I analyzed 15 years of testimonials from users of 750words.com to learn how their private journaling habits have helped them
Or, how I plan to get around the task of marketing my site by letting people speak for themselves
Cue movie trailer voice, “In a land before time…”
Hm, that’s not quite right. Okay, got it. Cue scratchy old man’s voice, “Four score minus 25 years ago today, when I was but a wee lad…”
That’s too derivative, damn it. I guess I gotta just be me, BBB. Okay, well, this coming December 16th, a little website called 750words.com is gonna turn 15 years old. It was inspired by the idea of morning pages in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but online and with lots of silly stats and animal badges. While reading testimonials I came across this description of the site from a long-time member back in 2017 when she was only about a month in, and I thought it captured the spirit of things really well:
“750words.com is very dynamic and tailorable with plenty of reward systems (badges, challenges, acknowledgment of word goal achievement, etc) and ways to engage in a social capacity while still having my work remain as private as I would like it to be.
The analysis of the entry is a nice touch too because it allows me to evaluate and know what I have written without going back to read over it.
The no rules part is liberating because it allows me to just write; I don’t have to think about sentence structure or typos or other things that might slow me down while writing.
While I often write in the morning, having the whole day to accomplish the goal allows me to have flexibility.
My life has changed in unexpected ways as I am able to focus better and understand myself better, regarding my goals, attributes, weaknesses, and how I plan to move forward. Thirty-seven days in and still going strong.”
— Chantele
But 750 Words really a very simple site. Just a blank slate every day to write on. The idea is to put thoughts down that have nowhere else to go.
750 words is the equivalent of 3 hand-written pages — enough to force some of the quieter open loops in our mind to spill themselves out, not so much that it takes longer than 10–14 minutes if you do it without distraction.
When you get to 750 words, it celebrates with some confetti 🎉 and gives you a link to some fun analytics about your words.
When you consistently write for a series of days, or write fast, or write early or late, or write every day for a whole month, you get badges, for example:
The truth is, however, that the magic isn’t in the features. It’s all in the practice itself. There’s something cleansing and freeing about writing 3 pages of unfiltered stream-of-consciousness every day as a way of digging out all those open looped thoughts and either giving them more attention or letting them go. That simple activity clears away some mind clutter and tills a fresh plot of brain soil for creativity to unfurl out of. I believed back then — and deeply know in my bones now — that the practice of writing every day, in a way that’s private, unfiltered, and spontaneous, and most importantly FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE… is one of the best gifts you can give yourself. It feels like a gift.
If you wanna get nerdy about it, there’s even some rEsEaRcH to support this. James Pennebaker is a researcher that I’ve been following for years and he has a really accessible approach to describing how private journaling can improve both physical and mental health with very little effort. Here are a few interviews and books that I’ve found to be enlightening:
- Planet Word: Writing Your Way to Better Health [YouTube]
- Ten Percent Happier: The Science of Journaling [YouTube]
- The Secret Life of Pronouns [Book on Amazon]
- Expressive Writing: Words That Heal [Book on Amazon]
If you like rabbit holes to travel down with all kinds of implications and insights along the way, I highly recommend this one with Pennebaker. A charming thing about him is that whenever someone says something hyperbolic about the research, he corrects them and kind of destroys the sound bite. I love that about him.
But… not many people know this and it’s a tough thing to really explain. Some people, like me, are just drawn to journaling and have been doing it in fits and starts (with piles of filled and unfilled notebooks to prove it) for their whole lives. When I tell them about this site they usually get it immediately and never hear about it again until 9 years later when they say that they’re on on a 3000 day streak or something and I need to create more badges for them (I’m looking at you, Liene 👀).
Enter 11,000 Notes of Inspiration
Because private journaling is such a solitary activity — by design! — there has been a way for people to write public “notes of inspiration” when they passed a significant writing streak or total word count milestone.
Here’s the very first one… from March 12th, 2010, which I probably created to test the feature:
For the last 15 years, over 11,000 notes of inspiration have been written (more are written every day). They’re the only way for people using the site to communicate publicly and interact with one another, and since you get these “cups of patronage” when you donate or when you complete a monthly challenge, etc, they are often written at moments of celebration and gratitude and they show up in daily nudge emails and other places. There have been so many amazing notes of inspiration over the years, but no way to browse or search them once they scrolled out of the most recent few. So many gems of inspiration, hidden in the stream of the past.
