I wrote 30 blogs in 30 days earlier in the year. It was very…difficult. Most of the work is not particularly great, but it was never about quality. It was about consistency. I did not miss a single day. Every day I wrote at least 300 words or more, and published it. The idea was to build a discipline for writing. There are many posts and books extoling the virtues of writing, but I can only speak for myself; I did see a marked improvement. However, as soon as the schedule was over, I stopped writing. Why?
Accountability
A publishing schedule introduced accountability. The schedule made me accountable to write. It forced me jam my ideas on to the proverbial page and make something of them. Schedule created an anxiety, but it also made work. As soon as the schedule was gone, my accountability was gone. And the procrastination came back. So starting this website is to bring back the accountability.
But Why not Medium?
I published originally on Medium. Medium is a platform to publish longform text. It started out as a platform to cut through blogspam, the content farms, and to counter the publishing oligopoly Google/Facebook on English language content. They wanted to be the gatekeepers of high-quality ‘content’. Instead, it is home to the same type of blogspam, the gatekeeping has been outsourced to ‘publications’, which have decided to err on the side of clickbait.
Plus, none of my audience actually came from Medium. All of it came from my own social shares. Medium was a thorough disappointment. I gave up the experience and the control for nothing. So I decided to just purchase some WordPress hosting. My ideas needed a home, it should be mine.
The Shape of Ideas
I believe that human beings have an active subconscious. Hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas go through it every day. Most are fleeting, passing you by. These are like vapor, without shape. Even those that do remain long enough to be in your conscious thoughts never solidify for you to work on them. Ideas need to have Shape.
Imagine how many Billion Dollar Ideas™ have been lost to these winds. Worse, imagine how many ideas could have saved or improved hundreds or thousands of lives, but just withered away. Even if we factor out the grandiose, there are many ideas that can change your personal lives that are never worked on long enough to become real. We owe it ourselves to work on them.
Writing, at least for me, is a way to turn my ideas into solid concrete. I write not to share what I have learned, but to understand what I already know. Writing brings me clarity that I have never achieved otherwise. The issue has always been how often to do it.
The Schedule
The schedule this time around would be twice-weekly, or weekly, or maybe even bi-weekly. I know now that I can write, and I should write, but frequency is important. A daily schedule is great, but it is limiting. The pressure forces me to write, but never all that well. I need to be accountable not just for frequency. I also need to be accountable for quality. I am not writing for a content farm, or SEO.
I am writing to express and formulate my thoughts. To do that, I need to give them time and space. That would never be possible in the daily grind. Ideas need to have the space to be useful. To be helpful. To be clear. To have Shape.