A Quincentennial Celebration, It Only Gets Better.
A quincentennial celebration means remarkable milestones. For your information, a quincentennial relates to a 500th anniversary. It doesn’t matter what the 500 means as long as it relates to something to do with the 500 and an achievement.
It may be as simple a thing as making your first five hundred dollars, shillings, pounds, euros or whatever the currency. It may not just be five hundred but five hundred thousand or even five hundred million. Why not?
I will exclude something to do with age especially if it has to do with a living human being. None of us is five hundred years old. But I do agree that a 500th anniversary of a lineage is possible. Or the 500th anniversary of a place such as a town. Lest you think there has been or is going to be a big celebration about a 16th-century event or thing, let me make it clear from the onset that this is about Daily Focus celebrating 500 articles on the site, with 99% written yours truly.
Precisely, we have 507 articles, 2 written by a guest writer and about 5 presented for publishing on behalf of organizations we believe are doing great work for the betterment of society. Irrespective of the authorship, we are celebrating churning out these great pieces of writing week in and week out to ensure we share insights that can help people in society to be a better version of themselves through our motivation segment.
We have not shunned away from writing boldly about political issues of the day, especially in the Kenyan context where this edition was founded. Much as we are not a media house given out to business, we have shared our views of where we feel things are not working as expected. If there was anything we felt needed to be done to make Kenya better, we shared it through our politics segment.
Not only motivation and politics but we have also shared, widely and wisely, personal and professional opinions on divergent issues touching on the environment, business, sustainability, lifestyle issues, men and women, technology, agriculture and much more.
Reaching 500+ articles has taken a lot of discipline and devotion. It has meant creating time every week out of busy schedules to sit down and deeply reflect on the topical issues before putting the thoughts down on paper. The hard work has never been in the writing, but rather in the thinking and researching of the content. Sometimes it meant doing the research and eventually writing even when we (I) felt like doing it.
Yet there are days when there has been a psyche and drive to do a super article, but the environment was not conducive. One ended up jotting down a nice topic and some key points looking forward to a quiet time later to do the super piece and by the time they got to that time, the topic became irrelevant, and they ended up writing about something completely different.
But such is writing, it has taught me the art of commitment and resilience as a person. I know what it takes to commit to a course which offers me a hint about what it takes to commit even to relationships in as much I look forward to committing at some point in time in the future, hopefully soon. And that is a story for another day.
Writing has also made me value a good read. Before I can write, I usually read a lot. As I do the reading, I get to collect some nuggets of wisdom along the way. And as I have been writing more and more, every article has made me a better writer. Every article helped me to be innovative and juggle the writing process, enabling me to come up with new ideas and styles of writing.
In a nutshell, by continuing to write, I have become a better person. A better thinker. A better conversationist. A better communicator. A better emotionally intelligent person. Coupled with the experience I have had in working, which has formed part of the stories, I have become a better employee and employer. I have become a whole different person, in a good way.
I should also note that writing has done something more. It has made me raise my standards as a person and my expectations of others. I don’t mean standards in locking out people, nay. By raising the standards of what I expect of myself, those I interact with often have had, by association, to also rise. Talk of raising each other. They become better through the reading and our interactions however little that better might have been.
So, this is a celebration of the Daily Focus. But much more, it is my celebration. It is what I have become courtesy of the writing. It is what I look forward to becoming with more of the writing. And the places it may take me. For now, cheers to clocking 500+ articles, and for becoming the person I am now, 8 years down the line since I wrote that first article.
