%% ID: 13204925 Updated: 2022-01-28 %% ![](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png) # About Title: [[Other/Obsidian Starter Vault(Second Brain)/Readwise/Articles/Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now]] Author: [[Alexey Guzey]] Category: #articles Number of Highlights: ==61== Last Highlighted: *2021-12-14* Readwise URL: https://readwise.io/bookreview/13204925 Source URL: https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/ # Highlights why you should start a blog (to help others and to help yourself), what to write about, and how to start it. ^278319517 --- . I hope to persuade you that you should start a blog even if you feel that you have nothing to say and even if almost nobody will read it. ^278319518 --- What to write about ^278319519 --- But nobody will read my blog” ^278319520 --- It doesn’t matter ^278319521 --- the purpose of the blog is fulfilled, since this is the best indicator of your writing actually being helpful. ^278319522 --- Writing helps you think better ^278319523 --- writing not only helps you to understand what’s going on and to crystallize your thoughts, it actually makes you think of new ideas and come up with solutions to your problems. ^278319524 --- not just write down a few keyword-bullets for yourself. ^278319525 --- you should not only write blog posts but also have a private journal with coherent text about what’s going on in your life and in your head. ^278319526 --- you listen to the lecturer and you understand everything perfectly and then you try to actually solve the problem and you realize that you have no idea how to do it. This is the way thinking and everything else in the world works. ^278319527 --- You can read all the self-help books in the world. You can read all the blog posts in the world. It’s not enough. Good thinking doesn’t happen by passive osmosis of other people’s good thinking. You have to actually write essays and journals to debug yourself and your ideas. And then, crucially, act (a) on this thinking. ^278319528 --- But I don’t have anything original to say and I would be just repeating things said elsewhere on the internet!” ^278319529 --- Consider a university professor teaching a course. Does she say anything original? Do you think she should cancel her course because somebody else discovered the things she wants to teach? Or does she have to cancel her course simply because there is a similar course at some other university? ^278319530 --- Is it useful? Well, yeah, it is. But this brings me to a more general idea… ^278319531 --- Why unoriginal writing is useful ^278319532 --- it helps in the process of discovery and in the process of supporting underappreciated ideas. ^278319533 --- Mendel’s ideas were basically ignored for thirty-four years after his publication ^278319534 --- There’s not that many new ideas in every episode but if you listen one episode a week, there’s a good chance some of the most important lessons will finally get stuck in your head and will motivate you, even if not strictly teaching you anything new ^278319535 --- you’re not a well the produces art by itself. Most art is a riff off from something we experienced, saw, heard or read, thus necessarily not very original ^278319536 --- Take some blog post that you love and try to figure out what would you change in it / how would you write it ^278319537 --- when Tessa was just starting out, one exercise she did was she picked a song she loved, looked up the chords, and asked herself “what would this song sound like if I had written it ^278319538 --- A note on your ideas feeling less original than they actually are ^278319539 --- Your own ideas mostly seem trivial to you because you have the right concept structures in place to support them. You wouldn’t come up with these ideas otherwise. So it’s easier to notice your own ideas in a dialogue: your friend has different concept structures and notices them. ^278319540 --- Corollary: don’t be afraid to say obvious things. ^278319541 --- Corollary 2: it is ok if it seems to you that you do not have nontrivial ideas of your own. It is just hard to notice them. ^278319542 --- A note on academics and value of unoriginality ^278319543 --- You can’t publish a paper that would summarize five other papers and argue that these papers are undervalued in a top journal but in the real world the value of doing that might be very high. ^278319544 --- How to start a blog ^278319545 --- launch a blog on wordpress / github’s jekyll / whatever. It doesn’t matter in the beginning and you can always change the stack later. At first just make sure to actually publish something. I started out with github pages and then moved to Hugo on Netlify. ^278319546 --- “Writing is really hard” ^278319547 --- It will get slightly easier, though ^278319548 --- if you’re writing a post and you don’t like it, don’t be scared to just start writing it from the beginning again. I rewrite most of my posts from the ground up several times. Like literally - I write an intro and then if I don’t like it, I just try to figure out how to make it good and then rewrite it completely. The first draft is just there to keep the juices flowing. ^278319549 --- A few more reasons to write ^278319550 --- as many people with such potential as possible to start writing and to not be disaffected after initial apparent lack of success ^278319551 --- having a blog may be useful as a way to demonstrate that you think well when you e.g. send cold emails ^278319552 --- One more question to ask yourself about your writing ^278319553 --- Would you save the post that you wrote to your OneNote/Evernote/whatevernote if you randomly stumbled on it on the internet? If you want your writing to stay with people, you need to first make sure that it would have stayed with you! ^278319554 --- With writing, it is fundamentally the process of externalizing an idea which allows you to play with it in ways that I don’t think are so easy when it’s in your head ^278319555 --- Writing things down can reduce the amount of ego that you have as you fiddled with an ide ^278319556 --- There are other things like everyone has great thoughts in the shower for instance. It’s very common. But it doesn’t serve all purposes, especially if you’re trying to vet and find the nooks and crannies of an idea ^278319557 --- When you write it down, when an idea has inconsistencies or gaping holes, they are clear and right in the face when it’s written down in a way that is just so easy to gloss over when they’re in your head ^278319558 --- regular conversations, we express a lot of thoughts, which are often incomplete and untidy, but this doesn’t make them any less important. After all, the text is just my thoughts converted into words with some delay. ^278319559 --- More importantly, learn to rewrite. ^278319560 --- The best stuff is rewritten over and over again. I know everything I’ve published that has done well has gone through several drafts and incorporates feedback from dozens of other people. ^278319561 --- “But I’m not a great writer.” Neither am I. But I am great at taking my first “vomit” draft and spending weeks to make it better and better, over and over again. ^278319562 --- if you can’t find a community, write for a specific person with a big audience. ^278319563 --- Whether you write for a community or an individual, if you can attract the gaze of big accounts who promote your work, your audience will grow. ^278319564 --- Assume that you are ready to be one level higher than you think you are ready for. ^278319565 --- My writing style is a slurry of the writing styles of everyone I’ve read and enjoyed, with some pieces chunkier than others. ^278319566 --- I think my worldview and my reasoning style are too, it’s just less obvious ^278319567 --- Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense or are merely gut feelings. ^278319568 --- Putting thoughts onto paper forces them into an unforgiving reality where you have to look at the words as the same symbols another reader will see them as, unaided by the silent crutch of gut feelings. ^278319569 --- Good writers don’t walk around all day with 100,000 words of eloquent wisdom in their heads. No one can do that ^278319570 --- Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It’s become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. ^278319571 --- Struggling to express things that you’re thinking or feeling helps you understand them better. ^278319572 --- I’m here to tell you that none of these reasons should stop you from writing in your blog. I’ll talk about each of them in turn. ^278319573 --- Everyone offers pretty much the same reasons: they’re too busy, or they’re afraid to put something on “permanent public record”, or they think nobody will read their blog, or they think blogging is narcissistic. Or they’re worried that they either don’t have anything good to say, or they won’t say it very well. ^278319574 --- most importantly, when I’m on my death bed 50+ years from now, I will remember writing my novel. I won’t remember 99.9% of my life, or 99% of the people I meet, or 99.9999% of the meals I ate, but I will remember the story I created. It’s a part of me. ^278319575 --- It’s not just a method of creating memories, but a method of creating myself. ^278319576 --- The important people I know, the passions I’ve pursued, the things I’ve written are as much a part of me as my personality traits, IQ, physique, or anything else. They are what occupy my mind, my time, and my existence, for better or worse ^278319577