Last Saturday, I wrote about the magic of daily practice. I ended it making the point that getting started is really the hard part.
Why is it hard though?
Getting started means pushing through that initial resistance when your brain hasn't built the pathways yet. It's when you're still convincing yourself that something matters enough to think and do it daily. It's when you're not yet sure you have anything meaningful to contribute to the conversation.
There are tons, tons, of accessibility articles out there. But none of them are written by me. From my perspective. With my voice.
I may be writing the 57th piece on colour contrast. But someone out there is reading about it for the first time. Someone out there has read the other 56 and something clicks when they read what I wrote.
That keeps me going.
I show up on the days I'm tired after debugging the same tired and overplayed div as button and re-writing the same explanation of why it's wrong. I write when the topic feels played out. I hit publish even after I wonder if anyone's actually reading and caring.
And here's what I expected about daily practice, but never anticipated how much an impact it could have. Once I got passed getting started, momentum carried me. The daily practice feeds on itself. My thinking goes deeper because I articulate it every day.
My initial drafts for this list consisted mainly of topics I've read about myself. I always felt I had something to contribute, but the topics felt over-explored already.
As I continued writing every day, I developed my own topics and wrote extensively about them. Effective Accessibility Workshops, Accessibility metrics that give you early warnings or The Product Owner's guide to accessibility debt were some of my favourite topics.
The side-effect is that the world became full of accessibility material, not void of it.
Daily practice made my work worth doing, not just easier.