Have you heard about the 100 Day project? Yet another challenge for creative people, this project was invented by Michael Bierut, a graphic design teacher at Yale. He would ask his students to choose a design operation and do it every day for 100 days. Later, this idea was embraced and developed by different people, and there is a yearly 100 days challenge where you can register to if you want to do your own project and share it for accountability.

Why would anyone do a 100 Day project?

The goal could be to create a discipline, to repeat something until you improve the execution, to create 100 pieces of something or make progress in one or a few projects by working on them for 100 days. It’s also done for the fun of it, to stimulate creativity and to keep you on the right track by reminding you to be creative every day. Each person might have different reasons to embark on this journey, and the tasks we are choosing are different as well. I always liked a good challenge and at the same time I’ve considered myself as someone who is lacking discipline. This year I decided I wanted to have a little creative project, so the 100 Days Project it is! The only other challenge I’ve completed was a 30 days challenge of taking pictures every day and share it on the blog. Choosing the one thing for the project wasn’t easy — I had a few ideas in mind, but in the end these made it to the final: writing a poem every day, drawing/painting something every day or writing a blog post every day.

And the winner is: writing a poem every day!

Some of you might know I write fiction and poetry, and I’ve even taken some writing classes a few years ago. Finding a discipline for writing is a constant struggle for me. I know I’m not supposed to wait around until inspiration strikes, and that I should force myself to write even when I feel I have nothing interesting to say, but it’s hard to implement this. It works better when it comes to writing articles, but with creative writing, I fail, most of the time. That’s why I will try to train myself to sit down and write something every day for the next 100 days. It can be 15 minutes, it can be longer, if I find the time, but it will happen every day. Maybe it will become a habit. Maybe I’ll fail miserably. But at least I’ll try. I chose poetry for the challenge because it’s more doable: poetry comes easy to me and I’ve always wanted to write more of it. It’s easy to write everywhere, I don’t need special materials for it; I can write if I’m on holiday and it won’t take up much time. It needs to be easy, otherwise I’ll find myself excuses to not do it. Hopefully, at the end of this project, I’ll have a few good ones that I can published in a poetry book.

I have to yet figure out how I’m going to have some sort of accountability. I’m not going to share all my poems on social media; maybe I’ll just report here on the blog from time to time and give you an update on how the project is going. Maybe I’ll even share some poems, if anyone is interested? I’ll figure that out on the way. Would be nice if anyone would like to join me in this quest, so please let me know!

Stay tuned for more and follow Amsterdamian on Instagram and Facebook for daily stories about life in the Netherlands. And share this post if you liked it!