I have been writing a blog post every day up until the end of the year with the goal of improving my writing skills. The reason I started doing this was because I realised that I was not a very ‘correct’ writer; my writing had a lot of grammatical errors, and didn’t flow very nicely. I am very bullish on the value of being able to communicate well, it is one of the most characteristics that almost all successful people share. I am a natural talker (although this definitely needs work as well), but writing was letting me down, so I decided to practice it. I didn’t just want to write something for myself every day because I knew I wouldn’t do it, I wanted to practice in public. I got the idea of this from David Perell and it was a game changer for me. The pressure of knowing (hoping) that other people would read my writing naturally made me be more thoughtful about what I wrote, and put more effort into it.
When I started I was following the thought process which has been promoted by many people who are in the business of creating content, be it books, youtube videos, blogs, etc. That is, the mindset of “your first 100 pieces of writing are not going to be good anyway, so don’t try to perfect each blog post, just write, and accept that it won’t be good.” This was great in helping me form a habit of writing every day, which is arguably one of the hardest things about writing. I also think it helped me think more creatively in general; I had to write something, so I had to have an idea, not the other way around. If I had waited for an idea to come to be so I could write about it spontaneously, I would have written a grand total of 3-4 blog posts, and none of them would have been great.
I know that I haven’t written any blog posts that have been amazing, some are definitely more interesting than others, and some are flat out boring, but throughout the process, I have felt writing come easier and easier, which is conducive to writing more, which will result in improvements. Or will it?
One of my friends raised the point that he had some issues with the “just produce a lot of content” idea of improvement, because it means you become comfortable with producing bad work, rather than aiming for higher quality work. I realised I didn’t have a comeback remark to this, and it made me think whether my writing has actually improved. I just looked back at my first blog post of the 50 days and was expecting to be embarrassed by it, but it was actually quite good, and incidentally, my most liked blog post. I compared it to a recent blog post explaining cryptocurrency and I struggle to see where I have improved. This is a bit disheartening but I think it’s important to always try assess yourself to see if your efforts are actually paying off, and simply putting up a blog every day without too much regard for quality doesn’t seem to be working for me. So whats the plan?
I still want to improve my writing ability, so what I plan on doing is upping the level of ‘public’ I go. Currently I just upload every blog to my website, and share the occasional one to LinkedIn where I have a few friends and other people in the area of exercise physiology. I don’t have any of my supervisors or other people I would want to impress on there. So to help me improve my writing, I’m going to add all of those people I look up to on LinkedIn, as well as begin sharing my posts to Twitter, or even write tweet-storms about thoughts I’m having. I’ve told myself a million times I should not be worried about what other people think about my work, or me in general. Beginning to post more to these channels will be one way to achieve both goals, improving my writing, and getting out of my comfort zone.
Harrison Hansford 