe it’s important to create something physical that can be passed down to future generations.

One of my most treasured possessions is a tattered notebook that my grandmother Louise used to write her poetry. She died when I was three years old, but when I look through the notebook at her poems—many of which are quite good—it’s almost like she’s there with me.

That’s something you can’t get on a computer screen.

In terms of writing, I think every author should create a print book. Not only is it more prestigious than an ebook, it’s something you can pass down to your kids and grandkids, and all future generations.

As writers, we have a responsibility to think not just about the impact we leave in the world today, but how we will impact those in the future as well.

Question: How do you imagine your writing might impact someone a hundred years into the future?

The post Think 100 Years Into the Future appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Each day is a thread you are weaving into an epic tapestry.

One day, the threads will run out and your life will be over. When your friends and loved ones reflect on your final tapestry, what will they see? Will they see shadows and a hint of greatness that was never fulfilled? Or will they stand in awe at the bold shapes and bright colors that helped them see they could create a beautiful tapestry, too?

Which picture will they see? The choice is up to you.

Your words are the most powerful tool you will ever own. Don’t let another day slip away without using them to weave a better future for yourself and those you care about.

A master craftsman weaves one thread at a time. When you stand back and look at the complicated pattern, you wonder how in the world they managed to create something so complex and beautiful. How did they do it? One thread at a time.

Years from now, people will wonder how you achieved so much with your writing. But it won’t be a mystery. Like a master artist who weaves a tapestry, you used each day as a thread to weave a life and legacy of words.

You will have done it because you were a Daily Writer.

Daily Question: Are you using today—THIS DAY—to weave a beautiful tapestry with your words?

The post Your One Thing appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

In his classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey famously wrote, “Begin with the end in mind.” Come with me on a journey to the end—the end of your life.

Imagine it’s the day of your funeral. You’ve had a long, productive life. There is sadness, but also a warm remembrance of a life well lived. The funeral service is over and people are telling stories about your life. These are people who knew you personally over the years. They can remember your mannerisms, the tone of your voice, your personality, and your quirks firsthand because they knew you and spent time with you.

Fast forward 25 years after your death. Anyone who knew you personally is now an adult. 25 years is a long time, and their memory is fading a bit. They still have pictures and videos, but those are probably archived on a hard drive somewhere or stored in the cloud on a server. There are still people alive who knew you personally, but the generation born after you died only knows you through the stories people tell about you, or things like pictures and videos that were left behind.

Jump ahead to 50 years after your death. We’re getting further away from those who knew you personally. The only ones still alive who knew you personally, knew you as kids or young adults, and now they are old, if they are still alive at all. Somewhere in a basement, someone might have some pictures or other mementos stored that were connected with your life.

It is now 100 years after your death. Several generations have grown up since you’ve been gone. There’s not a single person alive who knew you personally. Your kids and grandkids are probably gone as well.

The technology and media landscape will have changed so many times that ancient video and audio files, and even social media archives, from over 100 years ago, when you were still alive, have either been erased or archived in some vast collection of human data. But even if your great-great-grandkids generations after you can access all that, what will they find? They’ll find birth and death records, legal documents perhaps, and maybe a bunch of random social media posts if those are even accessible.

But how will they know YOU? What will they know about your story, your hopes and dreams, your ideas, and what your life meant?

There is only one way those future generations will know those things. They will know because you wrote them down.

Begin with the end in mind. Don’t leave your legacy to chance. Write it down so it won’t be forgotten.

Daily Question: Your life will come to an end someday—what do you want to leave behind with your writing?

The post Begin with the End in Mind appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

On a day-to-day basis, we are consumed with the here and now—what we have to write and publish today or this week.

Expand your horizons and think not just about this week, this month, or this year. Go beyond even the next five or ten years. Think a hundred years into the future.

How will people one hundred years from now be able to interact with your writing? No one can predict what the technology of the future will be like. That’s why I believe it’s important to create something physical that can be passed down to future generations.

One of my most treasured possessions is a tattered notebook that my grandmother Louise used to write her poetry in. She died when I was three years old, but when I look through the notebook at her poems—many of which are quite good—it’s almost like she’s there with me.

That’s something you can’t get on a computer screen.

In terms of writing, I think every author should create a print book. Not only is it more prestigious than an ebook, it’s something you can pass down to your kids and grandkids, and all future generations.

As writers, we have a responsibility to think not just about the impact we leave on the world today, but how we will impact those in the future as well.

Daily Question: How do you imagine your writing might impact someone a hundred years into the future?

The post Think 100 Years Into the Future appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

The writer Matthew Kelly said, “It is important to understand that you are not writing a story or a book, or a sentence or a paragraph. You are writing a body of work. Whatever you are writing today is just one small part of that body of work.”

This helps take the pressure off because we can easily get stressed out by feeling like we have to create a perfect article, social media post, email, or book chapter every time we sit down to write. But no single thing we write is the defining element of our body of work. It’s part of a much larger whole.

If you’re writing a book, don’t think of it as one book, but many. What if you thought about writing a dozen books over the next ten years? How would that change your point of view? It takes the pressure off.

Whatever you’re writing, it’s just a snapshot of where you are right now in your learning and life. There is no end to your knowledge and learning. So just write it now and move on. Your legacy isn’t just one book. The one book doesn’t represent the end all, be all of your learning.

At the Taylor Guitars company, they said, “The best guitar we make is the one we make tomorrow.” In the same vein, the best book you write is the one you write tomorrow. Always be improving and adding a bit each day to your body of work.

Daily Question: Does thinking about your writing as a larger body of work help take the pressure off what you are working on now?

The post Create a Body of Work appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

When I became a college professor in 2004, one of the courses I was assigned was Introduction to the Arts. It was a basic survey course covering visual art, architecture, music, theatre, and film from a Christian philosophical viewpoint.

The area I knew the least about was architecture. I had always been fascinated by it, but never studied it in-depth. Over the years, as I have learned more about architecture, it has become one of my favorite subjects.

I’m especially drawn to Gothic cathedrals. These medieval works of art represent one of the pinnacles of human ingenuity and creativity. The designers, laborers, and craftsmen worked for decades, in some cases centuries, to complete these massive projects.

My personal favorite is Chartes Cathedral in France. Built from 1194-1260, it’s one of the oldest Gothic cathedrals. Chartes is famous for several iconic features, including its beautiful stained-glass windows, a medieval labyrinth, and a purported relic of the Virgin Mary’s tunic.

Consider the mindset of the artists and craftsmen who built Gothic cathedrals. They worked to build something they knew would outlive them—not only by decades, but by centuries.

That’s a stark contrast to today’s creative world, where we don’t normally think in centuries or decades, or even years. We think in weeks and days, hours and moments.

Today, most of our creative work is designed for quick consumption. We share social media posts that we hope people “like” in the 30 minutes after the update. We write blog posts that we hope go viral in the days after they are published. We hope our book or album gets traction in the weeks and months after it’s released. We hope our podcast or video gets downloaded thousands (or millions!) of times.

I’m not saying those things are bad. I engage in all those mediums, and more. But is there a way to balance the need for relevance and timeliness with a more long-term perspective on our creative work?

The real question is: Will your creative work outlive you? We don’t create just for today. We create for decades from today. So let us create, work, and write with excellence. With high standards. And with a view to impact not just people today… but many years from now, just as we enjoy the Gothic cathedrals today, many hundreds of years after they were built.

Daily Question: How do you think your writing might impact people decades into the future?

The post A Lesson from Gothic Cathedrals appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.