30 Lessons I Learned From Shipping 30 Atomic Essays for 30 Days

#1. Starting a new challenge is fun

A month ago, I set myself a target:

A target to ship 30 atomic essays in 30 days.

And I did it ✅

But, how did I come up with the idea of publishing 30 atomic essays for 30 days?

Well, it wasn’t my idea.

I learned the atomic essay term from Twitter. When I was scrolling on my Twitter feed, I saw a couple of similar short-form articles.

Then I followed the hashtag that all of them were using, #Ship30for30, and other people who wrote atomic essays. After a short investigation, I found the name Dickie Bush. Dickie is the creator of “Ship 30 for 30”.

Ship 30 for 30 is a writing challenge that you need to publish 30 short-form essays in 30 days — one piece a day. The goal of the challenge is to build a writing habit.

After scrolling around Twitter and reading a couple of pieces from ship 30 for 30 participants, I decided to challenge myself to write 30 atomic essays for the next 30 days.

Since I didn’t participate in the Ship 30 for 30 group, I needed to create my own rules for atomic essays. Here are the basic rules I followed during the last 30 days:

• First thing first, atomic essays are 200 to 300 words, short-form writing format.
• Atomic essays are unedited essays.
• Moreover, I pushed myself to finish them in under 30–45 mins. Although I tried to write each atomic essay in under 30 mins. I must admit that some of them took about 1-hour to complete. However, the more I write, the faster I started writing and organizing my thoughts. At some point, I easily started finishing an atomic essay in under 30 mins.
• As I saw from Twitter, everyone was sharing their posts on social media. I followed the same principle. After writing each atomic essay, I shared them on Twitter and Medium — and, sometimes on LinkedIn.
• Participants were also writing around their chosen niche. Dickie explains this as, “find 30 ways to say the same thing → so, for the 30 days, attack ‘your idea’ from 30 different angles.”
• I cannot say I strictly followed this rule. I created my atomic essays around 3 topics: creativity, writing tips, content creation.
• One last thing, each participant has their own Twitter template. Therefore, I created a template for Twitter and used the same template every single day. (If you want, you can check my atomic essays from here and here.)

So far, I explained how I came up with the idea of writing atomic essays and what an atomic essay is. Now it’s time for the why part.

I started writing atomic essays because:

• Firstly, I wanted to challenge myself and see if I can make it.
• Secondly, I wanted to use atomic essays to test my ideas. Because instead of spending 10 hours on 1 idea, I spent 10 hours on 10 ideas. This way, I saw which ideas are worth investing in. Which ideas are worth creating long-form content.
• Thirdly, writing daily helps you to find out your creator-market fit faster.
• Lastly, I wanted to establish a regular writing habit.

As I promised in the title, now, it’s time to share with you what I have learned during these 30 days by writing 30 atomic essays.

Here are the 30 lessons I learned from shipping 30 atomic essays for 30 days:

1. Starting a new challenge is fun.

Challenges make you feel alive. Challenges increase the hunger to achieve a goal. Challenges are one of the best ways to build habits. Starting a new challenge is fun.

2. Sometimes writing 250–300 words is too much.

Sometimes it was very difficult to even write one sentence. Sometimes I just couldn’t find the words to complete the essay. Sometimes I couldn’t find my flow, and writing 250 words felt like writing a 300-page book.

3. Sometimes writing 250–300 words is too few.

When I find my flow, it was very easy to write a 250-word essay.

4. Constraints are NOT the enemy.

Creativity loves constraints. Because you have to be more creative when you have fewer resources. When I have a word limit, I wrote more focused articles. This way, I learned to say more with fewer words.

5. Benefit from the tools.

Tools are the best friend. A friend you want to keep around you all the time. Here is a list of major tools I use every single day:

• Grammarly
• Capitalize My Title
• CoSchedule Headline Studio
• Hemingway App
• Lose the Very
• Canva

6. Build an idea funnel to keep track of your ideas.

When you write every day, it’s better to keep track of writing ideas. For this reason, I’m using the idea funnel to follow my writing ideas from the ideation phase to the promotion phase.

