10 Things I Learned From Writing
For the past 30 days I was enrolled in the "Ship 30 for 30" digital writing course. The homework: write for 30 days.
Here are some things I learned along the way.
Consistency is a superpower. It goes back to James Clear's concept of "atomic" habits, in both the "big" and "small" sense of the word. You learn to write by writing. Its almost irrelevant what you write about, as long as you do.
Religiously maintaining a habit for 30 days is hard, yet possible. This you've probably heard about in self-help blabbage. But it's true. One day you'll have a very packed agenda. Others you won't feel like writing. But ticking that box at the end of the day and for 30 days, felt very rewarding.
It organically revealed the topics I was most interested in. What's most on your mind gets revealed after looking at what you've been writing about for a month. You quantify your passions, in a sense. And you gain some clarity out of that.
You build a digital network of very interesting people! The "topic of interest" of everyone in the cohort was - naturally - unique in their own ways. Everybody is different, duh. So I learned on a wide variety of topics and did deep-dives in the topics I was already interested in. Great stuff.
The days felt "grounded". I knew that I was going to write everyday for 30 days. So as I went to bed, I kind of mentally scheduled the day ahead so I made sure I did the writing. A good benefit of this is having "tomorrow" already planned out (and usually stacked with your other healthy habits).
Your thinking slightly changes. I even wrote a post on this, and the idea is that your very abstract day-to-day thinking now has some structure to it. You consciously avoid those mental logical leaps because writing has taught you that you need to fill them in.
You do some work on your leverage. With Twitter leverage, people can read what you've written 24/7. Its usually a day or two after publishing that you know what people thought of your idea (or your deconstruction of it at least).
You get feedback! Its easy to know how to improve when you have data points.
What are really your limitations? It served as a confidence builder. If you can do something you didn't have a drop of experience on, and then went out and did it for 30 days straight... is there a ceiling?
How to write! I never had really sat down to think about how and why digital writing is its own category. How it applies perfectly to emails.
On how spacing is its own beast.
A lot of my work life has been easier since I worked on this because:
You learn to communicate better
You realize how important that is
Anyways, it's been a cool and rewarding experience. I'll probably take a break for a while to focus on other things. I'm very grateful to the Ship30 team for the experience. I'll also probably be back. Don't know in what way, but this leverage thing is such a win-win that it would be dumb not to.