Let people speak for themselves
After leaving Medium’s product team last month, I’ve decided to dedicate nine months to working full-time attempting to turn 750 Words into a rEaL sUsTaInAbLe BuSiNeSs. My co-parent/business partner, Kellianne, has been keeping the site alive and managing the support queue during most of this time, but my involvement has been limited to fixing urgent things for most of its life. I did manage to re-build it from scratch during the pandemic, but that has meant that now there are TWO sites to support instead of one. 😱 But these next nine months will be a fun challenge. I decided to rip the bandaid off and officially point the domain to the new site a couple weeks ago. My goal is to try to grow from 4,000 to 8,000 paying members! 100% growth in 9 months?
Easy peasy. 💁🏻♂️
Okay maybe not easy peasy exactly but these aren’t huge numbers, generally speaking. As someone who’s first internet job was answering phone calls on the night shift for Amazon customer service in 1998, I turned away more paying customers in the 15 minutes that I broke the homepage that one time than I need to achieve this goal. BUT! SHIT! To grow I would need to probably do some marketing… only problem is that I’m kind of terrible at marketing (or maybe it’s just that I am allergic to it). Why not both? Yeah, it’s definitely both. I tell myself I want things to speak for themselves instead of having to try to convince people that something is good. But really, there’s some part of me that doesn’t want to ask people to sign up because… I JUST DON’T WANT TO, OKAY?! Leave me alone.
But wait! I could use ChatGPT to help me comb through over 11,000 testimonials so that I didn’t have to say anything! And I could let people who know and use and love the site can do all the talking!
[Cue diabolical laughter]
[Cue my inner child tentatively uncurling from the fetal position]
So, I exported all of the notes of inspiration into a CSV, uploaded into ChatGPT’s canvas mode, and began asking LoTs Of QuEsTiOnS based on the contents of the data set. It was very exciting! There seemed to be a perfect testimonial for almost every question I asked it to look for! It was only after several hours of work that I realized ChatGPT was coming up with its own testimonials that matched what I was looking for. 😱 WTFFFFFFFFF????
Bad ChatGPT! 😡
Back to the drawing board, this time with the VERY STRONG REQUEST to ONLY USE DIRECT QUOTES, which IT ITSELF told me to include in my prompt, and to also cross-reference every quote with the row it existed on in my CSV so I could also double check that it was actually sticking to this rule.
That worked for a bit but then slowly drifted into hallucination land again… UGH!
[Several days of hand-writing and frustration pass…]
I eventually resigned myself to re-uploading the CSV every time I asked a follow-up question and requested that it only reference IDs and never actually print any of the text from the testimonials. Eventually, I settled on a few prompts that I thought would generate interesting results when I cross-referenced them with the CSV, turning 11,000 testimonials into 4,000, and then 4,000 into a couple hundred. At the end of this brackish process, and so much cross-referencing, I discovered that there’s a very fat tail of high-quality and interesting testimonials that is much larger than a couple hundred. So the final 200 we identified may or may not be the truly “best” ones from the set, but I’m happy with them and we’re moving on. Also, side note: the quotes from actual humans were way more fun and interesting than the ones ChatGPT had hallucinated, maybe because they had so much more variety of personality, life circumstance, and word choice.
Yes, ChatGPT, that was a dig. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll catch up and pass us in personality and quirks in the next year, so I’m gonna relish this little lead while humans still hold it.
The results
Long story short(-ish)…
I tried a few different ways of categorizing the testimonials: by theme, by area of life affected, by whether it was a personal story or a review of 750 or a note meant primarily to inspire others, and a few other ways. Interestingly enough, the one that felt the best and that ChatGPT also felt best fit the data set, was to group them by the benefit they got from using 750 Words.