7. Always start by picturing your ideal reader.

The best way to write a piece is by picturing the ideal reader. Feeling their pain points. Understanding their questions. In this way, it’s easier to write reader-focused pieces.

8. Use simple, clear, direct language.

Using simple, clear, and straightforward language makes it easier for your audience to interpret, comprehend, and apply the knowledge you’re providing.

9. Appeal to your reader’s emotions.

We are naturally attracted to information and subjects that inspire, excite, and entertain us. Because we’re more attracted to emotion-driven content.

So, if you want to get people’s attention, you need to tap into their emotions.

10. If you want to be successful, you need to give yourself permission to create junk.

Of course, not all of your essays will be hit. Some of your attempts would be garbage. No one wants to read them; no one wants to click them.

And it’s totally OK.

But when you keep producing, finally, you’ll become good enough. Creating something, no matter how bad it is, is a practice for creating a better one.

11. Steal like an artist. Make new connections with old ideas.

As Austin Kleon wrote in his book, Steal Like an Artist, “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

The suggestion is to make new connections with old ideas. Start remixing the old ideas with your own touch, with your own voice, with your own words.

12. Always learn new things to make new connections.

Input determines output.

If you want to say something different or make new connections, you need to learn new perspectives. You need to enter new domains. There is no shortcut.

The quality of the content produced by content creators is determined by the information they consume.

13. You never know what your audience likes unless you share.

You should keep in mind that there is no successful researcher, painter, writer, director, or musician without showing their work.

Stop thinking about what, when, where, or how to share. Share your work. Just show what you’re doing.

As James Clear puts it, “The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.”

14. Never mind the interaction. Focus on the technique.

Improving your technique is much more valuable than success from single content. Because it is sustainable.

“Do not write to be liked. Write to be remembered.” — Chuck Palahniuk

15. No one cares about you or what you’re saying.

Resources are limited, and no one wants to waste their most important resource, time, on something worthless.

If you want your readers to commit themselves, their time, their money, their energy to something, they need to know what they’re going to gain from it.

16. Play according to the rules of the attention economy.

According to a study conducted by Microsoft, “average person’s attention span was 12 seconds in 2005. About 15 years later, it dropped to 8 seconds.”

Our attention span is decreasing because of the exponentially increasing amount of information produced. Since there is so much competition for our attention, we can only devote a limited amount of time to each new information.

To get people’s attention, you need to master three things:

1. Title
2. Subtitle
3. Featured Image

17. Don’t write about what you’re not comfortable with.

It’s very easy to understand whether you’re confident about the subject you’re writing from your words, tone, and way you present the article.

Hence, write about what you’re comfortable with.

18. Simplify your content for a better reading experience.

We, content writers, have a tendency to impress others with our big words, fun sentences, and some kind of spell-binding story that has never been told before in history.

There are days when I can’t even read my work because it’s overloaded with cluttered ideas.

That’s when I know I should work more on simplifying the article. Here are a few tips:

• Write as you speak
• Benefit from examples and illustrations
• Avoid jargon and complex words. Instead, use everyday words
• Write short, simple sentences and paragraphs
• Remove unnecessary words
• Use active voice and personal pronouns

19. Use simple words to say powerful things.

If you want your blog posts to stand out, be noticed, and get shared, you need to use simple words powerfully. Because an average American adult reads at a 7th-grade reading level.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that bestselling authors like Ernest Hemingway, Susan Collins, Jane Austen all wrote their work around the 5th-grade reading level.

20. Creativity is an endless journey.

Creativity is not a journey from A to B. It’s more like a loop. A loop you need to keep coming back to a new starting point after completing a project.

Every day is a new day. A blank canvas. A canvas you need to paint, draw, fill out. A canvas you need to fill one at a time.

Every day is a new starting point to create a new piece of content.

21. Creating content is not just throwing ideas around.

Idea generation is only one part of any creative process, and creativity is more than idea generation.

