Over the course of the last month I took part in the Digital Writing course Ship 30 for 30. I have mixed feelings about my personal journey and in this essay I want to discuss my Learnings.

Content & Community: I am amazed by the content that you get delivered in the course and the community the organizers built. They did a really amazing job with the preparation, with onboarding everyone to their system. I was amazed by how they were able to give so much value to so many people at the same time. That alone was worth the money for me.

My Personal Goals: It was never my goal to become a professional writer, to capitalize anything or market myself with online writing. The reason why I joined this course was that I just wanted to get pushed to publish. To overcome that perfectionism and getting more comfortable with sharing my own thoughts. I think I fully succeeded with that. I am proud of having now (almost) 30 pieces of content with my own thoughts and I even got some positive responses from my friends (one of my big fears why I was almost not doing the course)

Surprising Things:

• I made some friends: The energy in this community is amazing. I am now really happy to look get to know some of those great people. Thank you!

• I learned how to use Twitter: How fast it can go to get into a Twitter community, to get to know people there and that you can really find a lot of interesting people there.

• I wrote an essay that got semi-viral: That was an interesting experience and I also wrote about my learnings the next day.

• Sharing something on a daily basis is great: For my own intellectual development it just felt good to have this daily habit and structure to constantly work in small steps towards a "better" me.

My "Failures": At some point "life got in the way" and I was not motivated to do all the live calls, watch all the content, get all of the information. I wasn't as active in the Circle community and on Twitter after a week or so and saw that when you put less time into it, also the views/impressions/likes/comments decrease. Social Media is just something that I consciously try to avoid in my life and although this community is as supporting as it gets, I got overwhelmed at one point and decided to step back for my own mental health. Looking back, it was probably the right decision at that point.

My Skepticism: With some content of the course I was a bit skeptic. One thing was the pushing of Typeshare. I think it's cool that they build their own tool and of course it's their right to push it, but it made the content a bit less trustworthy. "Do not create a blog" is one of their big mantras. Is this really because you believe that or do you just want to push your own platform? I think both of them could be true and I don't want to ascribe something to them, but those are my skeptic thoughts.

Conclusion: I'm very happy that I decided to sign up for this course. I'm thankful for all of you who made this such a nice journey and who were so supportive over the last month. Nonetheless, I decided to take those all those learnings and put it into another context. More on that tomorrow :)