Come see me in SF and Portland next month—Australia and the mid-west after that and then the east coast—as part of the Daily Stoic Live tour. Ask me questions, get your books signed, learn a little—should be fun. Grab tickets here!

When I started writing, I followed the advice a lot of writers follow: hit a word count. Write a thousand words a day. Two thousand. Whatever the number.

Then I came across what, for years, I thought was the single best rule for writers—that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” Not brilliant pages. Not polished pages. Just two crappy ones. Give yourself permission to be bad.

But over time, I’ve come to lower the stakes even further.

Because even “two crappy pages a day” as a metric still creates a kind of perverse incentive. They say that what gets measured, gets managed, right? Metrics are a statement of your values and priorities. The problem with measuring output in pages is that it implies that adding pages is what you should be doing every day. Like that’s the job and it most certainly isn’t.

Now my writing habit is simpler, easier, and in a way, much better. My rule is just, make a positive contribution every day. The question I ask myself at the end of the day is simply, Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?

That’s it.

Sometimes a “positive contribution” means writing a bunch of new pages. Sometimes it means editing a chapter. Sometimes it’s adding. Sometimes it’s deleting. Sometimes it means I just have a really good phone call about the book with someone whose opinion matters. Maybe I read something good. Maybe I went for a long walk and thought of something that excited me about it. Maybe I met someone who can help me when it comes out. 

This is something I can do anywhere…it’s something I can do any day. I can do it when I’m sick. I can do it when I’m motivated. I can do it from my office or a hotel room or on the road. It can be a little contribution or a big one.

And at some point it hit me—this isn’t a practice for writing. It’s a practice for life.

Every year, as part of the New Year, New You Challenge we do over at Daily Stoic, we do weekly live calls. And year after year, one of the clearest patterns in the questions people ask is the struggle with all-or-nothing thinking. Not just with the challenge itself, but in their day-to-day lives. 

One person talked about abandoning a creative project because their schedule didn’t allow for the long, uninterrupted sessions they felt was required. Another talked about feeling like they had a terrible reading year because their (arbitrary) goal was to read fifty books, and they only read thirty-three. Several talked about how they don’t exercise, meditate, or journal at all because if you only have five or ten minutes, what’s the point? 

It’s the same binary, all-or-nothing trap, again and again. Either I’m all in, or I’m out. Either I can commit fully, or I shouldn’t bother at all. Either I did the thing perfectly, or it was a complete failure.

In ​Discipline Is Destiny​, I write about the practice of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Always finding some way to make a little progress. Focusing on the joys of getting a little bit better, day after day.

Because over time, it accumulates and compounds into impressive outcomes. 

Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.

That’s the question you want to consider. Not, what does the perfect, optimal, most ideal version of this look like? But, How much progress could I make if I made just a small positive contribution each day over the course of an entire life?

In one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty simple prescription for the good life. “Each day,” he wrote, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.” 

One gain per day. Or not even that—just spending some time seriously thinking one thing over per day. That’s it. 

George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. Even at the pace of one per day. 

The Stoics believed it was the little things that added up to wisdom and to virtue. What you read. Who you studied under. What you prioritized. How you treated someone. What your routine was like. The training you underwent. What rules you followed. What habits you cultivated. Day to day, practiced over a lifetime, this is what created greatness. This is what led to a good life.

“Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.”

So as a writer and as a person, I try to focus on just making a small contribution every day. I know that cumulatively this has an enormous impact. It’s not as glamorous as transformative reinvention or bold, dramatic leaps. But it’s dependable and it works. It’s something I control. 

“Do the best you can,” the emperor says in Marguerite Yourcenar’s beautiful novel Memoirs of Hadrian. “Do it over again. Then still improve, even if ever so slightly those retouches.” 

It’s a beautiful irony: You’re never content with your progress and yet, you’re always content . . . because you’re making progress.

You’re making a positive contribution.

Every day.