This blog post covers 6 reasons why you (yes, you) should start a blog. We discuss why writing and publishing your work is a good idea. To summarise, good reasons to start writing are:
- to develop a better understanding of yourself and the things around you,
- to improve the quality of your ideas, and
- to use writing as a creative outlet.
Good reasons to start publishing are:
- to collect feedback from others on your writing and thinking,
- to give yourself a little push to produce better work, and
- to build a track record.
Some months ago, I watched a YouTube video from productivity expert Ali Abdaal. Ali recommended reading the book “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon and I decided to give it a go. It is a funny looking book, square-shaped, small and bright yellow. It made me question whether I would learn anything from it. But hey, Ali recommended it. So I began reading, and the book convinced me that starting a blog is a good idea.
The main message from the book is to start creating and sharing work. Austin Kleon encourages the reader to do this in small, incremental steps. The form in which you share work is unimportant: it can be a blog post, an e-mail, a Twitter message, a YouTube video, or something else. The book made me realise that you do not need to be a subject matter expert to be allowed to create and publish on the internet. In fact, the book encourages you to start creating and not care about the amount of people that consume your work. This idea lowers the bar for entry. My favourite quote from the book is:
Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.
I like the idea of building a habit that helps me to express and improve myself. Expression helps with understanding yourself and embracing your own uniqueness, things that will likely improve your life.
One of the greatest benefits of writing is that it provides a mirror of what is happening inside your mind. Until thoughts are on paper, fuzziness around ideas can keep existing and you might not notice logical gaps in your reasoning.
Alexey Guzey’s “Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now” puts this nicely:
The analogy is as follows: you probably had experience learning some math or physics or whatever else where 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. 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.
Writing allows you to de-tangle the mental spaghetti inside your own head, allowing you to come to a greater understanding of yourself and the things around you. Writing also helps you to come up with better ideas. Ben Kuhn even goes as far as stating that writing, and the more interesting ideas he had because of it, has helped him to form better friendships.
At the same time, writing can serve as documentation. Putting mental models on paper allows you to reach back to those models at later points in your life. And as you learn to structure your thoughts and improve your reasoning skills, you become better at persuading with words. In this way, becoming a better writer can become beneficial in other areas too, like your career. Last but not least, writing can serve as a creative outlet, something that you enjoy doing.
Hence, the main reason to start a blog is, simply, to write. Publishing is secondary, but still a valuable step. One reason publishing is a good idea is that sharing your work will allow you to collect feedback. Another, and I found this to be an important one, is that creating-to-publish will make you work harder for the quality of your content. It forces you to dive deeper into topics and learn. Doing this will help you create better work. Publishing also allows you to build a track record online that you are able to share. This can be helpful for your career.
If you want to learn how to set-up your own blog, check out my other blog post on How to create your blog with Hugo.
Happy blogging! 😉