Day 1: 100 Days of Writing 1000 Words
1,030 Words
After reading Srinivas Rao’s “How Writing 1000 Words a Day Changed My Life”, I’ve decided to make an attempt at writing 1000 words for 100 days. I’m a big believer of habit and although the habits I keep aren’t always the best ones, some of the best changes in my life have come from habit changes. My desire to become more fit led me to start doing push-ups everyday, which at first were few and poorly formed. However, soon the habit formed and for the first time in my life, I’m excited about exercise. Seeing progress and not wanting to break that chain of habit is a very powerful thing.
So what will I write about? I’m not really sure yet. Srinivas mentioned in his piece that often times, he just puts fingers to the keyboard and starts writing. Many times, good things will come from just doing. I get that. I’ve experienced that with coding. Although I had been wanting to learn programing throughout my 2 years in consulting, I never quite had a reason to code, so it never stuck. After getting the contract to develop RemindMe for NYC.gov, the necessity of creating something led me to code almost daily — which gave me a ton of practice and led to a much greater understanding of code. Practicing something everyday will not guarantee success, but it will give you a much higher probability.
Ok, 236 words. This is actually quite tough.
I’ve always had an appreciation for people that can write well. Both thoughtful and creative or short and direct writing pieces take intensive thought and a natural ability to story tell. And practice, of course. Having spent the last 3.5 years in consulting and finance, I haven’t had many opportunities to fine-tune my writing. Consulting requires you to fit complex ideas onto 6-10 word sentences and finance only requires you to get words on a page. That’s not to say good writing won’t get you anywhere, but mediocre writing is all that is needed. My belief is that it is the people who are naturally great at storytelling (as well as the fundamental analysis and problem-solving) that get ahead in business. Great stories influence business leaders to make decisions and very often, investments are made on the story that wraps around the data and analysis — as we never see 100% of what’s going on in any industry or company.
Everyone grows up thinking they can do anything well if they put their minds to it. For me, analysis came easy — design, public speaking, writing did not. Taking a job in consulting was my way of addressing getting better at speaking, but in full honestly I think the experiences I’ve had as a hacker and an entrepreneur in giving demos, presentations, sales pitches, and speaking at public events have done significantly more for my speaking abilities and confidence than consulting ever did. Consulting felt unnatural — I was telling someone else’s story, a story that I didn’t fully understand or sometimes didn’t believe. Being a client service person means quite often you tell the client what he wants to hear, whether that’s something specific (like China is a good opportunity) or just confidence in an answer. But doing something against your beliefs impairs your improvement — you learn to be a much better sales person when you’re selling something you believe in. That’s what was missing from consulting, that’s what is missing from my current job in private equity.
So I’ll write.
Check back on this page, which if you’ve found it means either you’ve somehow stumbled upon it by accident (as I would never share the dismal quality writing and, let’s be honest, rambling) or I’ve made it enough days and my writing has improved to the point where I want to show off. Hopefully the writing exercise will reach 100 days. Even if it doesn’t or even if I miss a few days, I hope that at least in making an attempt to write, I’ll improve my abilities ever so slightly. If you do read this after I’ve published it on HackerNews and/or Reddit and/or Facebook at 100 days, please let me know what you think of my writing now vs. then (er…now as I’m writing). This in all honesty is an experiment, in hopes that this time, my attempts to start a blog will yield something meaningful besides a few posts and pictures that peter off after a couple weeks. I think we’ve all been there. Sitting in front of the computer, with a fresh Wordpress or Tumbler with so much optimism, picking out the perfect theme and font and name, putting in a great deal of effort crafting that first post, then posting it to our friends and seeing people comment / like. If this time indeed is different, it will have been for the fact that the quality of writing (at least for the first few days, I hope) is too poor to share. Like going to the gym for the first few times, you don’t want anyone to look. It’s ok, this is a safe place.
And hopefully I’ll keep up my other habits as well, like working out, coding, and eating healthier. I believe positive habits build on themselves. Working out leads to healthy eating. Being productive in the morning leads to being productive later in the day. This will get easier, working out certainly has. I’m not sure when I’ll experience the pleasure of sitting down, writing, and getting lost in what I want to write such that I don’t even check the online word counter once to see whether or not I’ve hit 1000 words yet (nope 933 — and I just noticed that Wordpress counts words for you down in the footer as you’re writing. That will save me a ton of time). Perhaps the greatest benefit of all will be going back to this site in many years and reading my writing from the past. I treasure being able to see my old Facebook ‘notes’ that I wrote in college, dreaming of being a philosopher, contemplating life and all of its complexities. That’s the person that I was then, this is the person that I am now. Here’s to finding my voice in 100 days.
