Less Wrong

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• 07 Nov, 2025 *

I’m not in the mood to write today.

I had an event last night, then had to work late into the small hours on something, and then I was up early at 5:30am with my daughter who is teething and not sleeping well. But I’ve always subscribed to Rich Roll’s mantra that “mood follows action”, so I started typing this paragraph before I had any clue where it would go - just to see if I could get into the swing of it and come up with something in realtime.

The whole point of Less Wrong is to help me build a daily habit of writing, even if I don’t have anything particularly profound to say. I’ve not stuck with writing over a sustained period of time in the past, and a big part of it is because the expectation to come up with something insightful every day is frankly unrealistic. Sometimes I’m just too bloody tired. It goes against pretty much everything I stand for, but in this part of my day maybe I need to relax the threshold on quality (sometimes) just to get the thing done.

I guess there’s a moral to that story. Showing up - not closing the laptop even when you’re starting at a blinking cursor with no bloody idea what order to move your fingers to start tapping keys - is part of the process. Most people probably give up, as I have in the past. That’s the understandable - and probably logical - thing to do. But doing unusual things is a prerequisite to getting to unusual places in life - you have to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary outcomes.

So maybe the mere fact that I’m publishing something today is as valuable for setting my mental framework as the substance of a more “profound” post?