What have I learned?

How well I write, is not the most important thing. In the beginning, I anguished about style, form, storytelling, etc. People get engaged with different things, and it is difficult to predict. My articles with the most engagement haven’t been the ones that I researched the most, or that I edited over and over again. They were the ones that I wrote straight from emotion.

I can commit to do something every day. The way to live up to the commitment, is every day. The only thing that matters, is “one more day”.

To celebrate, I will be taking some time off, not because I am going to just sit and savor the accomplishment, but because every once in a while, things have to re-evaluated to be able to produce quality work, so for the next couple of weeks, I will use one of the trusted tactics television networks have got us used to. I’ll be doing re-runs. Hope you enjoy them as well!

Now, maybe, the rest of us we may just be doing it wrong altogether. Think about it, most of the time one of our left hand is just sitting on the keyboard while the other one is doing most of the work, especially if you are like me and there are a lot of Backspace hits. I am also not the first one to think about this, as one-handed keyboards are quite a thing in the gaming world.

This made me think, What type of technology, originally created for special needs could we use for our advantage? It happens to be that there are plenty of examples of assistive technology turning into everyday products, including the Segway, the Speech to text on your phone, and Siri’s text-to-speech, among them.

Technology doesn’t care what you created it for, so we might as well give it try!

I owe you a big piece of my gratitude. Without the few who have liked and commented my posts, I may have never gotten here.

It has been a lot of hard work, and even more of that unrelenting determination to keep doing it. I tell you, more than once I have thought “today? do we really have to do it today?”, but we got here!

When I started out 20 weeks ago, 100 articles seemed very far into the future, and as much as it is a cliché, the steady effort of putting out “just one more” article, takes us from one, to 10x, and even better, to 100x. That’s TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.

Now the first question is, Was it worth it?

Absolutely yes. I may not be the best writer ever (yet), but I created a discipline and a habit. A positive one I would argue, of sharing my thoughts with you, and with anybody who decides to come back to this digital trail. On sharing my thoughts, yes, I know, they can be quite random, but they are just things that reveal themselves to me and that I think are worth learning from. Then, amidst the chaos, I try to organize them in one of these five categories that make up the name of the newsletter: Purpose, Process, Innovation, Leverage and Leadership.

And, the second question is What now?

I am going to give you a partial answer. It is “more of the same”. Not very exciting but, for now, as we cross this door and until further notice, I am going to continue writing.

I said it is a partial answer. That’s because it is one that will not be completed until later, because this is a journey that I am figuring out as I travel through it.

Part of it, is that cliché I mentioned before: that steady effort of putting out “just one more” article, that took us from one, to 100x; will not get us to 1000x; and that is yet another cliché: “what took us here, will not take us there”.