So last week I had a stressful experience which kept me from focusing on my writing for a day.
Wouldn’t have been a huge problem, except that when I refocused, I was hit with a sudden sense of futility: I wouldn’t make my hourly quota for the week, so what was the point? Why even try? Which is illogical, I know, the equivalent of the “Well, eating that chocolate blew my diet, so why not eat the whole box?” school of thought.
Even so, I got enough done last week that I wasn’t too far behind … and then came this week. I wasn’t planning to put in a full week of work, since I have a Mensa event scheduled Friday and Saturday, but I’d figured I’d get a fair amount done Sunday through Wednesday.
Nope. Sunday, preparations for Mensa—memorizing lines for a skit, preparing a presentation I’m doing on the old movie Production Code—took up a lot of time, as did skit rehearsal Monday night. And I still have a couple of other tasks that need doing. So the end result is, I can’t seem to summon up the will to write (away from the paper). I spent the morning before work finishing Christine Garwood’s interesting Flat Earth instead of writing, while feeling vaguely guilty about it.
I think part of my What’s the Use? reaction is because it’s been so long since I didn’t make my weekly hours that it really threw me off-kilter—more so because writing went so well last month that I fully expected it to flow in February too.
It occurred to me this morning that by that assumption I was ignoring “regression to the mean.” As Peter Bernstein explains it in Against the Gods (a fascinating look at probability, statistics, gambling and stock investing), when someone or something does really, really well, the odds are that simply because of random factors, they won’t do as well the next time (the same applies to doing really, really poorly). That’s why “average” is somewhere in the middle of our range of performance and not at the top.
In discussing investing—Bernstein thinks the “rational investor” is largely a myth—Bernstein points out that people find regression to the mean counter-intuitive: If our performance today is excellent, we should do as well tomorrow. As Nicholas Taleb says in Fooled By Randomness, we overestimate how much of a role skill plays in what we do, and underestimate chance.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that not getting my writing done used to freak me out—what if I never get back on the horse? What if I keep goofing off?—I’m much more relaxed about it now. Sooner or later, a misstep is inevitable, but just as my output fell this month, inevitably it will rise again.

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