When Richard Feynman was learning how to draw, his teachers told him to loosen up. He couldn’t quite figure out what this meant until one teacher told him to draw a person without looking at the paper. 

Richard quickly realized that it would be impossible to make a good drawing without looking at the paper. The first time he tried it, his pencil broke and he didn’t realize it—so the paper only had the indentations and impressions of the pencil. He gave up trying to make something good. He finally loosened up, and the next time he tried, he was very satisfied with his drawing.

That’s why prompts that make “good” impossible are helpful. They encourage you to relinquish results. They enable you to loosen up, put the end goal out of your mind, and focus on the process. You are free to simply put in a regular amount of effort, maybe even less than that.

When I write this blog, I set out with the goal of just writing five original sentences. That’s what acceptable looks like to me. I try not to get too precious about it.

There’s no way I can write something comprehensive, powerful, or moving in five sentences—something “good”— and that’s precisely what makes this practice so valuable.