“Let us assume you have a thousand followers” — Day 2/1000
A long time ago, in a school a friend of mine told me a joke.
Let there be a prestigious university with several illustrious professors of varying fields. The dean of this venerable institutions finds to his utter dismay that the question papers of tomorrow’s final exam have been locked in his safe and he has forgotten the password. He decides to call upon the counsel of the three professors who are each celebrated in their fields, an engineering professor, a psychology professor and finally the physics professor.
The engineering professor looks over the safe and does his measurements and declares that the kind of tools one would use to break open the safe and how the safe can be pried open using a lever.
The Psychology professor works on the dean himself using psychoanalytic techniques to have the code materialize and encourages the dean to share about his life.
The Physics professor calmly walks forward, looks at the safe a few times, brings out a blackboard and draws a square.
He then says “ let us assume the safe is open”
Note to self: next time put the joke at the end of the blog.
Hey, you are on medium, awesome so that means you might have some inclinations to right as well right? Excellent.
I have been here for some time trying to do the same but alas I have been all over the place, hemming and hawing at the fact that I don’t got any followers nor do I have much of a reading community to speak of.
But then again of course I am probably too early in this and with patience and tenacity I would reach the top.
Just like you.
I’ve been thinking, of various ways I can use to get to that coveted position. I dream of having a 1000 people reading my blog and leaving comments of encouragement and telling me how handsome I am. And when I come back to reality I see the dismal state of my medium participation and the essays that I write.
I had almost given up on my promise to post on medium everyday for 1000 days. (I seem to like the number 1000 a lot)
However recently I am getting back at it and I am building an empowering context towards tackling this.
I could see that I was approaching this in a way that was not really working for me.
I needed to get deeper, like ontology level deeper.
To ask myself when I sit down and write this blog, who is that person writing it?
What person would need to be writing such that it would fulfil the goals that I pursued and how do I emulate that person.
When asking these questions, it hit me that If I was someone on medium and if I was reading my own work as a third person, I may not have enjoyed my writing.
So that when it hit me, I am being desperate for validation for the medium community and I had told myself, without much thinking, that once I have a thousand followers or so then I could actually say what I want to say.
I realized that lie that I was telling myself.
I was not here to write everyday to be validated, I am here to discover.
I am here to become a powerful essayist that can mobilize the power of the English language.
To become an unstoppable force of nature.
And of course I would have to learn how to write clearly for that and the best way to do it is to practice.
So my message to you dear reader is that regardless of what task you are on right now, consider that it’s been awhile, you are not learning something much less remembering how these things are done.
The magic was in you all along, it’s just that you got to reach that tipping point, the critical mass that leads to spontaneous combustion that unleashes your creativity out into the world.
Like the above physicist, I want you to go ahead and blog as if already have a 1000 followers intently reading what you write.
How would that make you feel having a 1000 followers? Who would you be being? What would they be like?
Ask yourself these questions and go forward.
See what happens to you and your writing.
And write for 1000 consecutive days.
