Josh Pitzalis

The basic idea was to pick something we want to learn or write about and then commit to creating and publicly sharing one article a week for 6 weeks.

8 of us ended up joining the group and doing this project together.

The catch was that you had to pay out $100 to the group if you missed a post. The money got divided among the people who did write a post that week.

The money wasn’t the point. It’s just a mechanism to make the whole thing real. To prevent us from all flaking out two weeks in.

We could write about anything we wanted, as long as we picked a theme at the beginning and stuck to it. In alphabetical order, here is what we each wrote about.

Aditya wrote about the economics of agriculture. He explored solutions to the problem presented by the farmer’s protest in India at the moment.

1. The great Indian agriculture conundrum
2. The farmer’s backlash is a fight against global oligopoly
3. Minimum support price
4. Do free markets work?
5. Foreign trade restrictions and taxing agricultural income
6. An Agricutural Manifesto

Anton wanted to learn more about the historical context of our current times.

1. The 4 movements of the last 100 years
2. Trend 1 of the century: Climate Change
3. The propaganda model
4. Learning motivation
5. Sad things that make me happier
6. The history of printing

Jamal wrote about productivity and procrastination.

1. Why do you want to be productive? Really?
2. Lean productivity for individuals
3. Lean productivity for individuals (in action)
4. The willpower of a puppet
5. The right way to procrastinate
6. Productive environment

Josh wrote about UX writing and how to think about the words in digital product design.

1. 3 questions to quick fix the words in your design
2. Think of your product as a conversation
3. A pattern for the words in your product
4. Using customer interviews to draft great microcopy
5. User testing the words in your product
6. A/B testing the words in your product

Kunal wrote about the history of Goa.

1. Where Do You Belong?
2. The First Goenkars
3. The Island
4. Conquered
5. Portuguese Legacy: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
6. Indian Goa

Nav wrote about stuff he has learned and built at his company, Khoob.

1. Meet Kaagaz v2.0
2. Introducing Sanscubicle
3. An App that searches your screenshots? Meet Jaadoo

Navs got too busy at work after week 3. He paid out to the group and had to stop.

Shivangini decided to use the project to sharpen her storytelling skills and completed exercises for Neil Gaiman’s Storytelling Masterclass each week.

1. The saddest moment
2. Ganesh in therapy
3. A continuation of my Ganesh trauma story
4. Vonnegut’s shape of stories applied to life narrative writing
5. No writing this week. She paid out to the group and then kept going.
6. A global fever dream

Sumukh decided to write about early-stage product design and yoga. These are the two things he’s focused on, and it was clear that he wanted to split his attention across both from the start.

1. Breaking down the benefits of yoga for the mind
2. History of yoga (3000BC-500AD)
3. History of Yoga (500 AD -1600 AD)
4. Planning out the MVP for truYoga
5. History of Yoga (1600-1800 AD)
6. Build the MLP not MVP

I am immensely grateful to have been a part of this project.

Writing with a group of people, and the $100 penalty, helped me stay focused. It made sure that I carved out time to grow each week.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would love to do this again. If you’d like to be a part of the next one, send an email to hello@joshpitzalis and I’ll send out an invite if we run another.