CodyyyGardner's Categories

CodyyyGardner's Authors

Latest Saves

Earlier today, I gave a talk at the @SubstackInc's writer conference about building a writing habit. Below are the ten concrete strategies I shared that have helped me publish a post every week for 1.5 years šŸ‘‡

0/ First of all, just sharing advice about this topic gives me serious impostor syndrome because writing is still pretty new to me, and I have much to learn. But these are things that have helped me, and I hope they'll help you.

1/ Strategy 1: Commit publicly

This was maybe 50% of my initial motivation. Having told people I was going to write weekly made me feel bad when even thinking about skipping a week. It gave me just enough nudge to keep


1b/ You don't need to make this super public. Just sending an email to a few friends regularly with your concrete goals about writing (and anything else) works wonders.


1c/ If you *really* want to be motivated, ask people for money. Nothing motivates you more than people paying you for regular
I want to add an addendum to this thread from the other day to show why publishing an n=1 is so bad. It's because I can likely identify and put a name to this student.

(I'm not going to do that here but I am going to show you how easy it is.)


To do that, let's talk about the IPEDS data set. IPEDS is a US database that contains a range of information about US universities, such as enrollment, test scores, graduation rates, etc.

One notable data table shows graduated students by major and ethnicity.

(FYI, here is the IPEDS data: https://t.co/K4OwsyLLsE It's an open database so you can explore at your leisure.)

Back to the "Completions" table which shows ethnicity by major. This happens to line up with the n=1 from the offending article which identified a student by their ethnicity and major.

Sorry, the n=1 was year in school and ethnicity but I've now used the IPEDS data to find out their major. Linking datasets on minority populations is very very powerful.