It’s easy to read a book or watch a movie and feel inspired to create. Even more effective for moving your creativity forward, however, is to actually create something. For us, January has always been a time of kick-starting the year by exercising our creative muscles.

The Challenge: January 1–31, 2022

The strategy is simple: do something small, publish it, and repeat. For the entire month of January, we are challenging ourselves to making something every day. The goal is consistency—making a habit of making.

Daily from Seth Godin’s Blog

“There’s a fundamental difference between the things you do every day, every single day, and the things you do only when the spirit moves you. One difference is that once you’ve committed to doing something daily, you find that the spirit moves you, daily. Rather than having a daily debate about today’s agenda, you can decide once that you will do something, and then decide every single day how to do it.” 12/21/2014

Making Something Every Day

In the spirit of developing good habits of making something every day, even if the spirit doesn’t show up, here’s the challenge:

• One: pick a single discipline for the challenge. For example, if you want to develop photography skills, take a photo every day. The idea is to help you get better at something.
• Small: commit to something small. For example, if you want to develop writing skills, write something short every day. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• Posting: we will be posting our creations for others in the group to see. This accountability helps, and it’s useful to trace your progress throughout the challenge. It’s easier than ever to do this now. Post it on any public place online. Personal blog, social media, whatever.
• Rest: feel free to take one day off each week. Even God rested on the seventh day.

Resistance

If you are like me, you probably already sensed some resistance to this idea. Here are some voices I just heard as I wrote this:

• I’m not a very consistent person—I probably will poop out half way through.
• I’m rusty.
• What if I do something that isn’t very good? How embarrassing.
• This is going to cost me something. It takes time, and time is money. Is it worth it?

If you hear voices like that, then maybe you should listen to them and not sign up. Or maybe you will decide not to let them limit you, that it’s better to make something than nothing, and that this could be an interesting learning experience. Either decision is fine.

Participants

• Mary will do jewelry
• Dan will do haiku
• Kathy will do knitting and painting projects
• Cindy will do writing.
• Jennifer will write micro-stories on Instagram.
• Maddie will sketch portraits.

If you are posting to social media, use #31daysofcreativity2022

Join In

If you’d like to participate in the challenge, just send an email to (Ken at AccentInteractive [dot] net) and let me know what you’d like to do. Then start creating. Once you have something to share, post it online and send me the link to it so I can include it in our list of participants.