The Evening Project’s 2018 Annual Letter to Readers

Most public companies in the world participate in the tradition of issuing an annual letter to their shareholders. The annual letter is an instrument of communication used by the people who manage the company to impart information to the owners of the company, the shareholders.

I decided that this year, it would be an interesting idea to start a similar tradition for The Evening Project.

Traditional investors, entrust the managers of the public companies with their money, aiming for a higher than average return on their investment.

As readers of The Evening Project, you are entrusting me with something far more valuable than money: your time. Time, that could have been spent doing something else.

The resource of time is limited and finite. This makes it imperative for every one of us to understand and realize the opportunity costs associated with time. Reading The Evening Project means that you are not doing something else. Hence, it becomes my responsibility to make sure that you are getting an above average return for your time.

In this letter, I wish to talk about how we got here, what are we doing now and what can the readers expect from The Evening Project in the future.   

The Journey till now

An important question that we tackle in life, directly or indirectly, is that of personal values.

How do I choose what makes me happy or sad? How do I evaluate a right or wrong decision in my life? Why do I consider something as a success and something as a failure?

Our personal values underlie all that we do.

Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes down to how aligned is it with our personal values.

I consider my strongest personal value to be: Improving every day.

I like it because it is something that I have complete control over, it is grounded in reality and it is socially constructive. This is the value that I prioritize above everything else and therefore this is what influences my decisions more than anything else.

The Evening Project is a direct result of this personal value.

At the Evening Project, we believe that evenings are special.

In the mornings, we can be students in a college or employees in a company, but the evenings are irrevocably our own.

Our time to think, reflect, act.

In every blog post that I write, there is an underlying desire to use the ideas, the research and the examples of that content to help me improve different aspects of my life.

At the time of writing this letter, The Evening Project is just two weeks and five blog posts old, but this belief in constant self-improvement is what I have tried to maintain till now and what I hope to maintain in the future.

When I first decided to write a blog, I wanted it to be more of a personal passion project. I wanted it to be a place where I could document and share my learnings, discoveries and understandings of the world around me.

But eventually, this has transformed into an inclusive and a much bigger purpose. I started thinking about The Evening Project more in terms of “We” as opposed to “Me” and “Us” as opposed to “I”.

The aim now is to attract more and more people who share the same personal value of constant self-improvement in their lives. I wish to share this journey of discovery and learning with a much wider audience.

At The Evening Project, the goal is to optimize free time and the hope is to inspire thinking and action. 

Core Principles at The Evening Project

While consistent self-improvement is something that is central to The Evening Project, that’s not the only personal value that drives what we want to do here.

After multiple brainstorming sessions and deliberations with self, I came up with three more personal values that I want to include, which would serve as strong foundations for The Evening Project. Foundations that would keep us tethered, something that we can always fall back upon.

These core principles are our guiding lights.

They reflect what we believe in, what we think about, what we write about and what we strive to achieve.

You can read them here.

The Vision for 2019

At the End of 2018, The Evening Project will be officially one month and six blog posts old. If I could use the analogy of a cricket test match, this has just been the first session of a very long game. And as is so characteristic of the first sessions, this was the hardest bit.

But I would say that we have got the momentum now and the broader vision is to just keep building on the momentum and try to win each session by achieving set milestones. For 2019, there are some specific milestones that I wish to achieve for The Evening Project.  

Content

I mentioned previously that I consider myself responsible for giving the readers an above average return on their investment of time at The Evening Project. I plan to do that by focusing on providing the readers with good, quality content that inspires a change of thought or a change of action aimed at improving the self.

The blog posts would focus on subject categories of mental models, books, psychology, decision-making, behavioral science, personal and professional improvement. Readers would find a new blog post each week.

Apart from the regular blog posts, I also plan to start a series of Curated Content – which would feature a suggested list of books, podcasts, blogs and articles that are worth giving a read. This will soon go live as another tab in the menu bar.

Communication

We have an email subscription service in place. I think the best part about a subscription service is that it allows me – the content creator, to reach you -the readers, directly. If you love the content on our website, I invite you to be a part of the learning community and sign up for the new post updates.

You can find the option to subscribe in the right sidebar if you are reading on your laptop or at the bottom of this post if you are reading on the mobile.

Up until now, the only way for readers to access The Evening Project is if you quite literally type those exact words on Google.

I plan to change this.

As I write this letter, I am in the process of setting up social media properties for The Evening Project. The idea is to make it more convenient for readers in terms of access, updates and visibility.

At the same time, I plan on improving the SEO to help us rank better for search engine results.

In 2019, Content and Communication are going to be the primary areas of focus and development for The Evening Project. The idea is to use these two Cs of Content and Communication to build and create a Community.

Thank You

Mark Manson in his book, The Subtle Art of not giving a Fu*k argues that the real determinant of success and happiness is in asking yourself the question

“What pain do you want to sustain?  What are you willing to struggle for?”

When I think about the future for The Evening Project, I think about the above two questions. I hope someday that this website will have readership in millions but along with the love for that result, I am also in love with the process. It’s something that I am willing to struggle for.

Next year, we will continue to have a variety of good content on the website. We will continue to grow together. We will continue to build a community of learners.

There is so much to look forward to.

I wish all my readers greetings of the new year.
Thank you for reading The Evening Project.

Nirmit