I thought about starting a blog in the past, but I never went any further than writing a few test articles and playing around with WordPress. A lot of silly things were holding me back. I worried about stuff like:
- What will I blog about? / I don’t have a topic yet.
- Is blogging the best medium for me?
- There are a lot of blogs out there — will anybody read mine? Will it be a waste of time if I don’t have an audience?
- What if I’m no good at it?
When I took the time to think through my concerns, I realized that the best way to answer all of the unanswered questions would be to start blogging and find out! After all, it wouldn’t cost anything but time (I am already paying for web hosting).
What I want to do is create massive value. A lot of people do creative things because they are interested in self-expression. I don’t have a problem with that, but the phrase itself leaves me uninterested. The term self-expression does not begin to describe what I think of as “creativity.”
If I engaged in true self-expression, I suppose I might talk about my love of bacon and foxes and take lots of photos of me playing hockey. I know, I know. When people use that term, they mean they want to be creative and express something coming from inside.
I see my role as becoming an originator of new ideas. This is challenging. A lot of creative people talk about ideas or inspiration coming from God in the middle of the night; they talk about tapping into the “Source” or “being in the zone.” It’s that feeling you get when things that never existed before are coming out of you, or when you create something you never thought you were capable of creating. I had that experience when writing one of my recent articles. I wrote it from a state of inspiration — time completely disappeared. When I read the finished piece, I knew that I could not have predicted that I would create what I did. The process of creation forced me to combine some ideas in new ways, which resulted in something original — not necessarily world-changing, but new nonetheless. I understand what artists and songwriters and authors mean when they say that the ideas came out of nowhere. It can be exhilarating.
My goal is to originate useful and true new ideas and create massive value. The ideas could take any form. I’m not limiting myself to any particular medium, but I have to start out with the writing, reading, and thinking skills I have now. My practical, pay-the-bills career so far has been graphic design, but I see it as a dead end. I mainly work with typography and shapes in corporate identities. Though I admire great artwork, I don’t have the patience to learn to draw life or do really beautiful graphic work. And it will take some time to develop skills in other areas that interest me, like movies and speaking.
What to write about is a tough problem, because I’m interested in everything! The experts suggest choosing a specific focus for your blog, but I would get bored writing about just productivity or just architecture or just anything. In that famous quote about the fox and the hedgehog, I am definitely the fox (it’s a nice coincidence that they are my favorite animals):
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Archilochus (7th-century b.c.e.)
I suspect that by writing, I will find a focus. As I learn and grow as a writer, I will eventually decide what kind of topics I prefer to dive into deeply.
This blog will probably end up having a personal development or personal philosophy theme. I know that there are millions of personal development blogs out there already, but it’s an area that I have a real interest in. Plus, many other topics can easily be subsumed by that theme.
I can tell you what kind of things I won’t write. I am not interested in responding to the news of the day. I hate politics. I have opinions about what is going on, but talking about long term cultural trends is more meaningful to me than analyzing the latest anger-inducing news from Washington.
This won’t be a personal blog. I will talk about my own experiences from time to time, but I won’t be posting photos and notes about my daily life. That’s too boring.
I am interested in the timeless and the universal. For example, my favorite kind of fiction deals not with accurately depicting the present or the past, but with presenting characters and plots that could happen at any time in history.
I’m interested in humanity. I think a lot about where we came from and where we’re going, as a culture. I have certain ideas about where we should be going. We should become more rational, more independent, more courageous, more loving, and better critical thinkers, for starters. Encouraging others to grow will help me create the kind of world that I want to live in.
The Trial Begins
I made a commitment with myself to write a decent article each day for one month. Never in my life have I done so much writing. If I end up hating it or producing nothing but garbage, I can quit after thirty days. If I skip a few days, it’s because I care about quality more than quantity; it would be far too easy to post a handful of words every day forever (that’s what Twitter is for).
So that’s my plan. By making it public, it becomes harder to quit.
I won’t count my first five test articles. As far as I’m concerned, I started this trial on February 3. That gives me until March 3 to produce thirty reasonably good articles. This one will be number five.
Who knows what I will learn and what I will decide to do next? I bet it would make a pretty good article, though. 
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