Mridu Khullar

I’m often guilty of spending too much time inside my own head, and not making a lot of contact with the outside world. Unless I’m on assignment, it can be days before I have a decent conversation with a normal person. When I’m on assignment though, suddenly I go through a personality makeover and I’m the friendliest gal in town, who you’d assume never found herself alone. Depending on whether I’m in the stage of researching and writing, interviewing people or reporting, I’m at different levels of social networking. And each level brings with it different challenges, especially since I tend to bend towards the hermit tendencies.

When I’m out on assignment, it’s easy to get challenged daily. I once found myself sitting in a meeting with top technology executives clinging desperately to each word in the hope of finding something meaningful in the whole conversation. Another time I interviewed a source at great length and leisure taking absolutely no notes, knowing that my voice recorder was taking it all down for me. Yep, no recording at all. None whatsoever. I ended up recreating the whole thing from memory. Or yet another time when I found myself bang in the middle of dozens of people of a community and had to publicly interview a prominent personality that I was so not ready to interview! More challenge than I was hoping for, really.

It’s those other times, when I’m focused on the writing and researching that I need a constant reminder to challenge myself daily. I don’t know where I read it, but it’s stayed with me for a long time. Basically, the idea was to do one thing everyday that was a stretch for you. It might be something personal, like calling up a friend who’d hurt you deeply and making peace with her, but I’ve taken it to be professional, such as picking up the phone and calling the editor of a national magazine, or writing the first paragraph of a deeply personal piece, or maybe even just coming out of lurkdom in an online writing group and introducing yourself. The idea is to do one simple thing everyday that not only furthers your career (or personal life), but is also something that is tough for you. Just one. A day. That’s easy, right?

These are my personal challenges over the past week:

1. I picked up the phone…
… and called a hot-shot editor I’ve had a bit of an e-mail “conversation” with. And guess what– I may have an assignment in this major magazine soon enough!

2. I e-mailed someone I don’t know asking for a contact.
She works in the publicity or advertising department of a big media group, and I have no idea who she is or what she does. I only know about her because she posted a request to a message board. I e-mailed her immediately and within a day, had made my contact with the editor.

3. I wrote to The New York Times.
I usually don’t. Actually, I’ve only done it once before, and that was on the prodding of a friend. This time, I had an idea that I thought might be something that would be of interest to them, and since I already had a well-written pitch that I’d been sending out (and getting positive responses to), I figured it didn’t hurt to get my name out there. And boy, was I glad I did! The editor wrote back! NY Times wrote back to me! With a rejection, no doubt, but hell, who cares? Even better: the only reason I got a rejection was that they don’t take international submissions, but the editor did let me know very politely where else in the publication I had a chance.

4. I pitched an idea that comes at a certain personal cost.
It’s a good story. These are brave women. It’s something that I would totally have pitched and sold in another lifetime, but was conflicted about last week. The personal and professional side of me battled it out with much intensity, but the professional side finally won in the end. I can’t see a good story and just let it slide away, no matter what. Of course, it does depend on how much personal cost it is, but in this case, I decided to suck it up and do it. So an acceptance might mean I have to interview someone who I would rather keep in the past, but big deal! Not like I’m asking her to come live with us or something. I’m sure worse things have happened.

Seven days later, I’ve got a great contact in a big magazine, I’ve received a personal note from an editor at the NY Times, I’ve overcome a personal struggle and I’ve almost landed another article with a new magazine. Can you imagine how far ahead in my career I’ll be after a month or a year of doing this?

What are you doing to challenge yourself today? Share your ideas!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 12:39 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.