Mission Accomplished

One year back, I embarked upon a mission to write 52 articles in 52 weeks and today that mission is accomplished.

Yes, I am feeling very happy about it. Completing this mission has helped me satisfy 2 of my driving forces viz., Challenge & Achievement and Respect and Awe. Coincidentally, ‘Driving Forces’ was the topic of my first article 1 year back.

I thoroughly enjoyed this journey.

This mission gave me a sense of purpose, something to look forward to every week. I was missing this in my personal life since leaving IPCL Township in 2004 where I was engaged in so many socio-cultural activities. Since then, life has revolved largely around work.

I always believed that I have good understanding about various aspects and dimensions of life. Be it work, leadership, management, personal effectiveness, people skills, I had learnt something useful everywhere. This mission gave me a chance to really compose my learnings in a transferable form.

I also got a chance to convey my messages to a larger audience, some intended and some incidental. It allowed me to provided pertinent inputs to my colleagues as per the need of the hour. Sometimes, I advised some colleagues to read a specific article when they sought my suggestions in that area. I strongly felt that if I share my experience and learnings, it might impact some one’s life positively. This was a great motivator.

Many people used to ask me how I got time to write every week. Actually, that was the easiest part. Every Saturday evening, my wife and daughter go for their dance class and I used to be alone at home. Most of the articles were written in that period. Sometimes, for some reasons, if I missed that slot, I utilized Saturday late night or Sunday early morning slots.

What helped the most was the fact that very early; I had declared that I will be writing 52 blogs in 52 weeks. It then became a prestige issue. Once declared, missing the target was no more an option. Over time, it kind of became a habit. From, Friday evening itself I started thinking about the topic and contents.

There we many friends, colleagues and seniors who regularly encouraged me by way of feedback, comments and many times, open appreciation. Some of them were open enough to express their difference of opinion also. All this made it very exciting.

There weren’t too many hurdles. The biggest one was to think of a topic on which I have enough material to write 2 - 3 pages about. Now I understand the purpose we were made to write essays / composition in school days. One requires some depth of knowledge about a topic to think, compose and communicate meaningful information and ideas.

Thinking of first 10 odd topics was easy. After that it became a challenge. Since I had to avoid specific topics or incidents related to work, religion and politics, the options became limited. Many times I would ask my wife or daughter to suggest some topic. On few occasions they did suggest but then they also ran out of ideas. Sometimes, the ideas came from some incident that happened around that day as it happened last week. Sometimes, some friends suggested specific topics related to something I wrote. Somehow I could manage to think of 52 topics.

Another challenge was not to hurt anyone’s sentiments. Most of the topics and content therein were related to my information, opinions & impressions formed from experience and learning. There was all probability that some readers will have a different opinion or impressions. I tried my best to avoid hurting any one’s sentiments but still if that happened inadvertently, I take this opportunity to apologize.

Besides posting on the blog site, facebook and linkedin, I used to share the link with all my friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances either through whatsapp or email. I must accept that I had not asked their permission before doing so. I felt guilty of intruding in to their space and a few times asked them if I should stop sending these messages. Luckily, no one asked me to stop so I considered that as permission granted.

Only 2 people had asked me not to send the link to them in the beginning itself.

Honestly speaking, I do not know how many people actually read those articles. I know many people who did since they gave feedback. The number of views as visible is blog site data also indicated that there was fair amount of interest being shown. One of the articles got 700+ views while most clocked from 400 – 500.

I am not very sure about the quality of the content and composition of these blogs. I tried to honestly share whatever I knew or thought. I would really like to get a feedback from the readers across sections. Some friends did suggest that I must someday write a book but I am not sure if I am that good. Though the idea seems exciting and interesting.

With this mission accomplished, I now have to think of some new activity. Something exciting and challenging enough that will make me think and learn more. Something that will be beneficial for me and hopefully useful to others also. Let’s see what idea do I come across.

Does it mean I will stop writing now? No. I will still write but not so regularly.