How I Achieved My Goal Of Writing One Story A Week In 2016
My 2016 Medium Compendium
I began 2016 with a few resolutions with one of them being to write more. Specifically, write one story a week revolving around detailed information about the subject I immersed myself with every single day: entrepreneurship. By setting a goal, I’ve been able to choose actions each day to support this goal. Week by week, the choices and decisions I needed to make became a lot clearer and often driven by the creative powers of my subconscious. I wasn’t entirely keeping track of my progress. But yesterday, I received a notification from Medium that I had, in fact, reached my goal. I published 52 stories in 2016. Nearly one story a week.
After a while I started losing track and began to run on what felt like auto pilot. Heidi Halvorson, author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It and 9 Things Successful People Do Differently, uses the analogy of driving home to explain how to actually stick to your resolutions. Halvorson, in an HBR article, states:
A lot of people have had this experience that you get into the car and you’re preoccupied at the end of a long day by things you’ve been thinking about at work. And so you get into the car, and the next thing you know, you’re home. And you have no memory of making all the turns and stopping at stop lights and all of the things that you had to do in order to get home. But your brain knew that your goal was to get home, and so it took you there. And it made a bunch of choices along the way in order to facilitate that.
I didn’t expect to be among the top 10% of readers and writers on Medium this year or having almost 11,000 people read my stories. This certainly wasn’t easy and there were days I just didn’t want to type. However, explicitly telling myself what I wanted to achieve helped my brain make better choices everyday whether I was aware of it or not. The more I did it, the more automatic it became. Imagine how successful people would be if they applied this strategy to other areas of life.
Also, I didn’t expect to realize so many other benefits from setting my goal. I fell in love with reading! I spent 4,179 minutes reading on Medium equating to 1,550 stories by 844 different authors. I can’t help but think that these stories helped influence my writing throughout the year.
I’m no James Altucher, Mark Suster or Benjamin P. Hardy, but I’ve been able to better understand my content creation by digging further into the analytics. Below are other notable highlights from my year in review on Medium:
As the year’s coming to a close, I can’t wait to set new goals for 2017!
Like this story? Click the heart below. It helps others see the story. Thanks!
