One of my friends, Karthik Nandula, joined a challenge to write a total of 1,000,000 words. Not in one go of course, but over 1000 days. Sounds like a lot right? Anyway, The essence of the challenge is: 1000 words, for 1000 days. Pretty simple but also quite daunting at the same time.
Personally, I feel that it’s overestimated. You can’t make the excuse that you don’t have enough time since writing that much should only take about 40 minutes and you probably spend at least 2 hours a day scrolling through your phone.
The main reason that I’m doing this challenge is so that I consistently churn out content. Most of it will be on my working notes but a few interesting or noteworthy articles will be published here as well. It also fits quite well into my “grow in public” mentality. You see, a lot of people are afraid of failure and won’t reveal their work until it’s quite literally perfect. I say otherwise. By letting people get a glimpse into your process, you lean into the punch. Plus, it’s less embarrassing for someone to point out a mistake in something you’ve spent less than an hour working on as opposed to something that took weeks to prepare.
Back to the actual writing now. It’s less of a large project and more of building a habit. For one, it’ll help me figure out when and how I work best (turns out writing at 8:27pm on a whim isn’t the best of either) and I’ll have to adjust my lifestyle accordingly. Not only do I throw up more words, but I learn when the best time to throw them up is. A clear win-win.
This project is the most extreme one I’ve undertaken so far. I’m committing three (ish) years of my life to doing something that I’m not particularly good at. Oh and to make this thing a bit easier, if I write something for school, like an essay or commentary that I like, I will be using at least part of it in that day’s word vomit.
If we want to get deeper into this entire idea, we have a few questions to ask:
- Why the hell am I doing this?
- What am I going to write about?
- Am I a masochist?
The answers to that are: I don’t know, I’ll figure it out, and no. A potential reason I may be doing this challenge is to try and balance my consume:create ratio. After all, I consume an absurd amount of content and create a negligible fraction of that. Even now, after 470 words, I’m feeling drained, apprehensive, and second-guessing.
Going back to how this is a habit-building exercise, you could argue that I don’t have to be motivated to do this. At least, that’s what Ali Abdaal said. He made an excellent point about how we finish a project by taking the first step. I’ll give you an example: say I wanted to redesign the look of my website. There’s a lot to do: footers, headers, colours, typography, content boxes, seo optimisation, speed optimisation. But I can start of with something small. I can say “I’ll tweak the header for five minutes”. Chances are, I’ll forget about the five-minute limit and keep going (trust me, this has happened before). By the time I’ve realised how much time has passed, I’ve probably done a significant chunk of the work.
One of the ways I can make this entire thing easier for myself is to make it easy. Or at least easier. You see, if I have to surf a tidal wave, make some nanobots, or paint an entire continent before I can start writing (well typing), I’m just not going to do that. It’s way too much effort and frankly, this project isn’t worth it. So I should do the opposite, make it easier to write. For one, I could have my playlist ready to go and my app open so that when I wake up and go to my laptop, everything’s there.
The opposite goes for trying to stop doing something: make as much friction as possible. If you want to avoid using your phone when you’re trying to sleep, put your phone behind your TV. Or any hard to reach and inconvenient location for that matter. It may not stop you from getting up, but it will make it a lot harder for you to do so. Hopefully, hard enough that you’ll just roll over and pass out.
At this point, I’m hitting the 800 word mark so I’m inviting anyone else mad enough to do this to join me. But one condition: make it public. Not only for the reasons that I’ve already mentioned, but you’re going to be doing this for a while, might as well have something to show for it.
If there’s enough interest in this idea, and a fair amount of people go ahead and try it, it’ll be pretty useful to make a group chat where we can all talk about what we’ve written and promote ourselves. This is the point where you send me a message saying you love the idea and are going to be coming with me on the trek.
To wrap this thing off (and since it matches what I’ve just written), I might as well get you to see my other projects, namely my newsletter. I’ll see you again next time.
(PS I’ll try and make sure that each post is up for everyone to read before 7pm IST so set a reminder or alarm)