Malcolm Gladwell claims in his book, Outliers; The Story of Succes, that you roughly need 10.000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field of work. In this book he studies the lives of some very successful people, for example Bill Gates and The Beatles. Everybody seems to agree that practice makes progress.

With this thought in mind I decided to challenge myself, starting the first of January of 2015. Like some other designers I would start a 365 project in which I would create a custom designed number every day. It kind of is a long version of the well known 36 Days of type challenge. I decided to share the results on my Instagram page.

After a while I noticed I got comfortable with what I was doing daily. Things might even become a little boring. At this point you can do one of two things. Quit, because you are bored and don’t feel like you’re making much progress. Or, step out of your comfort zone. This will lead to you creating new exciting things. Maybe you will find a new style or material you really like. For example, I used dried coffee grounds for day 150. 

I wrote a Medium article about my experience from my first daily design challenge and why you should consider starting one too. Read it below!