Writing 365K Words Made Me Confront An Uncomfortable Truth

And the more I paid attention, the harder it became to look away.

A man writing. Photo by Vitaly Gariev from Pexels.

I thought writing 1,000 words a day would be easy. So easy, in fact, that I built a spreadsheet with 365 checkboxes and committed to doing it every day for a year.

The first few weeks were uneventful.

I’d sit down, open a document, watch the word counter climb, then move onto whatever else I was doing. Some days took twenty minutes. Some took an hour. But the checkbox always got ticked… and that’s what mattered.

A month later, I was sitting in a bookstore when an employee spent ten minutes helping a customer find a book that turned out to be out of stock. They checked the shelves, checked the computer, disappeared into another section, then came back empty-handed.

I wrote it down.

A few days later, I was at the library. A woman returned a stack of children’s books and spent several minutes thanking the librarian who’d recommended them. Her grandson was reading on his own now. Apparently, that was the big news.

I wrote that down too.

Then there was a note from a ride on the metro. Two kids compared the books they’d checked out from the library.

One held up a paperback. “My school said we can’t read this anymore.”

The other laughed. “Then that’s the first one I’m reading.”

The strange thing is that I wasn’t trying to collect any of this. The challenge was supposed to be about writing 1,000 words a day. Yet by the middle of the year, I seemed to be spending more time gathering material than actually using it. Because the world hadn’t suddenly become more interesting. Rather, I was simply noticing more of it.

For years, I spent a lot of time looking down. I’d put headphones on while traveling on a train before the doors even closed. In waiting rooms, I’d scroll through my phone. In coffee shops, libraries, airports, and station platforms, I’d usually have something occupying my attention before I had a chance to notice what was happening around me. If there was an empty moment available, I was pretty good at filling it.

But something started changing.

The longer I kept up the writing challenge, the harder it became to ignore the people sitting right in front of me. I’d still listen to music sometimes. I’d still check my phone. Yet more and more often, I’d catch myself watching the room instead.

Which led to a fairly unexpected problem.

Most of the news I consumed seemed determined to convince me that society was falling apart. Every week brought another story about division, outrage, conflict, or some new reason people supposedly couldn’t stand each other anymore.

Then I’d get on a train.

One afternoon, I watched a teenager help an older man lift a suitcase onto the luggage rack without being asked. A few days later, I saw a woman in a library spend ten minutes helping somebody work a self-checkout machine that neither of them seemed to fully understand. On another train journey, a passenger missed their stop because they were helping a parent fold up a pram near the doors.

You get my point.

The more time I spent looking up instead of down, the harder it became to square everyday kindness with the version of humanity I kept encountering online. People disagreed about politics. People argued about all sorts of things. Yet, most of the interactions I witnessed involved somebody making another person’s day slightly easier with no expectation of getting anything back.

Around this point, I started noticing something slightly embarrassing.

For years, I’d treated good ideas as evidence of intelligence.

A smart person has a good idea. They think harder than everyone else. They read more, analyze more, connect more dots, and eventually arrive at some brilliant conclusion the rest of us somehow missed.

At least that was the story I’d been telling myself.

Then I looked through my notes.

The pattern wasn’t exactly flattering.

One article started because I overheard a conversation on a train. Another came from a librarian helping somebody track down a book neither of them could remember the title of. One of my better-performing pieces began with a passing comment from a stranger who was buying a sandwich and probably forgot the conversation before lunch.

That’s not genius.

That’s good timing.

Or maybe that’s too harsh.

Because timing isn’t really the point either.

The point is that none of those ideas arrived while I was sitting alone trying to have them. They showed up while I was moving through the world, paying attention to things I would’ve ignored a year earlier, and writing them down before they disappeared.

Which raises a fairly obvious question.

If ideas are mostly the product of intelligence, why were so many of mine arriving from situations I never could’ve planned for in advance?

The more notes I reviewed, the stranger that became.

Some came from bookstores. Some came from libraries. Some came from conversations that lasted less than thirty seconds. One came from watching two strangers argue over whether a pigeon could recognize itself in a mirror. I still don’t know the answer, but I got an article out of it.

Then another thought occurred to me.

What if I’ve been giving thinking too much credit?

People talk about creativity as though it’s something you manufacture. Sit down. Focus harder. Push through. Wait for inspiration to arrive.

Maybe.

But when I looked back at the articles I was most proud of, very few started with a brilliant insight. Most started with exposure. Exposure to different people, different places, different experiences, and problems I never would’ve encountered if I’d spent the afternoon staring at another screen.

You get my point.

The writing challenge was supposed to teach me consistency.

Instead, it kept rewarding curiosity.

I found myself sitting on a train one morning without headphones. Across the aisle, an elderly man was carrying flowers home. On his lap, a 50th anniversary card. And every time somebody walked past, the man would glance down to make sure they hadn’t been crushed.

For years, I treated spare moments like empty space that needed filling. A train ride became a podcast. A waiting room became scrolling. A line at the grocery store became a chance to catch up on something I’d saved and forgotten 3 weeks earlier.

Give me information and I’d gobble it up like a turkey.

But those flowers?

For some reason, I still remember them.

No one tells you the strangest part of paying attention.

It isn’t the ideas. Nor articles. Instead, I started noticing things that were already there. The librarian who seems to know half the town by name. The grandfather showing photos of his grandson to strangers. The woman standing in a bookstore for 10 minutes because one novel reminded her of her sister and the other reminded her of herself.

A year earlier, I would’ve forgotten most of these things before dinner.

Then the challenge happened when I had 365 days of looking for something worth writing down. Which quickly turned into 365 days of carrying a notebook, opening the notes app, and paying closer attention than I ever had before. And somewhere along the way, a question started keeping me awake at night.

“How much had I missed?”

I had always been there for the train rides, libraries, and bookstores. TBut when I was sitting down scrolling through my phone or listening to something in my headphones, I must’ve missed thousands of beautiful moments worth paying attention to.

Funny, really.

365,000 words later, I can barely remember what I wrote on a random Tuesday in March. But I remember the flowers. Also the grandfather, kids sitting on the metro, and everything else that doesn’t seem important in the moment but one day is. So, when I look back at that year of writing (at least) 1,000 words a day, I keep coming back to the same thought.

The things I paid attention to became the things I remembered. And somewhere out there, a couple celebrated their 50th anniversary.

Gosh, I hope she liked the flowers.

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