Wendy Sue Maggio

For years, I read a man’s weekly newsletter.

Every year, he would pick something new to learn and spend five minutes a day on it.

Just five minutes.

One year, he chose drawing.

At first, it was… not good.

But he kept going.

Day after day. Year after year.

And slowly, it changed.

What started as rough sketches turned into something real.
Something beautiful.

Eventually, he was framing his work.

And I watched all of it from a distance, thinking,
“That’s incredible.”

Not just the art.

The consistency.

The quiet discipline of showing up every single day.

So I decided I was going to do it too.

January 2024.

I picked drawing.

Five minutes a day.

That was it.

I even bought the sketchbook.

This was from January 4th, 2024.

One of my first drawings.

I remember sitting there, trying to get the lines right, shading where I thought it should go, not really knowing what I was doing—but doing it anyway.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it was mine.

January 4, 2024 — Two of my first drawings

Three days later, I broke my wrist.

My dominant hand.

And that was the end of that.

I never went back to it.

Not because I couldn’t eventually.

But because something about it felt… borrowed.

Like I had taken someone else’s idea and tried to make it mine.

It wasn’t.

It was his thing.

Not mine.

So the next year—2025—I tried again.

Not on January 1st.
Not perfectly planned.

Sometime in the middle of January, I just decided:

This time, I would write.

No big announcement.
No pressure.

Just… show up and do it.

And now here I am.

Writing books.

Building something I didn’t even know I was capable of a few years ago.

Registering copyrights—something I never would have imagined when I started.

And the funny thing is…

I thought the lesson was about consistency.

Five minutes a day.
Stick with it.
Get better.

But that wasn’t the real lesson for me.

The real lesson was this:

You can admire someone else’s path…

and still need to find your own.

I didn’t fail at drawing.

I just hadn’t found my thing yet.

Now I have.

And I’m still showing up.

Just in a way that finally feels like mine.

If this felt familiar, you’re not alone.

I share thoughts like this in Wendy Sue’s Worthy Words—little notes about life, writing, and figuring things out as I go.

If you’d like to be part of that, you can sign up here.