Ship It Daily Goal

I mapped out Zig Ziglar’s seven steps to set a personal goal that made me uncomfortable. I decided this would be to publish each day of the week a ‘Ship It’ post. This is a challenge to become more courageous sharing my work publicly and compressing it down to less than 400 words. I consume and journal every day, but I am hesitant to share an equivalent amount. I want to be a persistent and consistent creator.

1. The Goal

Get in the habit of sharing more openly by publishing 1 compressed idea, less than 400 words every weekday, on my website beginning on July 23rd.

2. The benefits – what is in it for me?

• Build courage with learning in public by sharing and collecting evidence for myself as a writer

• Become a more compressed writer

• Be a model for those around me to create habits of sharing more

• Be more clear on my thoughts through writing more

• Learn about different topics by leveraging others’ ideas

• Forcing function to experiment and prioritize what I am most interested in publicly

• Building a vehicle that can level the playing field of my consumption. Currently, in my life, input is greater than output. Ideally I want to have input = output. I want to share ideas to create space for new ideas.

3. The obstacles to overcome

• Being away from social media to think

• Fear of unoriginality by copying ideas (even though Austin Kleon wrote that all artists must steal)

• Fear of failure if I miss a day while feeling uninspired

• The indecisiveness of which idea to choose and create on

• Make space in my morning to write and then post every week-night

• Not letting lack of research prevent publishing

4. The skills and knowledge required

• Ruthless prioritization and commitment each day

• Have an editing routine before I publish

• Creating a system to plan ahead if I cannot write on a weekday to ship on my phone when without my laptop

• Distribution channel to my Medium and Twitter account to sharing the ideas and gain engagement

5. Who you will work with?

• My weekly letter from a learn-it-all newsletter subscribers after I share the five ideas in each of my weekly newsletter and poll which one they most like

• I will share my website on my Twitter feed of where I will post these ideas

• Previous classmates who will provide feedback on ideas to double down on

• I will ask for support from my family and friends

6. Develop a Plan of Action

1. Continue my journaling habit each morning

2. Transfer my most insightful idea to my second brain (personal knowledge management system)

3. Write for 30 minutes about this idea by adding more notes to it (Be sure to have a writing environment carved out with warm beverage, writing desk, Airpods ready)

4. Compressing it down to less than 300 words

5. Edit in a Google Doc on my phone while walking

6. Post daily after dinner

7. Share all five ideas each week in my weekly newsletter

8. Gather feedback and build more on ideas to write longer-form articles to add to my portfolio

7. Deadline
Pursue experiment each week and evaluate whether changes need to be made.

Update: I will do this for 100 days which leaves me with a week off before the end of 2020.