Today is day 15 of my 30 day writing challenge. I've been writing 1 short essay every day for the last 2 weeks. Without fail. While I've had a daily journaling habit for a while, and I've been writing on Twitter and my newsletter for more than 3 years now.
But I've never done a challenge like this - where I write an essay every day on a new topic. Here's what I've learned about myself so far -
1. I thrive on external accountability
I don't know what it is - is it some sort of fear of rejection, or my people pleasing attitude or some other weird quirk of my personality - but if I commit to something publicly I follow through on it like a mad man. I knew this about myself for a while, but it got reinforced during this challenge.
And now I've started to look at it like a tool. Something I can use strategically, to get the work done which I'm procrastinating on for a while.
2. Writing is easy, but distribution is a PITA
Sitting down and writing a daily essay is hard, but its manageable. Because I inherently enjoy the act of writing. Once I get going, I don't want to stop, I just want to keep writing.
But the real challenge begins when it comes to distributing the daily essay. I don't want to annoy people, spam people, bore people. I don't want to disturb anyone with my writing.
But distribution is critical - I've had some amazing feedback on these mini essays - lots of people have reached out with their comments and insights about the topics I'm writing about. I would be stupid to not distribute my writing as widely as I can.
Something I haven't solved yet.
3. Writing is thinking
This idea gets reinforced every day. I start with a topic, write an intro and get into the main points. And as I'm writing my ideas start to evolve. New insights pop up which I hadn't thought of beforehand.
It's almost like peeling an onion - with every sentence, a new layer presents itself and I get excited to write about it. Old ideas which were clogging up the brain clear out, and new thinking emerges.
Writing brings a lot of clarity.
The last 2 weeks have been quite powerful for me. It's been a great experience, I've got new ideas which I'm going dig deeper in the future. For the next 2 weeks. I'm going to explore more new ideas, and see where they take me.
Cheers
🙌