If you want to get better at something — do it 100 times. Want to get better at cooking? Cook 100 different meals. Want to get better at stand-up comedy? Perform on stage 100 times. Want to get better at writing? Write 100 things — DMs, comments, full essays.
Don’t worry too much about the quality: it will automatically improve — quantity has a quality of its own.
This idea was popularised by a twitter personality @visakanv (visakan veerasamy on substack). In his essay titled “Do 100 things” he puts it the following way: “Do 100 Crappy Things For No Reason, With No Agenda To Live Up To, At Whatever Pace Feels Comfortable, However You Like”. The idea gained many loyal fans on Twitter who would put a counter next to their display name for public accountability. I was one of them: I wanted to write more.
Writing 100 things
I set my mind to writing 100 “long-form-ish” pieces, and it took me a bit more than two years to finish. The chart comes from my public work log on twitter, which I kept in addition to the counter. I started logging after the eighth thing, so the first seven are missing.
What counted as “long-form-ish”? Substack posts on this blog, obviously — but also I didn’t want restrict myself too much, so many other things: grant applications, reviews on Google Maps, 100–200-word DMs or emails. Counting emails may seem strange, but I only included ones that required some creative writing — like this short novel review I sent to Sasha Chapin, whom I worked with as a writing coach.
The natural cutoff for “having written something” was hitting Send. There had to be an audience, even if it’s an audience of one. It’s one thing to jot down a couple hundred words and abandon them; it’s another to bring them to closure — either by finding a natural stopping point or by haphazardly wrapping up your writing. You can find closure without publishing, but publishing gives you a clean breakpoint, a point of no return — a before and after.
My interest in the challenge waxed and waned. After I put the counter next to my username, a few weeks passed before I bumped it for the first time — those early points aren’t even on the chart because I wasn’t logging yet. Then I went through periods of more and less intensive writing — with multi-month gaps between them.
The last period of losing interest happened around the 90-95th thing two years into the challenge . You’d think the allure of the finish line would be thrilling at that point — and yeah, eventually crossing it felt satisfying on some level — but right before it a phase shift happened. Quantity really did turn into quality. I got much better at writing, and my mindset shifted from scarcity to abundance. Figuring out how to write another thing stopped being a rare event to celebrate by bumping a counter — I developed real skill of writing across a wide range of topics. This challenge delivered on its promise, just a tad earlier than the final 100 mark.
By doing this challenge, I didn’t become another Dostoevsky (at least not yet). But writing stopped being an event and became a habit, I got much better at expressing my thoughts online, and gained an audience on Substack (xoxo).
So if you want to get better at writing, free yourself from the neurotic tyranny of your own expectations, follow your own fun, and just write 100 things.