upbeat.it

by Cesare Rocchi
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One small thing everyday

by Cesare Rocchi

Tags: challenges

Since October 19th I have read and posted a small inspirational quote every day. I didn’t even realize it until I noticed that the file I uploaded was named “31.mp3”. That marked a month. Here’s the full list on Spoken.

Why did I do it? I struggle with some kind of routines. I wanted to challenge myself. It was a lot of fun. And effort. Especially considering that I made it in spite of the following:

  • I travelled for five days, that’s why Nov 4th is missing from the list. I filled the gap later.
  • We had masons restoring the roof of our house for more than one month.
  • My father was at the hospital for four days for a little surgery
  • I had client work to do
  • I had to keep working on AppVersion and Podrover
  • Kids where sick as often as not

Lessons learned:

  • If you skip a day for whatever reason, don’t be angry. Recover quickly and get back on track.
  • There’s always an excuse, the list above includes some serious ones. Stick to your commitment anyway.
  • Make it easy. One day I recorded 20+ quotes. I knew I needed a bank of quotes for the busy days. It payed off.
  • Make it ubiquitous. 40% of the quotes were posted from my iPhone while I was on the go. I kept them on Dropbox and I uploaded them via Safari. I posted them via Buffer
  • Spoken.co is very cool. I know they are working on an iOS app. Look forward to try it out.

I feel stronger now. I feel better. I believe so much in little steps. My presentation at RWDevCon is gonna be around the topic.

I feel I can take on some new challenge. As I was writing this I have noticed it’s the beginning of the month. Perfect time for a new challenge. I am gonna write a blog post every week day, until Xmas. I’ll write mostly about what’s going on in my life these days. Topics include:

  • transitioning from client work to selling my products
  • adventures in Swift
  • adventures with hackers attacking my servers
  • adventures in marketing
  • adventures in talking to customers
  • adventures in picking which conference/podcast to sponsor

Bottom line: lots of adventures :)

Let me know on Twitter if you like me to write on a specific topic.

PS. I blame Jaimee for convincing me of the power of challenges :)