On Blogging

This was originally posted on my medium, when I wanted to start blogging on medium. I’ve deicded to leave it here for posterity.

I’ve always found my relationship with blogging to be an interesting one. I admire, respect, and consume a lot of content from blogs, mostly around technology and business, and it’s something that I’ve wanted to get into for a long time.

The trouble is, writing is hard. I mean this in three ways:

• Writing in general, as in putting down your thoughts and articulating them in an expressive, interesting way, takes genuine mental effort — shock horror, I know. Turns out having interesting thoughts, introspections, and ideas is easy, but fleshing them out takes time.
• Writing is something that I, and many others with perfectionistic tendencies tend to never finish. Content is always /just/ not good enough, it can always /just/ get a little more editing, and it’s always /just/ not ready.
• Writing is something that’s easy to assign your self worth to. This is another thing that I think perfectionistic people tend to do a lot. I find that you write your thoughts down and present it to the world (ha, as if anyone is going to read this), it feels like you’re putting a bit of your intellectual self on a platter. For someone like me, that feels pretty scary and vulnerable.

All that said, I think writing and expressing myself in a format like this is useful in a fair few ways:

• Writing down your thoughts and ideas presents you with a log of the way you think for posterity
• Writing down your thoughts forces you to properly explore and identify the thoughts you’re having, which, not only develops those ideas, also makes it easier to do that in the future

Some of these thoughts might genuinely be useful to somebody — be they future me, or even some random on the internet

Anyways, I’m trying to get more into the mindset of lowering my standards and be a bit more stream of conciousness-y, at least for articles like this. I think it would be cool to write a few deep-dives and more polished articles/stories/posts/whatever you call it on medium — on topics and areas where I feel I have real insight, or something valuable to contribute.

Anyhows, this was a quick blog post to try and start me off on hopefully a habit of writing.