Do something different to get different results… Great idea
On writing
During my application process to business schools, I realized my writing quality had decreased since my college days. In college, I would crank out papers almost mindlessly and overtime I became efficient in making bloated papers focused on pages than quality. It wasn’t until I took an introduction to geopolitics in my senior year that I worked more on concise writing. We would create memo-like one pagers on our readings which meant I had to summarize forty or fifty pages in one page. For the first time, I had to really focus on main points and leave out irrelevant material. I wish I had more experience in college writing this way.
I feel like I am slowly losing my ability to write in a meaningful way.Two years out of college and working in a setting where most of my writing is emails or in less than 140 characters,I want to get back to the place where I write often and even get better. Here are a couple of things I plan on doing to improve my writing:
Practice
I will write more. By writing in my journal and on here more often, I hope to gain some confidence and get back to where I was at the end of my college career.
Read
I will reading more fictional books. I reading a lot of informational texts but I need to branch out to the fictional book space to practice identifying style and tone.
Edit
I will take opportunities to help others edit their writing. Practice makes better but helping others practice helps on a whole other level.
I hope to take my writing to the next level and to do that, I have to become a student of words, structures, tone and messaging. Writing, reading and editing more will definitely help me become a great writer.
CU
Picture of the week: Hello world?
""Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude." Colin Powell
Seth Green’s observation on my favorite quote:
Seth: so your gchat quote….I’ve actually been thinking about a variant of this recently. Because I took the GREs and I’m reminded of when i took the SATs, and how in my HS, excellence was just the norm. And excellence begets excellence, because belief, faith, really matters! For instance, a lot of people I knew got an 800 on the SAT verbal. I think once a few people did, and people knew it, other people not only started shooting higher, but also starting believing that it could happen. It also seems true with sports teams. For whatever reasons, a few schools routinely turn good to very good high school recruits into stars on the track, because when you’re training with people who can break 4 in the mile, you start to believe it’s possible for you too. One of the challenges of my work these past two years is that excellence has NOT been the norm. in City Year, compliance and “do-no-harm” were the standards and when I was doing a good but not great job as a corps member, someone who had extremely good rapport with the kids but who needed to work on controlling my temper and also not letting everything bring me down, there was no one there to coach me on it, because my performance was so above the norm that resources had to go elsewhere.
The situation was even more extreme in Thailand, where the expectations were zero. And that was extremely frustrating. Self-motivation can only go so far! A norm of excellence drags everyone up. Creating that, cultivating that, SUSTAINING that – these are some of the critical challenges facing any organization. If you can figure out how to do it, let me know.
Enjoy Work.”
– Seth Green