Should I be Writing?

Should I be writing? That is a question that I have asked myself time and time again. After I researched, listened to other people, and started writing myself, I found that the answer to my question is, yes!

By writing, I realized that I am able to retain more information, and I am also able to learn things faster or learn things that I may not have even known about myself. Writing has helped me in my work as a designer. I feel more comfortable relying on myself for copywriting. Now I am not saying that I was ever a bad writer, I just wasn’t very confident in my writing.

I challenged myself awhile back to take some time each week and just write something. It doesn’t have to be anything long, in fact, I prefer it to be short. Whatever I write also does not need to be about anything specific. Once I started doing this, I got the chance to just see how my brain works.

Writing helps me to be more self-aware. It allows me to look at myself from the perspective of someone else. That external perspective allows me to criticize myself and find both unbiased weaknesses and strengths. For instance, shortly after I started writing, I found out that I have a problem with distraction. Now, this realization might not sound very significant, but I was also able to determine what was causing my distraction and what I could do to stop it from happening.

I challenged a few friends to do the same thing shortly after I saw some benefits from writing like this. After these friends got started writing and did it a couple of times, they liked what they saw. These friends were feeling more creative and they were being more productive.

I spoke about this topic on a podcast that I am producing and co-hosting (at the time of writing this, the podcast is not currently open to the public, but we will talk about that soon). On the episode I am referencing, I sent out a challenge to any listeners to try writing like this and make it public on something like medium.com so you don’t “self-edit”. I also asked them to hashtag it with #mymidnightexchange and tag the podcast on twitter at @THEMEpodcast with a link to what they wrote for the chance to have it discussed on air, but so that we (the podcast) can see how this challenge is affecting people.

I am going to challenge you to do the same thing that I challenged the podcast listeners to do. I only have three rules for you:

• Keep it short.
• Make it about something that interests you.
• Make it public.

Now go write and learn something new about yourself!