I challenged myself this past month to create a month’s worth of newspaper blackout poems, which are poems made by redacting newspapers with a permanent marker.

I’d never done a blackout poem before and as I noted in the first post, my creative muscles had atrophied a good deal over the past few years. It was hard.

One interesting thing I found was that Arts, Profiles and Obituaries are the best sections in the newspaper for blackout poetry. Politics is near impossible because of all the boring writing and big names.

It’s also very difficult not to bias the theme of the poems coming into the activity. I often found myself wanting to create a poem around a particular topic and then struggling to find a newspaper that would work for that topic, which is really not how blackout poetry is supposed to work.

My favorites of the month are To create first collect, Dominique, Art will shape you, Just exciting enough, and Intro to a graduation speech. To be sure, none of these are poetic masterpieces and I’m not even sure the last one qualifies as poetry at all, but I’m glad I did them. I have enough here for maybe 1/4 of a book of blackout poems! I even had a couple people ask for prints.

Here’s the complete list of poems:

• To be or to do?
• Redacted
• You’ll have to work
• You will be unappreciated
• What you do or who you are?
• Art will shape you
• Less meetings, more creating
• The internet of false accomplishments
• Create your art now
• Be more interesting than your grades
• To create, first collect
• Dropping in
• Twitter
• Revenge has a long memory
• School closures
• Intro to a graduation speech
• What everybody’s thinking
• Teachers
• RIP, Star Wars
• The author
• One more
• School, canceled
• Just exciting enough
• Dominique
• First try (three poems)

I don’t want to put anything concrete in writing about my plans moving forward. I may or may not continue doing these, and at what frequency, I have no idea. It was a valuable, fun activity and it was a nice changeup to the kinds of things I’ve grown accustomed to writing and thinking about over the past few years.

Here’s a video covering how to do your own.

It’s a new month tomorrow. That means you’ve got roughly 30 new days ahead of you, the perfect time in which complete a 30-day challenge for something meaningful that you’ve been putting off. In other words, a time to answer this question for yourself: do I want to “be” or do I want to “do?”

This past month I challenged myself to blog publicly and make a new newspaper blackout poem every day. Funny enough, those daily activities laid the foundation for a mostly happy and productive January. I’m thinking more clearly and originally, communicating more effectively, and feeling far more focused than before.

The traffic on this blog has also grown tremendously, I’ve got a ton of new content ideas, and if I never blog again, I’ll always have at least 30 posts to point to, which is more than most people can say.

Of course, I do plan to blog again, and in addition to daily blogging, I’m going to issue myself another daily challenge this coming month. Since I’m not settled yet on what to do, I’m going to use this post to think publicly and hopefully help you find a challenge for yourself.

I tend to prefer challenges that end with something that requires a bit of public creative output. For any of these, consider that you should do a blog writeup every day tracking your progress. I also don’t recommend trying to stack too many of these but if you can, go for it.

• 30 days of blogging
• 30 days of vlogging
• 30 days of reading 30 pages per day
• 30 days of Ayn Rand (one essay per day)
• 30 days of writing poetry or short stories
• 30 days of photography
• 30 days of Bitcoin Cash content consumption
• 30 days of “lost world genre” film watching
• 30 days of coding
• 30 days of language
• 30 days of skill building
• 30 days of wine tasting reviews
• 30 days of interviewing interesting people
• 30 days of Yale Open Courses
• 30 days of trying out marketing tools & softwares
• 30 days of GoFundMe donations
• 30 days of emailing someone new
• 30 books in 30 days (aka the Tai Lopez challenge…)
• 30 days of cooking
• 30 days of Paleo dieting 
• 30 days of writing prompts
• 30 days of the Austin Kleon Steal Like an Artist Journal
• 30 days of list making
• 30 days of Latin or Ancient Greek
• 30 days of Quora answers
• 30 days of sending letters
• 30 days of public thank-you’s (maybe gets over the top)
• 30 days of yoga
• 30 days of blackout poetry
• 30 days of graphic design
• 30 days of podcasting
• 30 days of reading a blog archive

If you’re new to this, it almost doesn’t matter what you choose. The act of doing something creative and valuable every day is enough to start seeing a return. As I wrote this month,

…small acts of deliberate creative work yield far better results than waiting for big wins.

Think of yourself like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Living the same day over and over is tragically underrated.

And so it is.