30 Years. 30 Days. 30 Women. 30 Snippets of Advice. 30 Challenges.
By: Amina Samy
Tags: 30 Year Old, Life Lessons, 30 Day Challenge, Birthday, Year In Review

30 Years. 30 Days. 30 Women. 30 Snippets of Advice. 30 Challenges.

I’m getting old.

Rather, I was getting old when I started this experiment 30 days before my 30th birthday. I’m still getting old, but now getting more old than I was getting back then.

Anyway, I digress.

I turned 30 in March of 2019- and to some (including myself), that’s a bit of a milestone year.

To mark the occasion, and to ponder, muse, and prep myself for what I hoped to be an exciting year of growth and transformation, I reached out to 30 women in my life, and asked each of them to send me a piece of advice, and a daily challenge or a task for me to complete in the month preceding my birth anniversary.

And then I shared it all on Instagram.

I had intended to properly reflect on this experiment shortly after celebrating my 30th lap around the sun, but one thing lead to another, which lead to another, and before I knew it almost 7 months had passed with me putting off this exercise.

Better late than never, but this is how it all went down.

Rewind a sec. Why did you do this?

I love a good challenge. I love competing, and I love competing with myself first and foremost. There’s something about a set number of tasks, over a set number of days, that just really motivates me to perform. So I figured, why not. I find that I perform better, when I hold myself accountable to a public, social network. It’s like Instagram is my accountability buddy. Even if no one sees it, or cares. I know it’s up there. And I will push myself for that, and that alone. I don’t know if it’s the wisest or most effective tool, but it’s worked for me in the past and continues to work for me. I have an amazing network of badass females. I am in constant awe of the amazing women I keep around me locally, and globally. I saw an opportunity to benefit and grow from their experiences and to sponge off this shared brain trust. I also saw a great opportunity to publicly display my admiration for each of these 30 women- and a little love is never a bad idea. I wanted to push myself to think about things differently, and to go outside my comfort zone in a creative way. This seemed like a great opportunity to force myself to do so.

Ok great. How did you do this?

I sat down, and made a list of 30 women in my past and present that I admire, and who I feel would have good advice and challenges for me. I prioritized women who I haven’t been as in touch with as I’d like, and women who I’m not as close to on a day-to-day basis. It surprisingly took a lot less time than I expected.

Once that final list was sorted, I sent them a text, email, or message explaining the challenge and attached a very basic Google Form for them to fill out.

I then obsessively refreshed said Google Form waiting for responses.

And then I started.

Using Instagram Stories as the platform, I shared a profile of the woman (how I know them, and what it is I admire about them), their advice (or pieces of advice), their challenge, and then a short photo or video of me completing their challenges.

One a day. For 30 days.

Well. What did they say?

A lot.

Like a lot, a lot.

The full list is shared below, but some recurring and very universal themes: