I started many ambitions that ended up nowhere. So far, my daily project “A Doooodle A Day” project has been one of the few things I can proudly say that I succeed in doing with persistence.
If you hope to do personal activities with persistence, or if you are doing some routine but need to stay pumped. Here are my four secrets to help you:
1. Have a clear goal in your mind — What is it something that you have been wanting to achieve?
After I transitioned from computer engineering to design, I've always heard people talking about using storytelling to pitch ideas to clients, in design process, and communicating with teams. I wanted to become a good storyteller. This was probably the original motive that eventually led me to this project.
2. Explore your options and go with the one that works
I explored a few options to practice storytelling. I tried writing a few paragraphs and managed to do it TWO days in a row before gave it up. It’s simply too hard for me — I didn't know what to write and I just didn't have the desire to write in English every day — I don’t even do much writing in Chinese! I knew the importance of doing this project, but at the same time felt defeated and sick of it.
After that, I took a loooong break until few months later, another idea struck me — how about doing a combination of doodling and writing? I immediately started this experiment. I even gave it a name: "A Doooodle A Day”. It turned out it was one of the best ideas I've had in my life.
3. Do it at a proper pace, do not burn yourself up
When you start a project, it's very tempting to go “all in” for it — put in as much effort as you can and set a bar that’s too high. I knew from past experience that, if I take this project too serious and stress myself out, I would quickly burn up and quit. Therefore, I gave myself a 30-day trial, so that I knew it was ok if I can’t make it to 30 days. I'm also very flexible about the project workload.
At the beginning of the project, what’s most important is to keep it going, I was satisfied as long as I did it for that day.
4. Make adjustments, give yourself some challenges
Starting out, I mostly just captured interesting things in life. After a while, I felt like this was not exactly how I wanted to practice my storytelling skills. Therefore, I decided to write about other topics, like designs, work, tech, even book notes. It’s more challenging but also much more interesting.
These are the four secrets that have motivated me to do this project for more than a year.