We played around with that and eventually combined a few categories and re-ordered them to fit into a kind of OODA Loop (another fun rabbit hole if you aren’t familiar with the term) that looks like this:
The OODA Loop of discovering ourselves, building confidence, choosing consistency, and sparking self-expression
- OBSERVE: Processing emotions, finding clarity, understanding ourselves better
- ORIENT: Re-building confidence and conviction in our own value
- DECIDE: Celebrating the value of building a consistent writing habit
- ACT: Sparking creative momentum, new ideas, and expression
It’s kind of incredible how this loop (each step reinforcing the others, and improving as a whole through each iteration) just emerged from the data. I wasn’t looking for it, and neither was ChatGPT (at least, not explicitly). Here is a case where hallucination comes in handy, it’s how that last step of ACTION generates something surprising and delightful and honest, which then feeds right into the first step again of OBSERVING this new insight and then ORIENTING around it, etc.
This IS the creative, generative, BEING FULLY ALIVE process that we are always looking for but rarely know which rocks to look under for it.
1. OBSERVE testimonials
Processing emotions, finding clarity, understanding ourselves better
- “This digital journey has been one accompanied by so much pain, frustration, loss, rebirth, growth, and dare I say… enlightenment. 750words.com has been my therapy dojo as much or more so than my time in actual therapy while negotiating a divorce, the deaths of family and friends, heartbreak in new relationships, processing the absolutely surreal uptick in global insanity, and of course, a petri dish for culturing dreams and vision. Onward to the next million words.”
— Eric - “I have been an intermittent 750 words journaller for a while. I always struck gold around 600 words, making it well worth it, but hadn’t ever maintained more than a 30 day streak. Then, a few months ago, I was struggling to keep my spirits up in the thick of a long recovery from serious illness. I could see progress every day but it was still hard to imagine that progress would ever add up to the ‘normal’ life I had lost. I hoped that writing about it would keep me saner and help me mark the passing time. This week, I earned both Hefty Tome and Phoenix badges as I marked one year since diagnosis. Here’s to getting through the tough days — to sticking around for a chance at better days to come!”
— susspring - “I have been more at peace since I can empty my mind (and heart) of all the things that weigh me down. This practice of writing each morning helps me to gain a focus for each day. It has helped to take the sting out of this solitary journey I’m on.”
— Rocky - “Vocalizing my feelings and inadequacies gets increasingly more difficult as I get older (I am currently twenty-seven years old), and writing them down first thing in the morning is almost like therapy for me.”
— Coryn - “I have suffered from some severe losses over the past couple of years and this has been so cathartic as I can write what I feel, and not worry about what others think of it, or if it is even written well.”
— Norm - “Days, weeks, month after my dad’s burial and my grief was breaking and eating me thin. I lost weight and am looking like a teen at 40. 750 words was that woman or man I needed to just shut up and listen while I poured out my grief and heaven knows how this came to the rescue.”
— Wa - “750 words has grounded and centered me and is a comforting voice to all that is going on in my mind, heart and soul. Anytime I am worried or upset I know writing these pages will calm, soothe, and give an authentic picture to what is going on in my inner world and space to bring out into to the open so that I can deal with the issues that arise. It’s amazing how relaxing it is. This routine and habit has become for me something I do with joy and alacrity no matter what the mood is of the content matter of what I write.”
— Kay - “There’s something incredible about having a little sliver of time dedicated daily to writing, and it became really important to me. Some days I felt like I had nothing to say and struggled to hit the mark, and other days I pulled up the site specifically because I wanted to say things that I couldn’t say to anyone else. My favorite thing about writing is that it can be whatever you need it to be, and this site captures that so well.”
— Allyson - “When I write down all my thoughts daily it allows me to feel more rested and relaxed… like a weight has been lifted. Not to mention all the snippets of short stories, poetry, and novel ideas that seem to appear.”
— Renda - “My girlfriend just broke up with me, and I spent most of yesterday crying over her; meanwhile, I lost a two-month streak. But I’ve written my words for today, and I’m going to bounce back from this, fighting my way, one day at a time. One day at a time.”
— Daniel - “There were times when I was diligently working on writing and I would need these — what I call — writing temper tantrums. I couldn’t stay focused on what I wanted to write — so I finally would give in to my two year old writer, grab a crayon and clean piece of paper and allow myself to go at it!! It is like giving yourself a 750 word melt down!”
— Chantele - “I’ve been able to rant and cuss and say things I’d never say out loud in order to come back to a difficult person or situation in a calm, collected, and emotionally healthy manner. This site has changed my life for the better.”
