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.
En mayo llevaré cuatro años sentándome a escribir casi todas las semanas, normalmente los domingos por la tarde/noche. Ayer me preguntaban mis amigos si no me da pereza a veces ponerme a escribir… Y claro que sí, que me da pereza, mucho más a menudo de lo que me gustaría admitir. Pero igual que les da pereza a los atletas profesionales salir a entrenar todos los días, y lo hacen de todas formas, porque saben que es muy importante mantener la constancia aunque requiera un esfuerzo. Como me recordó también ayer una persona muy sabia, consistency is the key.
And the key to consistency, at least for me, is not giving myself the option not to do it (salvo en caso de emergencia, claro está, pero emergencias de verdad, y todavía no se ha dado el caso). Porque si no, como ya sabéis, como uno se lo piense mucho nunca es buen momento…
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.D. – Ahora al editar el artículo me doy cuenta de que el corrector ortográfico que uso para traducir seguro que tiene inteligencia artificial… ¡Está por todas partes! Seguiré intentando escapar de ella todo lo que pueda.