Lessons from writing one blog post per day

In December, I participated in an Advent of Blog challenge—writing 1 blog post every day until Christmas. Spoiler: I missed out 7 times. That’s 30% of misses.

But I didn’t fail the challenge.

In fact, I won.

Why would I want to write 24 blog posts anyway?

While scrolling Bluesky, I saw a post from Cassidy Williams that came with a #blogvent hashtag. She wanted to prove that blogging wasn’t dead. For this, she would write a blog post a day. I loved the idea.

As I recently became a freelancer, I needed to get better at building my own brand. This was a good opportunity to create content consistently: getting in the habit of balancing production and finding new clients.

Plus, I always love opportunities to build discipline, so the challenge was appealing to me. To formalize my commitment, I tweeted at Cassidy—well, skeeted lol—that I would participate in #blogvent the next day.

Of course, keeping up was hard

In the first days, I had articles ready in advance. I was on top of things. Then, I went to Kaohsiung for a week to participate in HackerHouse Taiwan, and balancing writing with a social life made things harder.

I prioritized socializing. The event lasted for a week; I had to make the most of it. Plus I also moved to Taiwan to have a change of pace in my life. Sitting in bed late at night, typing frantically on my computer, wasn’t much of a change from my previous life.

But I wasn’t at ease with missing some days. This threw me back to my fear of failure when I started writing. I realized I shouldn’t have to feel like this. No one was forcing me to do this. I needed to learn to let go.

Try this for a change

It felt wrong to beat myself up for not showing up. As I said earlier, my goal was to publish more often. And I did. I wrote 17 articles. That’s more than I usually do in an entire year.

So why was I conflicted?

I guess I needed to be clearer with myself. I needed to look at things through the correct lens. Pick the right metric. Otherwise, there would always be opportunities to look at the glass half-empty.

Reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I learned about Dave Mustaine, one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. He is the founder of Megadeth, which sold 50 million albums worldwide.

Yet, he revealed in an interview that he always saw himself as a failure. That’s because the metric he based his success on was “selling more than Metallica.” Similarly, I realized I was judging my success on the wrong criteria.

Picking the wrong metrics to judge your life on is a good way to live miserably.

This is the new, mindful me

This Advent of Blog turned out to be a great learning experience. As I wanted, I got into the habit of writing more, learning not to chase perfection, and being fine with “just shipping it.”

But the learnings also came in ways I did not expect. By not showing up every day, I practiced letting go of things. It’s fine to be imperfect, to fail, to be disappointed. I also learned to pick better metrics to evaluate my success.

Finally, writing (almost) every day was overall such a pleasant experience. It made me enjoy blogging again. So here's to even more blog posts.

Until next time,