7 Things I Learned From Completing a 30 Day Writing Challenge

I made it...

It's day 30 of my 30-day writing challenge, and I've completed my goal of publishing every day for the past 30 days.

Here are 7 of the key things I've learned along the way:

1.) Outflow determines inflow: The more you give, the more that flows back

Going into it, I was worried that I’d run out of ideas to write about.

I actually found the opposite to be true.

The more I published, the more good ideas flowed back to me.?

It’s almost like ideas take up real estate in our mind and it’s only when we let them out does it free up space for new, fresh ideas to come in.?

2. Ensure your goals don’t conflict with each other?

The reason I joined the course in the first place was to begin promoting ideas from a book I’m writing.

However, it ended up being a distraction from my main priority — writing the book itself.

With the pressure of having to publish a new post every day, my mind was focused on daily posts, rather than the long term goal of the book itself.?

The takeaway is to avoid committing to goals that conflict with each other — and to try and create synergy between the different projects I’m working on.

3. 30 day challenges are a powerful way to develop a new habit

I’d be wanting to share ideas online for years but couldn’t get into the habit of doing so consistently.

However, once I’d shared publicly that I was doing this 30 day challenge and would be posting every day, there was no backing out.?

In future, if my goal is to develop a new habit, I’ll be thinking about how I can kickstart it with a 30 day challenge.

4. Create internal metrics of validation

'You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.' — Bhagavad Gita

Hundreds of thousands of years of evolving in close knit tribes where our survival depended on fitting into our group have hardwired us to care enormously what people think about us.?

Therefore, if you’re sharing your ideas daily on social media, your emotional state can become tied to the number of likes you’re getting.

I realised this was happening to me, so I decided to create internal metrics of validation for myself.?

Before publishing, I would ask:

1. Is this my best effort, given the circumstances and time available?
2. Is this potentially useful or helpful to the person reading it?

If I could answer yes to both of the above, I was content - regardless of the number of likes on the post.

5.) Expect Tumbleweed - Anything on Top is a Bonus

Many researchers in the field of positive psychology agree that if you wrote happiness as an equation, it would look something like this:

Happiness = Reality — Expectations

In other words, we experience negative emotion when we get our hopes up, and then we’re let down when reality doesn’t meet our expectations.

It also means we experience happiness when circumstances exceed our expectations.?

This is why I like giving people false bad news (e.g. telling my Mum that the dog has done the business on the living room carpet - when it actually hasn’t).?

When she goes into the living room expecting a massive cleanup operation and finds nothing there, reality has exceeded her expectations, so she’s happy.?

I discovered I could apply the same principle to my writing by deliberately expecting to get zero likes on my posts - no matter how much effort I put into them.?

This meant that if it did happen, I was emotionally prepared — and also pleasantly surprised when I did receive some positive feedback.?

If you can emotionally accept the worst case scenario before it happens, then you're unphased if it does occur.

6. Strike while the iron is hot

Ideas have an energy to them — a sort of “life force” that’s hard to put into words.?

Some days an idea would strike me and I’d feel compelled to write about it there and then - usually on a note on my phone.

These turned out to be the posts that were both easiest to write and performed well.

However, if I delayed writing about it for a few days, it was like the energy had left the idea, and it became effortful to write about.?

The takeaway is that ideas have an “energy” to them that runs out over time.?

If you write about them when the energy is high, it’s sort of like your creativity is fuelled by a force beyond yourself.

The longer you delay, the less of that force you have available.

7. Your environment transforms depending on your goals

During my 30 day challenge, every experience I had became something I could write about.

Conversations, movies, books, stories, memories - all became raw material for whatever post(s) I was working on at the time.?

Our conscious minds can only take in a limited amount of information.?

So we have a selective focus about what we let in and what we ignore - depending on our goals.?

This might be what Kobe Bryant was getting at when he said:?

“Once you know what it is in life that you want to do, then the world basically becomes your library.”

When you have a clear goal, your mind searches the external world for resources that will help you accomplish it.?

For example, when I was 19, my aim was to “bulk up” and put on muscle.?

And it was around this time that I realised that a doorway in the office building I worked in could also serve as a pull up bar.?

In other words, simply having the goal to put on muscle caused me to see and interact with the world around me in a different way.?

The same principle applies to all of our goals.

Anyway, although this has been a fun experiment to work on, I'd better get back to writing my book.

Going forward, I'll be switching to a cadence of once per week, aiming for more quality in what I share.

Thank you to everyone who supported and offered feedback along the way - it made a huge difference - particularly on those "tumbleweed" days!