A blog is a thinking tool.
Anytime you write your thoughts anywhere, you’re forced to make your thoughts more precise. Technically my physical notebooks and my Evernote app (which I’m writing this post in) fulfill this purpose. The blog is just a publicly accessible, searchable context.
Publishing aids learning by stress-testing your thoughts in the seas of public scrutiny.
It’s about exposing your thoughts to the real world, outside of the bubble of your head and your private spaces. This can seem a little bit scary, because you’ll be subject to criticism and possibly abuse. But ships are not meant to stay safe in the harbour.
You don’t know which of your thoughts are actually valid and useful until you send them out to sea. You don’t know what you’re mistaken about. Thoughts should be tested and verified in the public domain; that’s how you improve as a thinker. (I could be wrong or inaccurate about that, but only by publishing will I be able to solicit corrections and improvements for that. That’s how I learn, by borrowing the minds of others.)
If you publish, the world will tell you what it likes and what it doesn’t.
This isn’t a magical good by itself, but it’s helpful information- especially if you’re interested in making a name for yourself in the world, or you’re interested in developing as an individual among others, etc. [1]
Important thing you should do early that I failed to do: be ruthlessly selective about your target audience.
I had illusions about being a public intellectual that wrote for everybody. So I would pander to public sentiment by writing angry or incendiary posts. It felt immense to get tens of thousands of hits, but it was ultimately a little hollow. I was trying to impress and please people that I didn’t really care about. If I could go back in time- or what I ought to do now- is to sit down and really think about who you want to talk to. And focus entirely on them, at the expense of everybody else. Because why bother pleasing people you don’t actually care about?
Ask yourself what your desired end-state is.
It can be hard to figure out what you should do with respect to where you are at a given point in time. You’ll probably think “I want to do what I’m doing, but better.” It’s far more effective to think “Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? What are the things I have to do along the way to get there?”
A blog is a conversation starter. Who do you want to have conversations with? [2]
When I started out, I simply took random walks in the spaces that I was interested in. I wrote 2000-3000 word ruminations about why I liked complex systems or why I resented large organizations. While I’m glad for having written them (I’m always glad for having written anything at all), I think a lot of it was non-directed energy just diffusing out. Which is suboptimal.
Now I realize that it makes much more sense to write with intent. To write wanting to make a case, to compel or inspire action of some sort. Or even just to make a quality list of items that helps people think. The point is, whatever you make, make it with purpose. Who do you want reading it? How do you want them to feel about it? What subsequent action do you want them to take having read it? In this regard a blog is a weapon.
Spend time thinking about your most fundamental ideas + principles and express them as succinctly as you can.
Sometimes you do need to take a random walk over the ideascape to see what you actually think. But once you figure out what the point is, what you actually want to say, extricate it from the wreckage and polish it up.
Write to solve your own problems.
I think this is the most Important thing of all. I think this is the central thing that I want to say above all else. If I took my own advice, and when I rewrite this post, this will be the single most important line. Hell, it will be the headline. How to write to solve your own problems. That’s all I’ve ever been trying to do, in an elaborate, roundabout way. I have a very diffused, hyperactive and ill-disciplined mind, traversing ideaspace the way an active child might traverse physical space- spinning round and round until she gets dizzy, knocking into things, laughing and squealing, then suddenly getting exhausted and falling asleep. A blog is a record that allows you to observe your own mind.
I’m quite inspired by this post on Ribbonfarm on How To Fall Off The Wagon. All progress can generally be reduced to progress along one of those three fronts- goals, values and processes. So write down what your goals are. Write down what your values are. And most importantly (for me), write down your behaviors, processes, habits. Once you have all of that in writing, you can ask yourself how you ought to improve them, and what steps you need to take to improve those things.
For me, I know what I care about and I know what sort of person I want to be, and I know what I want to do with my life. To a relatively high degree, I think. What I don’t have are habits, behaviors, routines, structures and processes that help me get there. So that’s what I need to work on. And to improve those things you first need to list them down. And a blog is a good place to do this sort of distributed, outwards thinking.
This was a clunky, ugly vomit but I’m publishing it anyway #yolo
Notes
[1] The only time this doesn’t apply is if you’re completely solipstic- if you’re content with spouting pure gibberish for your own entertainment. Then you don’t need a blog.
[2] One of the coolest things about blogging is that it will set you up to have awesome conversations with people from high places that you didn’t even know existed- but that’s more of a perk than a central motive.