The 200 words project

In this morning’s RSS feed Seth Godin’s post: https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/09/things-well-done-and-the-smartest-lt-gov-candidate-ever.html made me click on his links and I went to Rohan’s blog, and there I came upon this title: Amazon-style narratives – The 200 words project. Then I had to look up on what this ‘200 words project’ is.  Hmmm. Interesting. And how very smart. And creative.

And so, I have decided to adopt his idea. Once every week, on Monday morning, I will post my ‘200 Words Project’ post where I will ruminate on some idea which caught my interest in the current book I’m reading, or maybe (sometimes) from a blog post or podcast – in 200 words.

As I muddle along and learn, I hope you, my readers will help me with your feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s Idea #1:

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For a lot of people, including me, we have these dreams about writing, about expounding these deep thoughts on our blog and stunning everyone with our brilliance, lucidity and our wisdom. But when it comes to actually writing, all these fancy dreams peter out and challenges of

1. Actually sitting down
2. Writing
3. Thinking original stuff
4. Articulating clearly the original thought in beautiful prose
5. Writing for long durations

become so overwhelming that we don’t take even the first few steps towards our dreams of fame and wisdom and practical personal growth as thinkers and writers.

Rohan’s  ‘200 words project’ is brilliant because

1. It forces me to provide a blog post once a week. Not too many, not too sparse either.
2. I don’t need to worry about originality – the idea itself calls for me to ruminate over someone else’s original idea. So no pressure there.
3. And to help with articulating clearly, there is the inspiration for the post itself – the words in the book, the blog post / podcast to help out.
4. 200 words is mercifully short.
5. 200 words is long enough that you actually have to think to write 200 words – regurgitating can only take you so far.

“So, why is this different from the daily learning a day? This is similar to the book learning initiative in that we will focus on ideas from books rather than learnings from my experiences and observations.” – Rohan.