— Rashel - “I started writing on 750 Words a couple of months ago when my dad died. Last Monday my mom died and I am staying in their empty house till after the funeral. I just signed in & bookmarked 750 Words so I could empty myself of my feelings every day while I’m here. Thanks for being there.”
— Stoogeswoman
2. ORIENT testimonials
Re-building confidence and conviction in our own value
- “The victory is that I’m back in school, not hating myself and my life. The victory is that I’ve been consistent in this and a couple of other things for three whole months, which for someone with ADHD is an Apollo 11-level achievement.”
— Emily - “The biggest thing that has come out of this one month challenge is me ending my 2 year abusive relationship and beginning to move on. Without 750 words I know what I am doing would have been much more difficult. I am almost to 100,000 words and I know that I am finally on the right path, despite how difficult these last weeks have been. Thank you for everything. You have truly changed my life.”
— Amanda - “Besides just forging the writing habit in me and thus making me much more capable writer, this site has helped me push myself, it has helped me to achieve the consistency needed to achieve big goals, it has built up my work ethic, and slowly and surely it has made me see that I can do anything at all in the world.” — Jarkko
- “I’ve gone through many traumatic experiences over the years and have needed therapy, but have not been able to afford it. I have been re-constructing on my own, therefore, and 750 Words has really been very effective in this re-construction of myself. So far, I’ve been able to define the ways that I feel on a day-to-day basis, I’ve been able to identify behavioral patterns, and I’ve been able to knock down many of my demons and triggers in the process. It’s increased my mental stability, honestly, and I don’t think I’ll ever give it up.”
— Coryn - “What started as a journey to write my first work of fiction turned into a quest to write to heal. I’ve grown more bold in writing what is true for me. I used writing to explore my identity, question my internal programming, and recall all the things that are good about me.”
— Ren - “This site has changed my life. I’ve noticed that I am becoming more aware of my life and what is most important. Writing about things like that each morning, no wonder.”
— James - “In the process of journey — I find a lot of positive changes in me. I am less worried about things — once they’ve written out you start seeing them from a different angle and you find that most of the worries are silly. I feel that I have a better control of my thoughts — I haven’t reached the state of enlightenment yet — but I feel that the firm grasp of incessant thinking has somewhat relaxed and mostly because of the meditation I practice while typing 750 words daily.”
— Geniyat - “The time writing everyday has become my sacred time where I can explore every inch of my mind while being tethered to the present which has had a great positive impact on reducing my ruminating and increasing my ability to focus. Additionally, writing about the day’s events helps me to process my stress, figure out viable solutions or at the very least, unburden my mind.”
— Chantele - “It was a breakthrough moment somewhere along this ride of writing when it dawned upon me that writing in this way is immensely helpful and supportive in working towards healthy and loving conversations with loved ones — friends and family.”
— Marikanina - “It is part of my daily morning routine, cup of coffee by my side. Most often I use it to write about my night dreams — a core part of my spiritual life — or to work out difficult problems in my life. It’s refreshing for this perfectionist to not have to worry about typos or grammar and to just do a brain dump as fast as my fingers can go (they can never keep up with my mind).”
— Rashel - “I’d like you to know that 750words.com has changed my life. I live with ADD and, as such, my head is normally a constant jumble of competing thoughts. Writing 750 words every day has helped me to sort out the signal from the noise and has lead me down a whole new path for my life.”
— Anonymous
3. DECIDE testimonials
Celebrating the value of building a consistent writing habit
- “Over two years and almost nine full months ago I started my journey on 750 words. Now, 799 completed days and a 485 day streak later I have broken the magical limit of one million words. Someone might call for a badge for it, but for me personally just seeing that kind of a number up there is a reward in itself.”
— Jarkko - “I’ve been wanting to write stuff for about 7 years since my last book and nothing really happened on it because there was always something else more important to do. Then I came across 750 words and — like many of the people on this site — life changed. 75 days later I’d completed two month-challenges and built up a 75-day streak.”
— Andy - “Being unemployed, 750 words has given me something to look forward to every day, and allows me to focus on my fears, my hopes, my joys as well as heartbreaks.”
— Norm - “750 Words has shown me that daily spontaneous writing takes only 10 or 15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be a Big Thing that eats up my other writing time. And nearly every day, it clarifies my thoughts or priorities, or sparks a new idea or two. Completely worthwhile. I also love that my writing disappears when I’m done. I know it’s archived and I can get it back, but I feel free to write honestly or exaggerate or complain, and those pages won’t be hanging around visible next time I visit the website. Much better than having to open a document and scroll down and then store it somewhere myself.”
