In Spain, in the old days (same as currently in Ireland), car registration plates included a one or two-letter code indicating the county each vehicle was from. Cars from Cáceres, where I was born, had the "CC" code. I still remember the registration plate for that yellow Renault Mégane Coupé I owned back then; I had such a great time with it (we nicknamed it "Tweety"): CC-8836-U.

So, for me, "CC" is a way to identify Cáceres and its province (just to clarify: a province in Spain equates to a county in Ireland; the equivalent to an Irish province is a Spanish region, or "comunidad autónoma").

(Photo of the medieval city of Cáceres last time I visited, in December)

But "CC" also means other things; for example, the number two hundred (200) in Roman numerals. Because ladies and gentlemen, this is article number 200 in the BinaryWords blog.

In May, I´ll reach four years of sitting down to write almost every week, usually on Sunday evenings and into the night. Yesterday, my friends asked me if I didn´t feel lazy sometimes when it was time to sit down and write... Of course, there are times when I don´t feel like doing it, much more often than I would like to admit. But in the same way as professional athletes don´t feel like going out to do their training every day, and they do it anyway because they know it´s really important to stay consistent despite the effort required. As someone very wise reminded me yesterday, consistency is the key.

And the key to consistency, at least for me, is not giving myself the option not to do it (save emergencies, of course, but it has to be a real emergency, which hasn´t happened to date). Otherwise, as you already know, if one thinks too much about doing something, it´s never a good moment...

To be honest, I´m no longer able to imagine a Sunday without writing a blog post. I choose to do it because it´s important to me, because I find it nurturing and fulfilling. It´s the way I´ve found to express my creativity while reflecting on what I learn along the way, and I share my learnings with you all in case you find them helpful. I write for all of you, my readers, but first of all, I write for me.

By the way, nobody has ever asked me, but in case you had any doubts, I do NOT use ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence to write my articles. In my opinion, it would completely destroy the process I just described.

And when I sit down to write, sometimes the article turns out to be good, and sometimes, not so good. Occasionally, I feel inspired, and I end up writing an extra long article; some other times, I struggle to fill out even a couple of paragraphs. All of this is also normal. The key is to keep going, to keep creating. And to get used to the fact that, once the article is published, there´s no way to control who´s going to read it and who´s not, or who´s going to like it and who´s not. It´s a great opportunity to learn to let go of control, and trust that the information will reach whoever it needs to reach, whenever it needs to reach them.

About this topic: I remember hearing in a training course that, when one works on content creation (whether it´s a blog, a podcast, videos, etc.), sometimes there´s an article or episode we think is going to be very successful because we´ve invested lots of time, effort and resources on it and we´re very happy with how it came out, and it turns out it gets very few visits, when maybe there´s another one we put together quickly, almost sloppily, and for whatever reason, that´s the one with the most visits and the most success, much more than we were expecting. I thought that was a really interesting phenomenon, which goes to show how unpredictable the whole thing is, and (hopefully) helps us to relativize it, both when our publications are "successful" and when they´re not.

Having said that, do you know which is the most popular article in this blog? I have no idea why, but it´s this one: Arab Proverb, in which, by the way, I talk about Cáceres, my home town, closing the circle.

P.S.- If you feel like checking what other interesting articles there are around here, have a look at the the blog´s archive page. And thanks a million for reading me!

P.P.S.- Now editing the article, I realize the spell checker I use for my translations uses artificial intelligence for sure... It´s everywhere! I´ll continue to try and escape from it as much as I can.