On December 1, I vowed to share content every day for a month. Here, on Day 31, I look back at what I’ve learned.

First Up: ‘The What’

The content I shared — for the first 30 days, not counting today — fell into three categories:

Business and Advice: 11 posts
Music: 8 posts
The Saturday List: 4
Podcast Interviews/Summaries of Shows: 4
Inspirational: 2
Creativity: 2

Next: ‘The Where’

25 of the 30 posts were on the Area 224 blog (that’s where you are right now!) and the other 5 were posted on my Substack.

In most cases, the content was re-shared by me on LinkedIn; and some of the posts were also reshared on X, which I’m still calling “Twitter.”

Best-Performing Posts?

Six of my posts stand out as performing better than the others, at least when it comes to views; Four on Substack and two on the blog:

Five Business Book Recommendations (Substack)
The Saturday List, December 20 (Substack)
The Saturday List, December 6 (Substack)
The Saturday List, December 27 (Substack)
Just How Vulnerable? (Blog)
On Christmas Eve (Blog)

To be fair to myself: I had spent a year or so curating my Substack much more than my blog, so, the combination of a built-in audience and the consistency of The Saturday List would both be factors leading to its (relative) success.

It’s also been suggested — fairly, I might add — that I should add a Subscribe Button to the blog. So here’s one.

The LinkedIn Factor

I will be completely direct here: LinkedIn is not my favorite tool. Sure, everyone thinks that “Followers” and “Connections” and the like are great. But it’s clunky, its newsletter publisher is pretty bad and doesn’t allow links, and views don’t lead to any real activities.

LinkedIn has a REAL algorithm problem: posts are still being delivered to the feed that are 2-plus weeks old, so the jury may be out on whether some of the above posts might still move up or down my rankings.

Finally, and this is big, even with Premium, the analytics are…poor. I can’t tell you which of my posts on LinkedIn performed well, or not well, if they are more than seven days old. Each passing month leads me to question why I pay for Premium.

Big Winner: The Daily Habit of Writing

If you watch enough cooking videos or you talk to those in some sort of performance industry — sportscasters, professional speakers, actors — you know how big it is to get “reps.” Your first four ribeyes cooked on the steel pan will be okay, the next four will get better, and, by the ninth ribeye, you are finally able to cook for others.

Writing is similar; and, given the combination of work priorities and life priorities taking over, I had not really flexed any writing muscles of note in a long, long time.

But I did write every single day.

There were days I was able to pull together a couple blog posts, and there were other days where I felt like all I got was a neat little paragraph that shaped blog post or the next week’s Saturday List.

And, The Next Steps For Me (There Are Two)

A December goal was to do as much of this content creation as I could WITHOUT any AI tools. In fact, other than my post on GEO vs SEO, or my piece on AI-driven “creativity,” I stayed away from AI. (So yes, I wrote all the words myself.)

I don’t plan on issuing another 31-day content challenge to myself for January; however, I do plan on doing a few deeper-dive looks at AI tools and how to use them. Look for more of that in January.

The other January goal: MORE INTERVIEWS. Yes, that’s right, I plan on ramping up discussions on The Vandy Program. I only did ONE of them in December; the only gauntlet I’ll throw down for a busy January is to do…THREE.

(Here’s the one that I did in December.)

So yeah, that’s actually a blatant pitch for interesting podcast guests. If there’s someone YOU want to hear from, let me know in the comments…even if that person is you.

Finally, My Thanks

Back in journalism school, they would tell you to imagine that you’re talking to a friend or family member before you went on air. Trite? Maybe. But that’s been the thing that kept me going during December. And it’ll keep me going through 2026, come what may.

My sincere thanks for coming along for the ride.

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on my Substack in February 2025

To say that I have a favorite poem might be a bit of a stretch; I loved my lone college poetry class at Syracuse, but wouldn’t call myself a devotee of the genre. Alas, if pressed while at whatever passes for an Algonquin Round Table these days, I would offer perhaps the poem I remember best: “The Red Wheelbarrow”, by William Carlos Williams. Originally titled “XXII” — those Roman numerals add up to 22! — and from the book Spring and All, the Wikipedia entry for the poem itself devotes hundreds of words discussing the poem; the poem itself is sixteen (XVI) words.

Is it memorable because it’s so short? Is it great because it’s merely memorable? Is it too glib and flip and quick and quirky that it really counts more as an ad slogan than a poem?

Do you care?

Good poetry is a little like former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese talking about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” “The Red Wheelbarrow” is not an excerpt from The Iliad, nor is it a Shakespearean sonnet. Nor was it composed by committee or focus-grouped like an ad campaign for a soft drink with Seal as a seal.

It reminds me of another memorable quip (attribution unknown): “Perfect is good, done is better.”

‘I’m Something of a Writer Myself’

For the Creative Class, writing these days is limited to a well-composed email, or a really clever tweet; calling the tweet a tweet is way more creative, IMHO, than calling it a “post on X,” but we are where we are.

But that email was great! My tweet should have gone viral!

Enter the world of AI. Why write a blog post when you can ask ChatGPT or Grok or another machine to write a blog post for you. You just need to know how to correctly ask it to write a blog post for you. Logic be darned, as you don’t need to think your way through a blog post, you just need to think your way through the one question — “Write me a 400-word blog post about someone with writer’s block and how they got through it” — and let the machine do the rest.

When Creativity Gets Replaced By Prompts

When AI started getting interesting and I had to conduct team meetings, I tried to start them off with art. Not just any art, mind you, but AI-generated art that was, sometimes, rather out there.

Not just Trump-playing-keyboards out there…stuff like this:

I could go on — and attendees at those meetings were probably asking me to stop — but the point here is that the quality was fine, the messages were weird, and the “art” wasn’t really art.

‘I’m Something of an Artist Myself’

Back when NFTs were first a thing — they’re coming back, I just know it! — I created a bunch of art. Like tons of it. Hundreds of images. First, playing around with sketching programs on my phone, then using other programs to manipulate shapes, add colors and effects, and aim for some sort of aesthetic. First, the early work:

Then, a later piece:

Is the art any good? Would you put it on a wall? Is it gallery-worthy?

None of this really matters, actually. Which brings us to the point of the article.

Without a Creative Outlet, What Are We?

I could pound away at a keyboard — this article has taken me the better part of an afternoon; it’s actually an article I started probably a month ago by writing the headline — or I could outsource the creativity to a machine. I prefer the former.

I could challenge myself to remember things without going to Wikipedia, or I could just take the lazy way out. Again, memorizing new facts and figures or asking myself what details I remember from the first baseball game I attended (August 1978, Cubs 2, Reds 0, Dave Kingman homered!) exercises parts of the brain that don’t get used as much (or ever, in the case of most phone numbers, which exist solely in your contacts, I gather).

I could play around with art — maybe leaning into the fact that 99% of it is pretty bad — or I could just ask Bing to whip up something that looks like a modern art NFT.

I don’t have the answers, but I much prefer the future with some sort of human creativity to a code-driven, cyborg-fueled AI Franken-novel.

31 Days of Content: Here’s What I Learned