Milestones

I always think that milestones are interesting to consider. Whatever a person does, there are milestones for it. But for every activity, they are a little different. Most milestones have to deal with either time spent doing something or the number of things created. Writing uses both of these milestones.

Once you decide to be a writer or when you get your first paid gig, that is your beginning as a writer. The clock then continues uninterrupted until you either die or officially quit. But we also have milestones for how many things we create. These seem to matter more when writing short but frequent things. Blogs and webcomics, for example, definitely care about the number of entries.

What strikes me as weird, though, is how arbitrary the units of benchmarks are. In terms of time, each new unit is a milestone. Your first day, first week, first month, first year are all significant milestones. After a year, it becomes more arbitrary. The second year is significant because it is double 1. Then year 5. After year 5, every multiple of 5 is significant. 10 is very special because it is double 5, a multiple of 5, a multiple of 10 (all multiples of 10 are twice as special as multiples of five), and the first double digit.

When you look at the number of updates you've had, some of the rules still stand, but they are a little different. Humans only live so many years, so every 5 is significant. But we can create thousands of updates in our lives, tens of thousands, even. Significant milestones seem to be 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100. After that, all multiples of 100 until 1000. After that, only multiples of 1000 matter. And that is what is very scary to me. When you first start writing, you are achieving things in extremely short amounts of time. If you updated every day, you would reach the first ten milestones in your first year. But in your second year, you would only reach three milestones. Every year after that, it keeps getting smaller.

Milestones are points of accomplishment. It says that you have come a long way since the last one. Arbitrary though they may be, they still make you feel very good about yourself when you reach one. If you are coming close to a milestone, let that be an inspiration to keep going. But if there is no milestone in sight, don't let it get you down. Writing is nont about the glory of reaching milestones; it is about the things you write. The pride of creating a lot is great, but it is gravy compared to the pride you should feel for each thing that you create.