It took me about two seconds to decide on 1 January last year to take part in the Twitter 365 Flickr Challenge. I took a photo of myself each day for 267 days during which time I travelled overseas for seven weeks, lost 10kg, cut my hair to 1cm all over and changed jobs. I was also really confronted with the act of staring at my own camera and trying to find an image I was happy to share each day. I discovered that even though I found it really, really hard to smile for the camera, and felt like I was lying and being insincere when I did so, I looked much less like a dweeb when I smiled. I overcame my hesitancy about seeing myself in photographs and learned how to place a camera for an interesting self-portrait.
It took me slightly longer to decide to try saying “yes” to everything back in mid-June 2006 after I read Danny Wallace’s book, Yes Man….but I don’t think it was much longer, maybe five seconds. After about a year of saying yes, I found that I had previously been saying “yes” to things to do with the family and kids and “no” to things that involved me taking on personally interesting projects. At the end of the year, I described my attitude as having changed, from “I can’t do that because…” to “I can do this – do I want to?” .
Now in another 3 second decision, I’ve decided to take up Con‘s challenge, based on an idea of Stephanie’s, that I try to write one post a day for all of June. You can see a list of other Australasian library bloggers who have taken up the challenge in the comments at librariesinteract.info: 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge.
I am setting two further challenges for myself:
1)I am going to do “30 comments in 30 days” and make sure that I comment on at least one blog on the list at LINT per day.
2) I want to write “think posts” rather than “link posts”, so it is out to just put up a link to a really cool or cute story or only embed something like this clip of the STAR WARS I-PAD BRIEFING:
Post 1 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.
Lovely – I particularly like your plan to comment at least once a day too. I’ve decided to adopt that too as I tend to feel that I don’t engage sufficiently through commenting. With that said, this is I think, the third such post I’ve commented on today…or maybe the fourth 🙂
Now, one comment a day I could certainly do. If it was posts though I would be putting up pictures in NO TIME AT ALL.
I dips me lid.
Those photos are just lovely. What an impressive collage, and a great way to get over any portrait-shyness to boot.
What interesting projects! I ought to give the “yes man” idea a try myself; I don’t know how many times in the past year I’ve told myself “no” for things that would take me out of my comfort zone. “Should I start that bread baking challenge with other bloggers? No, they all started a year ago and I’d be way behind.” “Should I join the local hikers club? No, I’m too weak and it’s too hot these days.” “Should we just chuck it all and go out for a nice dinner tonight? No, that’s fiscally irresponsible.” It’s very tiring constantly denying yourself.
Love the idea of commenting. Will try this too.
By the way, did taking all those photos of yourself help you get over the (to me) natural dislike of looking at your portrait?
I’m trying to comment too so thanks to you and Sally for making that list.
Yes, it did get me over the “I don’t want to look at myself in pictures” cringing. One of the reasons I stopped however was when I looked at someone’s Facebook page and saw that most of the content was photos she had taken of herself …then I looked at my own Flickr account…