Wednesday, December 08, 2021

Power of Streaks - 30 Day Challenge

Image by QuinceCreative from Pixabay.
I didn't start out with a 30 Day Challenge in mind. I just knew I wanted to start blogging again. Every day.

And so this commitment to post a short blog entry has turned into a 32 day streak. Started Nov 6 and just passed the month-long target.

That's nothing, I know. But it's helped me get into a different mindset. I used to ask myself, "Do I want to write today?" And the answer was usually no, lol.

Now I ask myself, "What do I want to write about today?" I don't stress about it, but I usually fall asleep with an idea or two in mind and then wake up ready to tackle it. 

I think this will translate to when I start writing fiction more than just occasionally. If I plan to be a full time writer, then I better write, well, full time. Daily. Massive output. So this blog thing is priming my pump, as it were.

Plus I get to experiment with content.

If you've been dropping in every now and then, you'll have noted that these aren't long posts. Maybe 300 words at the minimum, 600 or so max. And the content varies. Heh. I have a lot of interests!

I don't expect readers to visit everyday. But I figure if you like my blog, maybe you'll pop by every few days or every week or so, see what's new and say hello.

Anyway, the power of maintaining a streak turns a task into something fun, building momentum as you see the days add up. My wife, for example, just passed 2 years of daily Spanish practice on DuoLingo. Crazy.

Oh, talk about crazy. In 2019, Seth Godin posted that he'd blogged daily for 11 years! It's almost 2022, so I assume he's kept that streak up! Here are three of his insights (taken from that post)...

  • Streaks are their own reward.
  • Streaks require commitment at first, but then the commitment turns into a practice, and the practice into a habit.
  • Habits are much easier to maintain than commitments.

Plus, like many DuoLingo learners have discovered, maintaining a streak is like "gamifying" a task. Turning something that was a challenge at first into something fun and rewarding. 

Welp. That's it for today. See you tomorrow and then the day after that and hopefully the day after that! (Then you can call me the streak! wut?)


~*~
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Keep it clean and positive. (And sorry about the word verification, but the spmb*ts are out in full force!)