Why I Started My 30-in-30 Writing Challenge finally

I’ve seen a few people do the 30 in 30 writing challenge. Off my mind, I can remember that Hiten Shah and my close friend, Tomas Laurinavicius, have done the challenge. The challenge is to write a blog post everyday for 30 days.

Recently, I have also started the challenge and I’m into my 11th day of the challenge today. I have been wanting to do the challenge for a long time, to satisfy my desire to write more and improve my writing. But I have never gotten round to do it. I never had the habit of writing much online. I’ve tried and failed. So I have been quite surprised that I’m not just writing everyday for the past 10 days but also writing close to almost a 1000 words for each post. (My original plan was to write only 500 words a day.) I decided to dig deeper into this. After researching online, I found an explanation.

The Fogg Behaviour Model

Dr BJ Fogg explains that there are 3 elements that have to converge at the same time for a behaviour to take place — Motivation, Ability and Trigger. When a behaviour does not occur, it is because at least one of them is missing.

Now, let’s go through them one by one.

Motivation

The first factor is having the motivation. The Fogg Behaviour Model highlights 3 core motivators: Sensation (pleasure/pain), Anticipation (hope/fear), and Belonging (acceptance/rejection). They are a good way to explain motivation. However, in my case, I would like to look at motivation in terms of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

In his book, Psychology of Motivation, Lois Brown describes extrinsic motivation as “our tendency to perform activities for known external rewards, whether they be tangible (e.g., money) or psychological (e.g., praise) in nature.”. On the other hand, he refers to intrinsic motivation as “the reason why we perform certain activities for inherent satisfaction or pleasure; you might say performing one of these activities in reinforcing in-and-of itself.”

For my situation, I feel that my intrinsic motivation for the challenge outweighed any extrinsic motivation. I’m not paid to do the challenge and I do not get any financial rewards for completing it. The case of a psychological reward in the form of praise (or recommendations on Medium) isn’t very strong as this is the first time I’m writing so much online, so I wasn’t expect much of those.

Intrinsic Motivation

In his TED talk video, Dan Pink explained that there are 3 main factors that drive individuals, from within themselves, to work hard.

Autonomy: “the urge to direct our own lives”
Mastery: “the desire to get better and better at something that matters”
Purpose: “the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves”

The factors apply to my situation.

Autonomy: I wasn’t force to do the challenge. In fact, no one asked me to the challenge. I took it up myself.
Mastery: I wanted to get better at writing and articulating myself. The skill of writing matters to me because I want to be able to think and express myself better, which I feel writing would help. Also, I hope that it can help to feed me someday.
Purpose: Apart from improving myself, I hope that sharing my stories would inspire and help others who are a few steps behind me, like those who are ahead of me have been doing.

When looking at Hiten and Tomas, I realised that the factors could be applied to their situations too.

Autonomy: While Hiten was challenged by his friend and mentor, he had the freedom to accept or reject it. Tomas took up the challenge himself after reflecting on his achievements.
Mastery: Hiten had “a constant desire to write more” while Tomas seemed to want to get better at accomplishing his goals.
Purpose: Hiten tries to write blog posts that are really valuable to others and Tomas’s “mission is to inspire and be inspired”.

If we were to use Dr BJ Fogg’s model to look at motivation, it would most likely be the pleasure (sensation) and hope (anticipation) from writing that motivated me to start the writing challenge. The core motivator of belonging would not apply here as I would not be social accepted or rejected by doing or not doing the challenge. Motivation? Check!

Ability

The second factor is the ability to take the action. Without the ability to take an action, we naturally can’t do it. The level of ability matters too. The higher my ability to write, the more likely I would start writing, provided that I have the motivation and there’s a trigger. I believe that ability here does not only refer to my writing skills but also other conditions such as environment and convenience. For me, I just started my 5-week Easter break with no plans at all so it was great timing. I have lots of time to spend on writing. Also, using Medium made it a lot easier for me to write because of its user interface and design. There’s few things on the website that would distract me while I write on Medium and I do not have to bother about formatting. That’s why I have been writing on Medium and reposting it here. For Hiten and Tomas, it would be hard to assess their situations from their blog posts. Nevertheless, I don’t doubt that they have great writing skills because of their background. Hiten is a long time entrepreneur and startup advisor while Tomas has been blogging for more than 7 years. Ability? Check!

Trigger

The third factor is trigger. Fogg’s Behaviour Model explains that without a trigger, a target behaviour would not happen. For this, I also went back to what I was taught in Physics — Newton’s First Law of Motion, or sometimes referred to as the Law of Inertia:

When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force.

In simpler terms, it means that an object that is stationary would remain stationary and an object in motion would remain in motion at the same speed and direction, unless there is an external factor acting on it. Extrinsic motivation like financial incentive could be an external change-inducing force (or trigger) since by definition, it is something from the outside. However, for my case, the effect of extrinsic motivation was not strong enough to induce the change in my behaviour (ie. start the challenge). I feel that my trigger was a spark, one of the 3 types of trigger in the Fogg’s Behaviour Model.

The spark came from the application rejection from Buffer. Along with the feedforward (feedback) I received, it triggered a strong desire in me to improve my writing skills. For Hiten, I reckon that his friend and mentor’s challenge was probably a spark for him to take up the challenge too. For Tomas, his trigger might be either a signal or a spark. His reflection on his achievement might have signaled or sparked him to start the challenge. Trigger? Check!

Behaviour

As mentioned earlier, if either of the elements were missing, the behaviour would have likely not taken place. If I didn’t have the motivation, neither the time and ease to write nor spark from rejection nor both could have made me start the challenge. If I didn’t have the ability to write, having the motivation and the rejection would not have changed me too. If I didn’t have the spark from the rejection, having the motivation and the perfect conditions for writing would not have made me start the challenge too. And that’s probably why I didn’t start it in the past, despite having the time. (Everything happens for a reason.) To sum up, I started the 30-in-30 challenge because all the 3 elements — Motivation, Ability and Trigger, were present. Without any of the elements, I would probably not have started it.

(This is my 11th blog post of my 30in30 challenge — 30 blog posts in 30 days. Through this challenge, I hope to feel comfortable and more confident with writing and become better at writing.)