Halfway into 🚢 Ship 30 for 30, I have learned these three essential principles

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Write and publish each day.

Practice is probably the most critical key to improving at anything, in theory.

In practice, though (see what I did?), building habits is what matters.

The only way to build a daily writing habit is to start writing one day. Then do it again, the next, the next, and the following. Progressively you become a person who writes. It is as simple as that.

It is good to ease in progressively, to establish a daily habit, which leads us straight to the second principle.

Write short pieces.

In 🚢 Ship 30 for 30, we agree to limit our essays to 300 words, so we call them Atomic Essays.

The limit is beneficial on several levels.

• It doesn’t take long to write 300 words, which makes the exercise attainable and helps build the habit.
• It forces you to distill an idea into its essential components and remain focused.
• It enables experimentation to try different formats, approaches, and styles to see what resonates with your audience, which leads to the last of the three principles.

Make noise, listen for signals.

You are writing online to reach an audience.

As you begin, you don’t know which of the ideas you want to share will resonate with your future audience. You don’t know which tone to adopt or which perspective. Are they going to be fascinated by your expertise or identify with you when you describe your current journey?

When writing online, you can answer these and many other questions by gathering data.

Writing short pieces and writing daily both help in this analytical process: by writing often, you accumulate more data, and by writing short essays, you reduce the number of variables. Both contribute to making the results significant.

Longer form content will birth out of multiple atomic essays eventually.