Keith Sawyer analyzed countless studies related to creativity and synthesized them all into one cohesive process. He found that any creative process consists of eight distinct stages:

1. Find and define the problem
2. Gather relevant knowledge
3. Gather potentially related information
4. Take time off for incubation
5. Generate a large variety of ideas
6. Combine ideas in unexpected ways
7. Select the best ideas
8. Externalize the idea

22. You might feel like you’re running out of ideas, but you won’t run out of ideas.

Sometimes it feels like you don’t have any idea left to write tomorrow.

This happens to many of us.

However, in reality, no one can ever run out of ideas.

Instead of writing randomly, build a system. A system to find new content ideas. A system to keep track of your ideas.

In this way, you’ll never run out of ideas.

23. Quality > Quantity.

We all agree that quality, in most cases, is more important than quantity.

However, creating something, no matter how bad it is, is a practice for creating a better one.

Because creativity and the ability to innovate are like muscles — the more we use them, the stronger they get.

24. You’ll start writing faster.

Writing atomic essays for 30 days made me organize my thoughts faster. It made me think faster.

Hence I become to write faster.

25. Writing is not the only part of writing.

Writing doesn’t consist only of writing.

Writing, or any type of content creation, consists of different stages:

1. Research
2. Creation
3. Promotion
4. Analysis

Therefore, it’s not enough to write outstanding pieces. As Austin Kleon says in his book Show Your Work, “It’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”

26. Recycle (repurpose) your content for different platforms.

Once you have one piece of content, repurpose it for different platforms. Use your main piece as a reference point. Recycle your content for different platforms:

• Create a Twitter thread
• Answer a question on Quora
• Take the main points and share them as a status update on LinkedIn
• …

27. Track the data. See what works and what not.

As Peter Drucker says, “You cannot manage what you cannot measure.”

In order to become better, you need to track and analyze your numbers. Look at the numbers. Understand what works and not.

Eliminate the ones that don’t work. And scale the ones that increase your numbers.

28. Scale what works. Create long-form content.

One of the biggest benefits of writing atomic essays is that you can easily test which ideas work. Which ideas worth investing in.

After analyzing the atomic essays, create long-form content from successful ones. Here are two articles I created based on following this principle:

• Before You’re Starting Content Creation, Create Your Creator-Market Fit
• Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong Content With This Method

By the way, both of them are distributed, and one of them is even published in one of the biggest publications on Medium: The Writing Cooperative.

29. Consistency is a power everyone should master.

“No single act will uncover more creative genius than forcing yourself to create consistently. Practicing your craft over and over is the only way to become decent at it.” — James Clear

You can’t become better if you wait for some inspiration. Inspiration will not come to you while you’re waiting. You need to act. Once you force yourself to do it consistently, you’ll become better at whatever you’re doing. And inspiration will visit you more frequently.

• If you want to become a better writer → you need to write every day
• If you want to become a better… → you need to practice every single freaking day.

30. You’ll have ups and downs. But you need to keep going.

Success is a process. Never forget this.

You’ll have ups and downs. But you need to keep going.

It’s crucial that you create a schedule that you can rely on. Because the best way to keep going is by working around a timetable.

The Bottom Line

These are but a few of the many lessons I learned while writing atomic essays daily.

The question is:

Does it worth writing 30 atomic essays in 30 days?

Absolutely YES!

Sometimes the writing was fun. But sometimes, it was difficult to finish 250 words. There were 1–2 posts I completed just because of the challenge. Just because of my commitment to challenge.

Now the question is:

Will I continue writing atomics essays every day?

After completing 30 atomic essays in 30 days, I decided to continue writing atomic essays — however, not every day, but every other day. Because of my other duties, it’s more logical for me to write every other they.

In short, I’ll continue writing atomic essays because writing them helped me to:

• test different content ideas with less effort
• find ideas/topics to scale up
• keep my mind sharp and organize my thoughts faster
• write faster
• establish a daily writing habit

If you don’t know how to start or want to challenge yourself to write every day, give it a shot — whether individually or with a group of people. Explore your limits. Push yourself. You’ll not regret it.