Day 424: Monthly Challenges

I consistently have my best ideas after working out.

In the warm glow of the post-exercise endorphin high, anything feels possible. Ideas that previously seemed too scary or cumbersome appear easy and fun, as if exercising has the effect of Mario touching a gold star. For a period of time, I feel fearless running into the Koopas that I’d been long avoiding.

If you look through my monthly retrospectives for the past year, I’ve been doing the same thing again and again: I work on Browserflow, lament that I’m coding nonstop and not marketing enough, and then go right back to coding. Sure, there’s a bit of variation here and there, but it’s like the difference between penne, ziti, and rigatoni: There’s basically no difference. (Pasta lovers, come @ me.)

While showering after today’s workout, I had the idea of setting up monthly challenges this year. Monthly challenges offer a way to step outside old patterns and commit to doing something outside of my comfort zone (following my fear!). It’s short enough that it doesn’t feel like a massive undertaking but long enough for me to have explored something fairly deeply.

One of the areas I want to experiment with more this year is sharing my work publicly. I attempted to build in public using Twitter for chunks of last year, but I always ended up crawling back into my code cave. No more!!!

(To be fair, I’ve been super consistent with this journal and it’s a form of building in public, but I’ve intentionally avoided promoting it much to keep this space intimate. There’s no way to subscribe to posts here because introducing a push mechanism would make me care more about whether posts are ready for publishing, and I’d rather keep this journal a fun space where I can blab without thinking about whether something is good enough for people’s inboxes. That said, I do want to get back into writing posts that are meant to be read and shared — just not through this journal.)

In that spirit, here’s my monthly challenge for March:

March Monthly Challenge

Tweet every day.

Motivation

The goal here is to experiment with sharing stuff publicly on a regular basis.

The goal is NOT to grow my following as much as possible. In fact, thanks to Hide Likes (and another extension I haven’t published that filters notifications), I can ignore that piece entirely. I don’t care about how much engagement my tweets get or how many followers I have, nor do I want to care. I’ve learned from getting hundreds of thousands of subscribers during my video creating days that chasing those metrics is not worth it. Exposure to those metrics subtly condition you to care more about how your work is received than whether you’re sharing yourself authentically, and the latter means a lot more to me. (This is also why I don’t put analytics on this journal.)

Rules

The only rule is to post at least one tweet a day. The content doesn’t matter: it could even be a snippet plus a link to a Road to Ramen post. That said, I’m hoping that this challenge will motivate me to create interesting and useful content that I otherwise wouldn’t have made.

Similar to Road to Ramen, I expect to write about whatever comes to mind: Browserflow, coding, meditation, personal life, etc. It’ll likely be more work-focused than here since I’m trying to build in public.

Okay, let’s go!!!