I wrote 365 blog posts in 365 days. My thoughts:

When things got hard, I pulled up a blank Google doc. When depressed or frustrated, I used writing to (1) get it out of my system and (2) reason through solutions.

Not only did writing solve personal issues, but business ones too. In the last year, I’ve doubled revenue and tripled web traffic. This is not luck! It’s from writing (example).

Would I have figured these things out on my own? Yes, but slower. By writing, I was able to think and move faster. Probably 2-3x faster.

Some people are “talkers”. They’re innately smooth and charismatic. I’m not one of those people. But I’d like to be better.

Writing helps. 

In real-life situations, I found myself mentally referencing back to my writing. My blog posts were like nodes in my brain, helping me express myself better.

Now, writing feels more like an extension of my body. Like writing code, or proficiency in Excel.

Compared to a year ago, I write better, faster, and with more confidence.

This has translated to other domains: emails, texts, tweets, etc. 

Yesterday, my friend told me I should write an important email instead of him: “because I’m the better writer”. That felt good.

Throughout the year, I dug deeper into topics. I peeled back the onion more and more.

I shared some things I thought I never would. But pulling these out led to my best writing, and my biggest progress IRL.

Being vulnerable is essential to great writing, because it’s accessing your true feelings. Whenever I do this correctly, I get emails and DMs where people say “Damn I can really relate to this”.

If I miss a day of writing, I have to donate $20. I knew I needed this accountability to really get better.

Two things: 

(1) the thought of losing money got me to write every day

(2) doing it in public forced me to polish and refine my writing

This forced over a thousand hours of (often painful) writing and re-writing. That’s what really pushed me this year.

Nobody read my daily blog for months. Now it has 1,000 daily readers!