On That Nasty Writing Challenges

I always found writing challenges off-putting. Marathons of writing every day for a month, 100 days or a year always seemed to me like something both impossible and pointless. I realised I'm reluctant to take on even a shortest, 7-day long one. Why is that?

Excuse 1: I don't have enough material to write about

Untrue. There's so many things happening every day and so many thoughts about them that there must be enough stuff to put something down. Especially I think too much about what's happening around anyway. And there's always things going down around me (and inside me).

Excuse 2: I Won't Have Time

How can that be true since I'm typing hundreds to thousands of words almost each day? What I really wanted to say is that I will not have enough time to write anything substantial. Anything impactful or important. And that's fine. That should be fine, right? Not every blog post has to change the world (duh)!

Excuse 3: It'll Be Crap

Since I'd need to write every day and I can't afford the luxury of spending too much time on it I'm afraid this writing is going to be poor. But I should be fine with that as well. I'm not working for grades here. I don't need to be brilliant or even right. It's just the small voice in the back of my head that's saying: you'll make fool of yourself and everybody won't will stop liking you.

Again this should be fine. Some already don't and I'm fine. Nothing bad happens if I post a crappy article. The problem is with the internal censor not allowing myself to publish crap. That's the real issue. It's perfectionism at it's worst.

The real reason

The fear. I'm afraid I won't make it every day. I'm afraid of putting up crap with my name on it. I'm afraid of all those days when I'll have nothing interesting or important to say.

That thing you don't want to write about - that's what you have to write about!

Said someone wise. So here you go. I've started with writing I don't want to take up such a challenge. Now let's go to action. Starting today, I'll publish a blog post every day for the next 7 days. Let's see how it goes...

Michał Nowak
