I Wrote An Article Everday For 30 Days, Here Is What I Learned.
Over the last 30 days, I have written one article a day as part of a writing challenge to improve my writing and storytelling. This challenge was so hard! I had no idea what I was signing up for when I started. The first few days were relatively easy because I thought of doing this challenge for a while, so I already had the first three articles planned out in my head.
However, the next 27 days were not so simple. I needed not only write the article but think through, research and plan it’s content; figuring out what to write about was as hard as the actual writing. One aspect which was particularly challenging was dropping my quality standards in order to publish every day.
I wanted every article to be clear and articulate; I wanted it to be scientifically accurate; I wanted to cite research papers and quote thought leaders in the field. However, I had a full-time job to do while doing this challenge; this gave me at most an hour to an hour and a half a day to write the article. To come up with the topic and do all the planning and research on the same day was impossible. I needed to just write and hope the words appearing on the screen would magically form into something interesting.
Writing on weekends was incredibly challenging; I just wanted to chill and take a break from the week. However, I knew I had to publish, so I spent some hungover Sunday mornings painfully and slowly writing the article for the day, and even once I was done, I would worry about what I would write about the next day.
“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually, you get better at it.
That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ― Octavia E. Butler
My Brain Feels 20Kg Lighter.
I found the process of writing to be incredibly cathartic; it felt like I was draining oil out of my ear that had been pulling down my thoughts for as long as I can remember. The foremost benefit of writing for me was not that I could better explain my ideas to others; it was that I could better explain my thoughts to myself. I had the vocabulary and structure to think through things that were bothering me, and I could start building and iterating on ideas that were previously vague images in my mind.
Clearer and more compelling ideas
Many of the ideas I had before the writing challenge were nothing more than hunches, feelings I had some vague thoughts about. However, writing about them and making sure they are clear enough for another person to understand pushed my thinking to another level.
There is a learning technique called the Feynman technique: to learn a concept, you try and explain it to a five-year-old. By doing so, you have to understand something from first principles; you have to be able to explain it simply and concisely. Luckily my audience is not a bunch of five-year-olds, but none the less I was forced to interrogate my ideas and think through them to write an article explaining it to someone else.
I felt the effectiveness of this technique in full effect specifically, with my beliefs around education. The flaws that exist and the various possible solutions have become so much more lucid in my mind. I am far more convinced that our education system is in complete chaos after collecting and organising many of my thoughts on the topic.
Some Wins
A few large medium publications spotted my articles and featured them in their journal. I am now a contributing writer for
- Age of Awareness
- Data Driven Investor
- The Startup (The Largest Publication on Medium)
Some Statistics
My most successful article (in terms of the number of reads):
My least successful article
The Future of Education — Project Based Learning
Closing Remarks
Tomorrow I will not be publishing an article! I have been waiting 29 days to write these words, and I am so bloody relieved to be saying it finally. However, I do feel I have another tool in my toolbox after this month. Our identities become intertwined with what we do, not what we think; if you want to be a coder, then code every day; if you want to be a director, then create movies and if you want to be a writer: write. It is as simple as that.
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it and make trial after trial until it comes. — Thomas Edison
This was the last post of my 30-day writing challenge. Every day for 30 days I wrote an article of at least 500 words. Unfortunetly no free lunches were given out over this period, however, if you would like we can meet for a coffee and chat about some cool thing like tech, startups and education.
