In 1960, Eugene Wigner published a paper called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." His point was that math works way better than it should. Why would abstract symbols scratched on paper describe the behavior of quarks and galaxies? It's unreasonable. And yet.
I want to make a similar claim about something much less glamorous: showing up.
The Data
I've been tracking my writing habit for two years. Here's what the data looks like:
Year 1:
- Days I wrote: 187 / 365 (51%)
- Days I wrote well: 34 / 365 (9%)
- Posts published: 12
- Posts I'm proud of: 3
Year 2:
- Days I wrote: 241 / 365 (66%)
- Days I wrote well: 52 / 365 (14%)
- Posts published: 28
- Posts I'm proud of: 9
The "wrote well" metric is subjective — it means I felt like the writing was flowing, like I was discovering something, like the work was pulling me forward instead of me pushing it. Thirty-four days the first year. Fifty-two the second.
Here's the thing: I can't predict which days will be good. There's no correlation with sleep, mood, coffee intake, or day of the week. The good days are randomly distributed among the days I show up.
The only way to get more good days is to show up more.
The Myth of Inspiration
We have this romantic idea about creative work — that it comes from inspiration, from being struck by lightning, from the muse visiting. And sometimes it does feel like that. The 34 good days felt magical. Ideas arrived fully formed. Sentences wrote themselves.
But here's what nobody talks about: the other 153 days. The days I sat down, stared at the screen, wrote 200 mediocre words, and stopped. Those days felt like failure. They weren't.
Those days were the price of admission. You don't get the 34 without the 153. They're not separate categories — they're the same practice. The good days emerge from the bad days, the way a photograph emerges from a contact sheet. Most frames are throwaways. You need them anyway.
The Compound Effect
Something else happens when you show up consistently: you get marginally better in ways you can't perceive.
Day to day, nothing changes. Week to week, nothing changes. But month to month, if you look honestly, things are different. The sentences are cleaner. The ideas connect more naturally. The gap between what you imagine and what you produce shrinks — slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it shrinks.
This is maddening because you can't feel it happening. Progress in creative work isn't like progress in running, where you can check your time. It's more like aging — one day you look in the mirror and realize you're different from who you were, but you can't point to the day it changed.
What "Showing Up" Actually Means
I want to be specific about what showing up means, because it's easy to romanticize.
Showing up is not:
- Writing for four hours in a flow state
- Having a brilliant idea and executing it perfectly
- Feeling motivated and inspired
Showing up is:
- Opening the document
- Writing one bad sentence
- Sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what to say
- Doing it again tomorrow
That's it. The bar is on the floor. Open the document. Write one sentence. If more comes, great. If not, you showed up. That counts.
Why It's Unreasonable
Here's the unreasonable part: the relationship between input and output is non-linear.
Showing up 51% of the time produced 3 posts I'm proud of. Showing up 66% of the time — just 15 percentage points more — produced 9 posts I'm proud of. Triple the output for a 30% increase in input.
This doesn't make sense if you think of writing as a linear process where effort maps directly to results. It makes perfect sense if you think of it as a threshold process — you need a certain amount of accumulated practice before anything good can emerge, and every day you show up brings you closer to that threshold.
The first 100 bad days are building the instrument. The good days are when you finally get to play it.
The Analogy to Everything
This applies to everything I care about. Coding. Reading. Relationships. Exercise. Cooking.
The people who are good at these things aren't more talented. They're not more disciplined — discipline implies willpower, and willpower is finite. They've just been showing up long enough that the practice became automatic. The threshold passed. The instrument was built.
The unreasonable part is that you have to show up before it gets good. You have to invest without evidence that the investment will pay off. You have to write 153 bad days' worth of words on faith that the 34 good days are coming.
They are. But only if you show up.