Thanks to my friend's recent awesome book recommendation on willpower, I am kicking this off as a celebration gift to myself for making a new change (woo hoo!).
One of my childhood dreams was being a journalist (I'm pretty sure at some point when you were little, your head were filled with fantasies of who-to-be-when-I-grow-up). Now I am so lucky that I do what I love to earn a decent living (being a designer was also one of my dreams. It's just being a UX designer wasn't at all what I ever expected), I realize being a creative professional requires me to do something on a regular basis to keep my fountain of creative juices alive.
I love music and always admire those who can compose beautiful pieces of music and songs. I am a natural when it comes to using my body to interpret what music projects in me - dancing. But I can't never do the magic those composers have - sew those melody and lyrics seamlessly to tell the soul-touching stories. Doing design for a living, however, often in times my head is full of sparks and ideas, which if I don't jot down timely, then I may forget all about in just a blink of eyes.
Especially as getting older, I start to forget easier and easier - or may I confess I start to be afraid of forgetting - and what's ironically funny is that the emotional damage some toxic people caused and shity things happened to me have intention to leave tracks in my memory longer than those "bingo!" light bulb moments and meaningful discoveries and inspirations. However the latter one is what's worth keeping. I tweet occasionally for the sake of utilizing social media, but the 140-character is merely scattered chips of hey-may-I-have-2-seconds-of-your-attention. I need to do something about this before it's too late. No more procrastinating. No more excuses.
The solution is writing.
A while ago I came across Julie Zhuo's Medium post on writing. How cool is that likewise her fear of forgetting lead her to list writing as her 2013 New Year's Resolution. It's been three quarters in 2014, and shame on me "write about UX to train my design thinking" is one thing I haven't started yet. I don't care if you take this as "great minds think alike", or "steal like an artist", or you are totally cool with people just coincidentally have the same thoughts about what to do in life (it happens to all of us, everywhere, all the time), I am going to write:
- Write about lessons learned in the course of life, through my Tango lens;
- Write about what I do, inside and outside of my job, the joy and the pain of fighting the good fight in design in all forms;
- Write about observations through interacting with people;
- Write to understand myself, others, and the surroundings;
- Write to learn how to write to practice my belief of "learning by doing";
- Write with accountability and honesty, fearlessly;
- Write at least once every two weeks, more often is better;
- Write to preserve and remember why I write.
My writing starts now. Let's see where it takes me.