Re-learning how to write is tough. It’s akin to re-learning how to become a good athlete. Any athlete worth their salt will tell you how hard it is picking up a race again once you start walking—this is what writing is to me. My writing streak was dented by an unfamiliar fear.

It’s fascinating how a great deal of my workflow still relies on me and my teams’ effective writing. Currently, I am assuming more technical roles with my professional work. So coding, hardware development and curriculum development take up most of my time. With this, I fear my writing flame may die off with no chance to rekindle the flame until too late. So I’d rather re-learn sooner. Now.

For 2020, I decided to be more aggressive in pursuing my year’s goals. I discovered that how often I re-wrote them really impacted how I worked toward them. I have an accountability partner, and we review those goals every month. One of my goals this year was: “practise more religion” by going to church more often. I learnt that my goals were clearer when I rewrote them. While I haven’t achieved attending church more often, I learnt that I am more critical of religion as a function of church. So I rather practise religion personally. Every time I’ve had to re-write (redefine) each of my goals, the more focused I became in exploring the ‘how’s of achieving them. The more I write the more I’m inclined to focus on my goals. This would be a plausible finding to report here.

I’ll be publicly writing about some of my sentimental personal projects, lessons, advice and essays. I’ll be sharing them with the hope of sharing my excitement with this site’s readers. Over time, I will naturally disagree with a decent chunk of what I write about. It’s the kind of growth I aspire to. I look forward to sharing more of my personal and professional lessons to inspire more work just anywhere in the world. I intentionally didn’t overdo this site’s SEO. As a result, you will have probably landed here organically/on your own. That is good-enough incentive for me to compound my writing. That way, I’m solely responsible for my learning curve. Here, I only have my high expectations to meet, not anyone’s.

I hope to leverage this snowball effect to develop my writing to more long-form content. i.e. Essays. In today’s era, comprehension and succinctness is a superpower. Especially with the abundance of short form content and the infamous TL;DR. I’m still learning. If anything, I don’t want to write persuasively. I want to write usefully.

While myself and my opinion pieces have been published on established and well-read media houses like CNN, Forbes, HuffPost and Fast Company, I’m excited about writing in my own space. Here, my biggest undoing is not hitting ‘publish’. Even better: I set my own expectations. Fun fact: No respectable media house will give an audience to your pet-project. However, I am writing to overcome that unfamiliar fear. A fear of me. I still expect a certain degree of fear as I’m writing to learn. That inherent fear is a motivator.

As at writing this, I am 22. At 40 I hope to look back at this piece and beam with a smile. Because the long-term is underrated.

Writing this first piece was hard. In hind-sight, I liked that it made me feel uncomfortable—this what learning should feel like.

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*Appreciation to my *editor for crossing t’s and dotting i’s.*

*editor preferred to stay anonymous.