Today I learned:
1. Restraint: When you publicly commit to start a blog on Jan 1, you should apply restraint on New Year’s Eve. Some lessons are learned the hard way. Some are learned after an evening with good friends sharing too many bottles of good red wine.
2. The fear of shipping is real: One of the motivations for this project comes from Seth Godin. Within his 2011 book Linchpin, he talks a lot about the concept of shipping, and the “lizard brain” that imparts fear in us and keeps us from starting anything that might be hard or potentially lead to failure. I won’t regurgitate his ideas here – I encourage you to read his book – but suffice it to say, the lizard brain is real. This insight comes from the knot in my stomach today. The fear of publicly committing to learn just two things a day (and to diarize/blog them for at least the first 66 days straight) is real, particularly when you have never made one blog post before, and you have never kept a diary. I had a sense this would be the case going into the project and I am hoping this exercise will help teach me how to quash that same feeling whenever I need to deliver something big or new.
What’s next for this space? Check out The Two Things Project and Bio pages for more info. Any guesses where my focus will shift through the year?
two things i learned today 