Rat Race Armaggeddon: 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The May Prompts

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The May Prompts

Content Excellence Challenge: May Prompts

It’s May! Holy beans, the year’s nearly half over. I’m still wondering where March went, never mind April.

Here’s our pair of community prompts for this month. Each month in 2017, we’re giving you a pair of prompts — one to make you more productive, and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.

You can jump in anytime — and let us know about your experiences in the comments!

The May Productivity Prompt

Banish “Fine”

A few years back, I helped crowdfund a documentary called “I’m Fine, Thanks” about some folks who, in the words of one of the subjects, had “climbed the ladder, then realized it was against the wrong wall.”

We all have things in life that we dismiss as being “fine” when they aren’t fine at all. Career situations, personal situations, meaning-of-life situations.

This month, think about an important problem that you’ve squished down as being “fine.” Then spend 30 days taking some kind of action to move to something better.

They could be tiny actions or medium actions. Maybe there will be some huge actions in there as well. But if you do this, even if your actions every day are truly tiny, I predict you’ll find out two things:

Small actions create momentum surprisingly quickly.
The energy you spend trying not to think about what’s “fine” could be much better spent making something amazing.

Here are a few little motivational shoves to get you rolling:

My post on the power of small habits (lots more resource links there)
I’m Fine, Thanks: The Movie (you can watch a preview for free, or spring for the film for $5)
Mel Robbins’s TEDx Talk on “fine” and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone

The May Creativity Prompt

Enhance Your Strengths

The “Fine” prompt is about working on your weaknesses, which is what we usually do when we want to get better.

But your greatest opportunities often lie in your strengths.

“Train your weaknesses. Compete your strengths.”
– strength coach Mark Reifkind

What are you excellent at? Do you have a strong writing voice? Are you great at researching details? Do you have a terrific network?

This month, identify one strength you have as a content marketer. (You can always pick another one to work on next month.) And every day, do something with that strength.

If you’re a storyteller, write a one-paragraph story every day. If you’re a data genius, distill some messy numbers into a clear, focused statement. You get the idea.

For some more ideas, take a look at my post on playing to your strengths.

Let us know how you’re doing with these!

Planning on tackling one or both of these this month? Let us know in the comments! I’d love to hear more.

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