During the month of January, I have participated in the Ultimate Blog Challenge. The idea is to commit to writing a blog entry every day, thereby building your writing and execution muscles, while building more of a following. And you know what, it did exactly that!
A friend runs this challenge quarterly, and I kept thinking that maybe I’d try it sometime. So I started in early 2025, did a few postings, got busy, and didn’t get back to it.
Then in October, I decided to commit to it. I had a backlog of items from the Influential Leadership Tips series Dave Miller and I collaborated on that I could use as subjects, and that sustained me throughout the month.
So for January’s challenge, I started out thinking that if I got stuck for ideas, I could just continue with that series. But you know what happened?
- I started getting inspired.
- I started listening to Tools of Titans, giving me access to the thinking of many different people.
- I listened to part of an interview that talked about unlocking creativity, and what he said made sense to me.
- A week or so ago, I dusted off the RocketBook that I had put aside long ago, and put it by the side of my bed so I could capture ideas at night rather than having them rattling around in my brain, interfering with my sleep.
- I found I was really enjoying myself doing the blogging.
- I felt good for sticking to my commitment to the challenge.
As things now stand, I have a list of several dozen ideas I haven’t even gotten to, with at least one or two new ones popping up almost every day. Are they all great ideas? No. But they are all interesting to me, which is the key.
I think before I was blocked a little bit by looking at things to write from the perspective of first picking a topic area on which I wanted to write, and then figuring out what to write about it.
Now it’s the reverse. I come across a quote, or hear a song lyric, or something just strikes me as interesting, and I put it on the list, perhaps with a couple of notes regarding what about it grabbed my attention. I can flesh out the idea into a full blog post, LinkedIn posting, or Career Tips article later on.
Does this mean I’m going to continue to make blog posts every day, now that the latest quarterly challenge is ending?
Probably not.
But it does mean that I will continue posting on a regular basis – maybe 2 or 3 times a week. And I’ll probably go back into daily mode for the next Ultimate Blog challenge!
So is there an area in which you need to build your inspiration and execution muscles? What can you do about it?
I too am so happy that I participated in the Ultimate Blogging Challenge this month. I actually didn’t miss a day. It’s not often that I can say that. But this month, yes, that was the case. My goal is to post blog posts twice a week and then return to UBC in April.
It was a real pleasure to read your blog posts and I look forward to seeing more from you in April!
Thanks, Alice – I look forward to participating with you next time as well!
I like the way you framed inspiration as something we notice and gather, not chase. Sometimes paying attention is what brings it back.
Yes. I found that when I started my practice, and was ready to post something to my alumni network about it, the perfect email came through that let me make my posting a response to someone else’s rant.
I’m sure there had been other such opportunities, but until I was ready and ‘tuned’, I didn’t notice.