I saw an idea about writing an essay/blog post each day here, and I am interested in trying it out. Why should I?
Upsides
- Practice formalizing my thoughts to be more persuasive. There are few skills more important in the grand scheme of things than being able to convince others of one’s ideas (assuming one’s ideas are marginally meritorious).
- Refine my specific thoughts. There is no better way of doing this than writing.
- Get my ideas out there for others to read. Perhaps I will update someone’s knowledge in an important way.
- Positive signaling. If someone likes my writing, perhaps I can make a new friend or increase my chances of getting a job I want down the road.
- Public writing gives me an increased opportunity to be proved wrong. A conversation can take place if someone disagrees with me, and perhaps they will change my mind.
- Facilitate longer-length thoughts. Let me break this down: I’ve noticed that when I Tweet a lot, I tend to propagate ideas in my mind that are tweetable. These tend to be relatively short ideas that get likes. It’s probably not ideal for me to walk around thinking at this shallow of a level. Yet, I like to publish my ideas and be thinking about ideas I can share. So if I transfer to sharing predominantly longer-winded thoughts, then perhaps my thinking throughout the day can be of higher quality.
Possible downsides
- A blog could hurt me financially or socially. I could be rejected from a job for making a claim that is just repugnant to a potential employer.
- An AI down the road could use my essays to make a predictive model of me and I could thus lose some of my power. To illustrate, to the degree life is a chess game, an opponent could develop a heat map of positions I tend to play.
- Could be a time waste in the sense that I may not necessarily be working on the deepest ideas. This could encourage quantity over quality to a fault.
- If I don’t post every day, people can clearly see that I am not perfectly reliable.
These are fair downsides, but I’m going to try this out. So I don’t give myself a life-long burden, I am going to set a time-bounded goal: at a minimum, publish a post every day until April 1. Thanks for reading!
Update: I was overall successful, accept that I sometimes wrote 2 posts one day and then on days where I didn’t write a new post, I updated one of these posts to count for my post for that day. I also lasted until March 24, which was a month from when I started, but not fully until April 1. I don’t want to make excuses, but I was running out of ideas at the time and didn’t want to dilute what I had written so far with lesser-quality posts.
Update 2: Here are some more excellent reasons to start a blog!