12 Months 12 Tags Challenge
The Challenge to Leave the Writing-Comfort-Zone and Explore Your Writing Potential
That’s How it started:
It’s been a month since I started writing on Medium regularly.
While enjoying the holiday season and waiting for the new year to arrive, I was feeling the pressure to post something amazing to end the month and the year. As expected, the pressure crippled my thinking and it was not the first time, so I decided to stop thinking about it and spent a day with one of my best friends. One thing I realized was that I need to learn more about economics, investment, and finance.
As soon as I started to wonder if I can write a few posts on Medium after learning about it, three things occurred to me:
- Someone inside my head told me that I am someone who writes exclusively about philosophy, life-lessons, self-improvement.
- The mental image of an odd-one-out post about finance on my profile appeared
- This one is really funny: the image of my followers protesting against the off-topic post.
And I gave up the idea.
But what if I am wrong? Where is the rule saying that if I have written most of my posts on one topic, it prevents me to write on other topics? How would I know the actual response to my posts on other topics if I never write them? Am I simply limiting myself to certain topics to avoid the extra effort required to write about a completely new and different topic?
Is it my safety zone or my comfort zone that I will be leaving if I write on other topics?
Also what about this:
Finally convinced that I should learn and write about any topic I wish, I wanted to take this one step forward and came up with this challenge.
The idea is pretty basic.
I will pick one topic per month that I have hardly ever written about, and want to learn about, and have considered it not to be my cup of tea.
This will be followed by enough research and reading about the topic to produce at least one blog post (obviously there is no upper limit) and the final proof: the post on Medium on that topic — with that tag.
From the top of my head: history, fiction, physics, and of course finance are the topics for me that fall into that category.
The aim is just to go out of my writing-comfort-zone and explore some basic ideas and write about what I learned.
If you have ever found yourself limited to certain topics you think you are allowed to write about and want to challenge it, please join me and let me know in the comments. The word ‘tag’ is taken from the tags we can assign to our post, and the idea is to write in the most unrelated or unexplored tags.
Update:
If you want to join me to this challenge, just add ‘12months12tags’ tag to your post :)
Please let me know if you have ideas and suggestions to make this challenge better 👊.
