“I eat two frogs each morning,” wrote my friend Anu Sharma on her LinkedIn post.
The frogs she is talking about are exercise and writing.
“It takes me 45 minutes, and I prepare for them the night before.”
“You can do it too,” she added.
But I couldn’t.
I tried to exercise and write in the morning for years but realized I could manage only one. I chose writing over exercise. I was new to writing and wanted to use a fresh morning mind for writing.
I pushed exercise to evenings.
But you know what evenings are like.
They are unpredictable.
Friends drop-in, the article didn’t finish, cooking isn’t done! So you skip the walk or the gym.
Three years of intermittent exercise had its toll. I have never been so unfit. I have put on weight, my stamina is at an all-time low, and I am losing flexibility fast.
One thing we writers can’t do is ignore health. Because it directly impacts our writing.
An unhealthy body leads to an unhealthy mind, and an unhealthy mind generates negativity. I experienced it first hand.
So I decided to replace the writing frog with the exercise frog.
And I feel fantastic now. Each morning I get a chance to get out of the house, meet a few people in the gym, come back home and work in the garden a bit before having breakfast. Then I can get on with writing.
This week has been outstanding. From Monday, my first course, ‘Write Your Book In 30 Days’, started with a Zoom call. Ten out of 16 participants turned out for the Zoom call. The topics range is incredible - from podcasting, social media relationships, leadership to sobriety, grief, and resilience.
I, too, will be writing a book. This time a cookbook. Want to know the story behind the book?
I am enjoying a lot of success on LinkedIn. Writing on the platform is just like blogging, only easier.
It is called micro-blogging. Posts are smaller, and you are writing to a very engaged built-in audience.
Social Media is the future of online writing.
When they think of online writing, most people think of starting a blog.
It would have been a great thing if it was 1999.
Today it is tough to drive traffic to a blog or a website.
If you want to write, then don’t start a blog. To know what to do instead:
Last month I announced that I would start publishing training courses on the paid version of this newsletter. After some deliberations, I have given up on the idea. There are a couple of reasons for that:
First, I think a newsletter is not a good way of doing courses. A better way is to create the course, build a sales page and give the link to those who want it.
Second, I don’t want to spend all my time building courses. I would rather write fiction. I know I have been saying that for some time, but now the time has come to take action. So I will start with writing a short story once a week. Then, as I get more comfortable with it, I will increase the frequency to two stories a week.
That’s all from me this week.
Neera Mahajan
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I do both exercise and writing in the morning, but for me the exercise is the frog and the writing is the reason I want to get up in the morning. My writing time is the highlight of my day.