Revising My New Year’s Resolution

This post is part of a series where we’ll explore how technology can change our perspective by writing and designing novel products every week this year.

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Ten weeks ago, 2019 rang in and like everyone with a New Year's resolution, I had an ambitious plan. I wanted to write more so I set a goal to write every week about how technology can help change our perspective. I believe that writing forces us to think, which is critical today because we can affect countless lives as quickly as we can press the enter key on our keyboard. We need to consider what we are doing before we do it.

It seems only fair to reflect and apply this same critique to my New Year’s resolution. Did I ironically plunge myself into the same rat-race of doing rather than thinking? Was the whole endeavor even fruitful?

Large output

As to whether or not I achieved my goal of writing more, the answer is of course yes: I wrote every week and as a result I produced about an hour of text content thus far. For so many years I have had ideas percolating in my head — sucked in by the myth of Silicon Valley: I too can be the next Steve Jobs. Now, through this project, I am finally able to test that theory and expound on ideas rather than only hinting at them.

Ideas are a dime a dozen and writing essays forces us to scrutinize it. Unfortunately ten weeks later, I’m still not Steve Jobs. But, maybe, I’m closer to becoming Jeff Bezos. Not in monetary wealth, but rather in my aptitude to leverage the pen as a thinking device.

Writing leads to discoveries

That being said, I didn’t write for length. I wrote in the service of sharing ideas and auditing them. Thankfully, it turns out, in the process of bringing my ideas to life, it spoke back to me. Here’s an example:

In week 4, I wanted to discuss one cause for in-equal representation in the work field: those with little representation likely do not know the people who can introduce them to it. My naive reaction is to create a mailing list sharing “lesser” known careers; infrastructure cost would be minimal and it would create a wide distribution.

However, one of the most novel insights in that essay is how we can leverage techniques employed by dating apps for better career matching. Because I was using dating apps at the time of writing, my brain interwove the two experiences. I realized that both processes ask the question of how to maximize compatibility. As a result, instead of yet another mailing list, I designed a novel app that helps people find purpose, while helping companies achieve diversity, through heuristic.

Though I had the idea of introducing the breadth of career choices for a long time, it wasn’t until I was writing at my desk while “swiping right” that I discovered their commonality.

Drowning

Unsurprisingly there are trade-offs in writing more — namely doing everything less (wait, is this a feature not a bug?).

Although the last ten weeks have been some of the most productive times I’ve ever had, it was also one of the most anxious. The reality is that writing takes time. For every sentence a reader reads, I probably wrote ten. Every day I was concerned with when I could write, and what I would even write about. Writing more showed me why people don’t write.

Here are some examples:

Because I had to write all the time, I had to (ironically) read less. To help write better I bought The Elements of Style. Though it is only 100 pages, it took me almost three weeks to read it. With a deadline always looming, I always felt compelled to produce rather than to improve production value.

Similarly, writing ideas all the time means that the ideas themselves don’t get executed. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, though I had more ideas and clarity, I had less time to work on them.

The project helped me produce a lot of writing, but I never felt like I could produce anything else.

Future

Earlier I asked whether this project led me to the place that I intended to walk away from. It turns out the answer is complex. I am in the rat-race: my free time has been subjugated by the need to write. But, in needing to write, I’ve been forced to think and not “just do”.

If the goal of this project is to be more mindful of what it is we are building, then unfortunately it has failed. Every week the question I ask is “what should I write about?” rather than “what would be good to bring to the world?”. If the goal is to approach ideas with mindfulness, then I’ve succeeded. I’ve become more critical and insightful of ideas that were only a seed in the beginning. If in the future I decide to execute on some of these ideas, every minute that I took to write about it now will save me hours of doing the wrong thing.

If Silicon Valley has taught me anything, however, is that nothing is a failure. Failure is a success that needs refinement. I’m not going to stop writing, because it IS useful. But I will write less, because I also realize that “doing” is also useful.

TL;DR

2019 started with a bang. Who knew that I would have actually kept my new year resolution of writing once per week this far? In that time I’ve validated the fact that I can learn more by writing before doing. But I’ve also learned that writing takes time. Most importantly, I’ve learned that even aiming not to do things can itself trap us into doing — it will just be other things.

I’m excited about writing more, but now know that I want to do other things too. Revising a new year resolution isn’t failure, but rather proof that we’ve learned from it. The year is still early, and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

This is day one — Jeff Bezos

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Photo by Victoria Palacios on Unsplash