Starting December 1st, I’m gonna do a challenge of writing (or video recording) every weekday until the 20th of April (coincidentally, also the most significant date in my life, when my baby girl was miraculously “revived”).
I want to be respectful of your email inbox, thus I won’t be sending these daily posts into your inbox by default. However, you can opt-in to them if you go to the “manage subscriptions” on my publication and check the box for “100 Days of Wonder.”
Sidenote: I’ll likely link to a few of these 100-days-of-wonder-posts in the essays I write for the main publication (this one you’re reading now called Meaning-Making). Plus I’ll have a tab at the top of this publication with a list of solely the 100-day posts as well if you want to look them up.
This challenge is not only for myself but others as well.
The more, the merrier!
If you ever had the idea to write or record something yourself, please see this as an invitation to join in.
For the community aspect of the challenge, I set up a separate publication to aggregate and link to the posts everyone else is writing as part of this challenge.
A few people have already committed to joining in, so you won’t be alone! We can chat, respond to, and support each other in the comments over there.
Also, the threshold of what you have to make each weekday is really low:
100 words
or 1 minute of recording.
And if you ever miss a day, no worries; there’s no one judging you. (Well maybe yourself. 😉 But that’s one of the reasons we’re doing this challenge in the first place, right? To silence the voice in the back of our minds that says “you can’t do this.”)
You can choose whatever topic or format you want and even change it along the way.
I chose to write about what I’m wondering about and what sparks wonder in me. Hence, “100 days of wonder.”
Some ideas you could try are:
journaling,
exploring a specific topic,
poetry,
flash fiction,
mini how-to’s,
love letters,
movie reviews,
songs,
and personal stories.
As you see, anything goes, really. (But I’d recommend not overthinking it.)
It’s easy to join; just send me the URL (or RSS feed) of where you’ll post your things, and I’ll make sure to add your posts that pop up there to the 100-day Creator Challenge publication. (Btw, if you don’t have an “online home” yet, it’s super easy to make a free Substack publication like this one.)
Now, why even do this challenge?
At the end of 2019, I did a similar challenge of writing 70 days in a row (including weekends, which was a bit too much, so that’s why I chose only weekdays this time) and lifting weights every day. It was transformative, to say the least.
First, it can be introspective: a lot of what I wrote then was me exploring my inner world. I was able to put into words the way I view the world and myself, which is of such immense value, it’s hard to describe. But it allowed me to see clearly my past, present, and the direction I can go.
The second piece of value I got from it was that I had proven to myself that I actually could keep up a practice/habit (I was pretty depressed at the time, and this is one of the things that pulled me out of it).
Third, I built up a body of work that I still get value from. Some of the posts that I wrote then still bring interesting people into my view, some of which have become friends. It has also brought me (freelance) work, and it helped me to become a better wordsmith.
Fourth, and maybe most important, it has helped me to express myself and to help me create meaning in my life and in the lives of others. Seeing my words resonate with other people is such a beautiful feeling. I’m grateful for it every day.
There are probably more reasons, but each one of these is, by itself, enough reason to publish something consistently, however small. As I want to help more people benefit from this practice, I decided to do this as a public and open challenge. So anyone can join.
So here’s an explicit call to action!
Please join me in the challenge of writing, recording (or making in some other way) something small but with consistency.
Other than filling out the mini-form above, there are three other ways you can send me your publication/blog URL:
comment here at the bottom of this post,
email me (or reply to this post if it came into your inbox),
If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know, I’d love to hear them. And if you know someone else for who a challenge like this might be meaningful and fun, please share this post with them.
sent you dm on twitter!