Exactly 90 days ago I decided to challenge myself to write the book I have been thinking about for a long time. And because I know that I need a way to push myself forward I decided to try to write, edit and publish it in 90 days. After I made the decision, I immediately wrote a blog post about it and posted it to Facebook and Linkedin. I also started to invite people to the release party on November 26 (today). Yesterday the books arrived, and today I celebrated with friends and family that my book was published and is available for anyone to buy.
The idea of the 90-day challenge came from a friend who had decided to write and record 30 songs in 30 days. I knew I had no chance of recording songs, but some part of the challenge still resonated with me. The challenge I set for myself was to write fiction daily for 90 days and publish it on a blog. I felt I got better at writing and to produce text faster during that challenge, and it got me thinking of what else I wanted to learn. My 90-day drawing challenge was then born. I tried a lot of different drawing styles and based on some different books, I drew and posted something daily here. I then tried to work out daily for 90 days, but I didn’t manage and changed the goal to run my first half-marathon, which I did on October 1. It was a lot of fun, and while I was training for that race, I started to think about what my next challenge could be. Instead of setting the goal to just do something daily, I liked the idea to work towards something on a daily basis instead.
The idea of writing a book popped into my mind and was rejected a few times. I then sat down and thought: is it be possible to write a book in 90 days? Suddenly it hit me, of course, it is possible. If I don’t define the scope of the book, instead I will write a book that contains what I have time to write and edit within 90 days. This Agile mindset is what I help companies implement all the time. I think that now is the time to implement it in the book-writing world as well:
- You either keep the scope or deadline fixed, you can’t keep both fixed unless you want to throw a large amount of money and resources on the problem (which I didn’t).
- Get feedback early and often: It wouldn’t have been possible without the test readers who commented and corrected what I wrote along the way. Without that feedback, the book would not have been this good.
- Make it visual: it was a lot of fun drawing all the pictures in the book to help explain all the concept better and to make it more fun to read.
It has been such a fun journey, and it does not stop here. Now the book is released, and I’m hoping for a lot of comments and questions based on it. I am so curious about what people will take with them from the book. Next week I will launch another 90-day challenge connected to this, I have not managed to define it yet fully, but I’m working on it.
Marcus Degerman 