Alright! This is starting to feel really natural now, I write in evernote on my way to and from office. I’m not sure why I prefer writing in evernote instead of WordPress but I’ll just stick with what works for now. If I can churn out two vomits per weekday, that’s ten a week. It’ll take me 10 weeks to do 100. I have about 920 more to go, so 92 weeks. That’s about two years. Seems doable, though of course that’s really premature. Making assumptions about what I’m going to be doing. (Holy crap the trains are crowded.) But this is a nice pace, i’ll cross 100 vomits in a couple of weeks. I wonder when I should start summarizing them, if I should at all.
I think I’m getting more excited about work. It’s taken longer than I’d have liked, but there’s so much to learn and so much to do. I wonder how much we can grow by the end of the year. I wonder what are the unknowns that are going to make things unexpectedly interesting. What are the quantum leaps? There are surely some!
I’ve been spending more time on twitter. There’s something about the structure of twitter that makes it seem more receptive to power usage than say a regular Facebook profile. This is partially because you don’t have to follow someone to interact with them. If you make something good, it can get shared in a more “atomic” way. I’m not sure how to describe this with more precision. I’ll get better at it in time.
Of all my social media profiles, my Quora posts have been most successful. This has given me a false sense of confidence and control, making me feel like I know what I’m doing when I really don’t. My Facebook profile was probably the second most successful but it was more time intensive. I enjoyed it but it was a huge time sink and I’m not sure if the juice was worth the squeeze.
If I study my own experience, Quora and independent blogging are the best uses of time. (In the return-on-time-investment sense.) I think search traffic has something to do with it. Blog content can be Googled, and Quora’s questions mean a ready-and-waiting audience for some questions. If you find a question with many followers but no answers, you’ve got an opportunity for engagement. The most general principle is always good and useful content- if you make something good, people will find a way to it. All you need to do is put it out there. The act of putting stuff out there is an entire science in itself. Reddit is an interesting and useful resource. So are online forums if you can find something that’s in the niche of whatever it is you’re writing about.
I’d like to get better at this. I suppose to be cheesy you could say I’d like to be a competent growth hacker, for my own ends and for the work that I do. But I don’t want it to be fake, forced or insincere. There has to be a middle path. “Give it time” is valid but incomplete. What should you do with that time? You should be constantly producing, that’s the inescapable first principle- but how do you get better? In a way it’s like learning a musical instrument. You have to practice hard everyday. That goes without saying. But once you’ve got that down- and I think I kind of do- how do you turn that practice into something deliberate and constructive? You don’t want to fall into the trap of noodling around the same things over and over again. You need to identify your weak spots and demolish them. I don’t do this well enough. I’m not deliberate enough- and I think this applied to a lot of things. Music, writing, engagement.
I wonder about curation and pruning. Let’s talk about my blog, specifically. I have about 700-800 blog posts at the moment. Should I just leave them be? Intuitively I think the answer is no. I should make it easier for visitors to just plug-and-play.
Which brings me to the question: what use is my blog? What value does it have in the world? It’s a little useful to some people looking for some things. I think it should function for me as a tool of inquiry. What have I learnt? What do I need to talk about?
Maybe I can flip it on its head and think about what not to do. In 2011 I used to write cliche “guide” posts like how to x or y. These posts helped me learn to write, but they weren’t very useful because I was- and still am- a nobody. I can’t play poker for shit, so why should anybody care about what I have to say about life lessons from poker or anything like that? I can’t write very well about things I know little about, and it shows. I really have to mine my own experiences and be as painfully honest as possible- only then is the writing any use.
Consider the “everything is technology” lens. Paul Graham’s essays are useful because they provide us with a way of seeing things. Arguments and perspectives are presented, and you can try them on like eyeglasses. Every book or work of art is a pair of eyeglasses. Different glasses have different effects on different people depending on your previous experiences and perspectives. Two pairs of eyes can be affected very differently by the same pair of glasses. So trying to make a useful pair of glasses for everybody is nearly impossible- you’ll end up with something very bland, neutral, forgettable. The thing about cultural lenses is that they’re hard to try on and put aside. They’re not so easily interchangeable. The effects can be permanent. This may or may not be desirable. Life itself is impermanent so… Some effects are more persistent than others, and harder to reverse. Let’s leave it at that.
(holw shit, this word vomit ended up at over 2000 words. spltting it in two)