31 Days of Blogging
During the month of July, I wrote a blog post every single day to improve my skills as a writer. For post #31, I’m going to share what this challenge taught me about writing – and particularly, myself.
Here’s what I learned:
It’s easier with a plan
Each day I was required to start fresh. It’s not easy to come up with new, relevant ideas to spend time thinking and writing about every day, therefore It’s imperative to write ideas down as soon as they come to you. I found that keeping a running list of ideas or themes to address in blog posts helped me avoid scraping the bottom of the barrel for inspiration. You still want to be actively looking for inspiration as you go through each day, but it’s nice to have ideas to fall back on. At the very least, try to plan one day in advance. Dedicating significant time each night to brainstorming or researching helps establish the right mindset to approach the next day’s post.
I became a better writer
Coming from an academic background, I’m currently undergoing a significant shift in how I approach writing – a shift that’s been accelerated due to this challenge. Now that I have more practice writing, I was able to more easily identify areas of improvement. This month has helped my writing become more focused and concise. I’ve learned how to write for value – no one is obligated to read my posts, I need to engage them. Part of writing for value is being intentional about brainstorming quality ideas – I know how important it is to be conscious about the things I consume and invest my time on if I want to write inspired content.
Consistency breeds consistency
If you drink at the bar every night, chances are other bad habits will follow suit: ordering unneeded food, smoking outside, burning social capital, etc. Conversely, if you go to the gym every morning, chances are you’ll eat well, sleep well, and maybe even build relationships. Every choice leads to more choices.
Enter writing. Sitting down daily to do a productive task like writing is really difficult, but it breeds other positive habits. It could be in response to a need for content, e.g. reading more or listening to helpful podcasts. An unintended byproduct of writing every day is that I found I drink a lot more water. I also expanded the music library that I use when writing or working on other projects. Consistency manifests itself in a variety of ways, so keep in mind that habits can snowball – with diligence, they can snowball positively.
The pursuit of perfection is paralyzing
In an ideal world, I would have left July with 30 intelligent, informative, well-polished blog posts that could be submitted for publication. I can tell you right away that I would not have lasted a week had I been concerned with making every blog post absolutely perfect. I certainly don’t want to get complacent with mediocrity, but realized it’s okay if not every post is mind-blowing – what’s important is using each unpolished post (or “failure”) as a lesson. The whole point of the project is to improve my ability as a writer – use the great posts as models for the future and posts that are essentially still in the draft phase to shore up weak points in your writing.
These takeaways in addition to the knowledge and skills I acquired over the course of this month are invaluable and will stay with me as I venture into the business world – and they’re only the tip of the iceberg of what I learned this month. I would never have known that I enjoy writing about new ideas without completing a writing challenge this extensive, and although I felt a touch of burnout near the end, I feel excited to continue writing now that I am more secure in my ability. While I won’t be blogging every day from this point on, it certainly won’t be the end of my blogging career. I’ve realized the sheer amount of value that comes from producing enough thought to create tangible value through writing – and as experience proves, the consistency will only better me moving forward.