— grrlpup - “I’ve been using this site for nearly 5 years, and it has become an integral part of my life. I’ve written 1.3 million words of journaling, school work, creative writing, complaining, and thinking out loud about whatever happened to be in my head.”
— Allyson - “When I was in elementary school I relied heavily on writing to cope with the bullying I endured. Over the years writing has become my safety net but I have never been able to keep a journal to document my thoughts due to the paranoia of someone reading it — I’d be mortified. The reason I love 750 words is because it’s where I can jot down my thoughts & not have to worry about people peering into a public Tumblr post or a journal that I left misplaced. I’ve seen an immense improvement in my writing & I am content that I can clear my head in a private space. For that I am eternally grateful.”
— Annel - “I know some people don’t care for badges for various reasons. For me, however, they’ve been fun and they’ve been helpful. It’s a small thing, so one wouldn’t think that it would make much difference, but it does. Why? Because while I love to write, it’s one of the few things that I do for *me*, and because it is, prioritizing the time to do it sometimes feels selfish, especially on days when I have so much to do for everyone else. Having a badge to work towards gives me a reason to prioritize myself, even if it’s only for fifteen or so minutes a day. If I just want to sit down and write for myself, I’m likely to let other things get in the way.”
— NocturnalRites - “The positive impact that 750w has had on me, and my life, is nearly indescribable… Er, it may have been, prior to my daily habit that is now well over 1300 days. But now? I could write vivid descriptions about pretty much anything, and that alone is something worthy of deep gratitude and appreciation. The key benefit for me — and for anyone committed to 750w on a daily basis IMHO — is all about mental health and clarity. No matter how many times I feel like I have a handle on something that’s happening in my life — e.g. an upcoming decision — when I spend a few minutes in 750w writing about it — just dumping the thoughts on the page, no filter — 100% of the time I discover some new aspect or detail that sparks a valuable insight. Those insights wind up driving some of the best decisions and choices I’ve made during these 1300+ days of my streak… as well as saved me from some potentially disastrous ones.”
— christopher - “The achievement badges hooked me. I wrote daily to earn badges. I signed on for monthly challenges. I wrote quickly to earn a badge. I wrote late at night and then in the early morning to earn more badges. I wrote a draft for NaNoWriMo to earn that badge. I accidentally broke a streak, cried for a few minutes, and then wrote again the next day, glad to be relieved of the pressure to maintain a streak, but still, I wrote daily. Yesterday, on the last day of 2021, I passed the 4 million words milestone. This site has changed my writing life — really, in many ways, it has changed my life!”
— writinglife67 - “Thing is, I’m primarily a writer, but I had totally lost my writing groove. I had no idea how important daily writing was to the writer until I decided to try to get back, not only into the habit, but the MINDSET of being a writer.”
— Noel
4. ACT testimonials
Sparking creative momentum, new ideas, and expression
- “What a joy this site is. I can’t imagine a morning without it, it’s helped my productivity in addition to just providing me a canvas to input whatever I need to at that moment. It can be exciting stuff, and it can be painful stuff. I’ve been writing on this website through writing 2 albums, designing 3 games, failing 3 personal relationships, deaths of pets and close friends. This humble white void has seen a lot of my darkness and a lot of my light. A lot of my life.”
— Malev - “Yesterday I reached 100,000 words. Lots of words, and some of them helped me write papers last spring; some of them helped me participate in classes and respond to reading intelligently. Some of them bolstered my spiritual journey; some called in aid for other people who were in need of prayers. Some words took me on a short fictional journey through characters I have created. Some words helped me process complex emotions during my first year of a second marriage. I may have written 100,000 words before, maybe even a million words, multiple times, but not with the discipline and focus that I got from visiting this site every morning and having it count my words, analyze their content to some extent, and reward me for my daily grind with silly animal stickers.”
— Anonymous - “Writing every day on 750words.com lets me write to my novel, publishing, sometimes four chapters in a week: twenty-thousand words, and lets me look into myself and see myself in my characters and see in other people an actual person who has hopes, dreams, fears, and a job to get done, and admire them, now, just as they are.”
