- alectcoughlin
#74 After writing 73 300'ish word Micro Essays, 4 things I've learned
After writing 73 Micro Essays (300'ish words in length), I can't say enough about how much I enjoy writing them. I'd encourage anyone considering it to absolutely give it a shot. Here are 4 things I've learned along the way:
1 - Important to do things that are really hard and that take unreasonable amounts of time
I'm not sure how to describe it but you have to give yourself psychological permission to put your thoughts out into the arena. It can be very uncomfortable at first because you have to face all sorts of human stuff that gets in the way of publishing. Give it a shot, you won't regret it.
2 - Feedback loops are something else
The feedback you receive is different. Yes, it can be difficult to take, it can be unnecessarily harsh etc but the pace / quality of what you receive back and how quickly you learn, can improve etc is absolutely worth overcoming the less desirable bits.
3 - This is a different kind of learning + clarity
It's outrageous how much knowledge is being shared on Twitter. While #2 above is awesome, the next level learning comes from learning more about the people that engage with you, the people they engage with, the content they publish etc and how the process creates a learning flywheel is incredible. You begin to discover the most gnarly and incredible thinkers / doers on the topics that matter the most to you. All the while, Twitter is getting smarter and smarter about the content and people you're into. Providing you with more and more knowledge. Your content diet just gets better and better.
4 - Constraints breed creativity + compression is good
Limiting the length of your Micro Essays and time boxing how much time you work on each one before publishing are critical, especially in the beginning. There will always be another edit you want to make but the most important thing you can do in the beginning is to publish consistently. Build the muscle.
As Seth Godin aka The Goat says, "Do then be".