Turning Jerry Seinfeld's writing advice into life advice

This is advice Jerry Seinfeld gave to his daughter when she was struggling to write. It applies to many things we might want to accomplish. Just replace the word "write" with whatever you're trying to do. I found it especially useful when thinking about studying.

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So my daughter's trying to write this thing. She’s struggling, “I can’t write. I keep putting it off.” So I explain to her my basic system, which is, if you’re going to write, make yourself a writing session.

What’s the writing session? I’m going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don’t just sit down with an open-ended, “I’m going to work on this problem.” That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.

I told her, “Just do an hour. That’s a lot."

She says, “I’m going to write all day.”

“No, you’re not. Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”

 Let’s come up with something you can do. That’s where you start everything. That’s how you start to build a system.

I said to her, “You have to have an end-time to your writing session. If you’re going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you’ve got to get a reward for that. And the reward is, the alarm goes off, and you’re done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You’re done.”

If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is “Stop now. Pencils down.”

So that’s the beginning of a system that to me will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I’ve kind of wanted to teach in a way, because I think it’s so simple.

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I cheated a bit and merged quotes of advice he gave his daughter and his son into one whole thing. This is taken from a podcast episode Seinfeld did with Tim Ferriss. If you want to hear the original, the section of the episode is here.