— geophf - “This year I finished NaNoWriMo and I know I couldn’t have done it without this site. Because of 750words I’ve written for 128 days in a row. I’ve developed the discipline that I previously lacked. Writing a book isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”
— Kristie - “Two of the short stories I’ve written since starting 750 words have been published. On a 116 day streak now, I’ve found my writing has improved every day that I’ve spent here. I usually use it more as a mind-dump than a motivator to work on fiction, but it’s precisely that mind-dump that allows me to work on said fiction when I’m done. With all of this world’s worries left on the page, I can dive headfirst into the worlds I’m crafting in my mind, with no hesitation or distractions from stray thoughts. It really is amazing.”
— Ashleigh - “My proudest writing accomplishment in these million words is writing the toast I gave for my daughter and her new husband at their wedding six weeks ago. It is the best thing I have ever written, and it became that because I rewrote it several times, and I did that because of this site.”
— Bob - “The muse is alert — creative potential percolating in the far recesses of my mind where the cobwebs are getting swept away. I see them flutter in a ghostly breath, the awakening of inspiration after a long slumber.”
— Rocky
BONUS. A few bonus ones for an extra dose of inspiration
- “Keep going, you guys. No, seriously. Go. Type. Outline. Ramble. Do one more character sketch. Make that grocery list. Whatever it is you’re doing. Keep reaching for that next writing goal dancing just in front of you, and the next, and the next, whatever your personal reasons for showing up in this wonderful space every day. Trust that those reasons are valid and your time doing these words will be worth it. Trust that they matter. I know how hard it is some days to believe you have something worthwhile to say, or that you have the ability to say it well. Show up anyway, put your fingers on the keyboard anyway, because that spiteful little voice is full of lies, and its only purpose is to hold you back. To keep you from taking creative and personal risks. You are so much more capable than you think. So go prove it, to yourself if no one else.”
— Amy - “Writing every day can be challenging, and even anxiety-inducing for those of us who strive to be better at our craft. Keep. Going. Today, I close out my first week on the 750 Words platform with an inspiring breakthrough in story writing — and I’m sure continued diligence will be duly rewarded.”
— celrerystick - “I encourage everyone who has a love of writing — do not stop — find your voice, find your brave and put words to paper. I am SO grateful to 750 Words for helping me commit to myself. The writing community that has encouraged and shared their stories — their triumphs and set backs we ALL learn from one another and are there for one another. I am grateful for that! It does not matter if you are an ‘egg’ or challenging yourself with 50k words in month — don’t stop! The joy is in the writing!” — Chantele
If for some crazy reason you are still hungry for more testimonials, you can browse more recent ones here.
What’s next?
I’m sure you’re thinking, sure Buster, you say you don’t like marketing but here you are publishing a 20+ minute post of marketing hype! Yeah… I’m as surprised as you are! Who knew? 😬
My last post about the benefits of private journaling was over 10 years ago, though, so rest assured that very likely this is a once-in-a-decade kind of anomaly.
The thing is, I DO NOT want you to think I’m saying that 750 Words is tHe OnLy TrUe WaY to practice private journaling and writing every day. It’s obviously not. Grab a notebook and read The Artist’s Way, that’ll work too! I also love James Pennebaker’s comment (in one of those links I included above) about how you can get all the benefits of private journaling if you simply write with your finger on the air!
Try any of these methods that resonates with you!
- Write with your finger in the air!
- Dictate your words to your Notes app on your phone!
- Write in a physical journal long-hand!
- Use one of the many other journaling apps out there!
I will say that if the testimonials you read seem a bit unhinged and hyperbolic that you try out at least one of these methods — whichever one resonates most with you! It really is kind of immediately apparent once you do real free-writing without filters or any thought about other people seeing it. It can become a trusted direct line to your real self! The benefits compound over time because the OODA loop reinforces itself and as you start to understand yourself better, and gain confidence and conviction in your worth, and building a consistent habit that you can do in a couple minutes a day, and this leads to new creative insights and breakthroughs that then feed back into what you are observing as SURPRISING AND DELIGHTFUL AND CREATIVE within yourself and the loop gets more and more streamlined and gunk with each loop.
GO DO IT!
OR NOT!
EITHER WAY HAVE A NICE DAY!
