Publishing 841 blog posts for #YourTurnChallenge was the best Monday ever

The Your Turn Challenge officially began today. It’s a one week challenge to write a blog post every day for 7 days.

The main point? Learning to ship and knowing what it feels like to create something and get it out the door before it feels “ready” or “perfect.”

The real main point? Doing a project with a like-minded group of people who want to push themselves to grow too. No lonely nights of shipping here, my friends. We’re doing it with a fierce community.

Over the weekend, posts already started trickling in and people on Twitter were committing with tweets saying “I’m in!” 

This was encouraging. But you know how in the third grade, you have a birthday party, and you’re really, really worried that no one is going to show up?

I was afraid that no one was going to show up for the Your Turn Challenge. I knew people talked about wanting to push themselves outside of their comfort zone, but I wasn’t sure if they’d want to do it together, to do it now. 

Today, I got up at 9am since it’s a holiday and I had the day off. I opened up Tumblr and woke up to hundreds of blog posts from readers around the world. I started reading and publishing right away, and as the day went on, more posts kept flowing in and it didn’t stop. Every time I hit “refresh” on my browser, there’d be more posts. 

As of now, there are 841 posts from Day 1 of the Your Turn Challenge.

I had the incredible privilege of reading posts before they went out into the world, where I knew so many other readers would be moved by the writing.

The question prompt today was, “Why are you doing the Your Turn Challenge?”

So I’ll answer that question too. I’m doing the Your Turn Challenge because I want to meet people who inspire me to be better.

I wanted to see if a certain kind of people existed out there beyond my immediate stomping grounds. The kind of people who voluntarily do hard things and push themselves purely for the sake of self-satisfaction. People who could be ambitious with their goals, but also genuinely support other people instead of feeling superior. The kind of people who say “I know this is hard, I think so too - but I know you can do it.”

And now, seeing the posts that are coming through, and how participants are sharing each other’s work and giving each other kudos on Twitter, and people are admitting “I’m not sure that I can do this, which is exactly why I need to do this” - I’m inspired beyond belief.

I am absolutely blown away by how smart, sincere, driven, and reflective each post was. I can only imagine who the reader is behind the post. There were participants who had never blogged or used Twitter or written anything, who said, “I haven’t tried this before, but I want to give this a shot. Why not now?” 

That’s exactly the kind of attitude I want to have more often. I want to see a challenge and think, “I might not know how to do it now but I can figure it out and I’m going to try.” I’ve already been exposed to so much positive attitude from Your Turn Challenge participants that I’m counting this as a success. I’m soaking it in. I’m being changed by everyone who’s doing this.

When you put a call out onto the Internet, you can’t be sure what the results will be. I know I wasn’t sure.

But it’s 11:59pm on Monday night, and I can say with confidence: all the right people showed up to this.