The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is a real mixed bag. Mark Manson is the kind of dude who quotes Bukowski and tends to make sweeping statements that sound good until you really start thinking about them. But there were a handful of eye-opening moments in this book, including this little anecdote:  

“When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to
say, ‘If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it;
just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the
simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to
show up in your head.’”

Manson uses this anecdote to serve a larger point about motivation; it put me in mind of writing. Specifically, it put me in mind of Mike Rose’s study that I wrote about a few months ago:

Composition scholar Mike Rose compared people who got stuck in
their writing with people who got their writing done. He found that the stuck
group tried their best to follow rules like the ones at the top of this post.
When they struggled, they stopped. The people who got their writing done also
struggled, but they didn’t stop. They abandoned the rules—Well, I guess I’ll just have to do it wrong—and got their writing
done.

Which makes me think of

“Revision
Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy
Sommers. According to Sommers, here’s one key difference between the two groups: Students think they know what they want to say at the start of a project; experienced practitioners write to figure out what they mean to say. 

There’s an intersection point between these three pieces, I know there is. Maybe it’s this: The insistence on getting things right, right away, might be the most effective form of writer’s block.

Or, to put it another way: A good writer sees badness and wrongness as the stepping stones to goodness.