I read this quote from Twitter recently that I really liked:
Blogging is creating async read access to your brain. Highly recommend. – @brian_lovin
I feel like this is very true for me because a lot of the time, I write posts in an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness manner, so in many ways it is in fact a direct look at how I think (barring the limitations of language of course). Basically a documentation of thought processes. More often than not the beneficiary of that documentation is myself, or at least, a future version of me; but having a blog also gives other people insight to what and how I think.
Somewhat related: I read this post from Jamie Rubin about unposted writings:
Before a post goes into the world, there is really only one person who can judge whether it is good enough to be posted and that is me. This blog is a one-man operation. I play the role of writer, editor, and marketing department all by myself. And sometimes I write something and think, nope, that just isn’t very good. It used to be that I’d post the bad stuff anyway, but over time I realized that I wanted to show the very best of what I write. So I’ve gotten better at weeding out the bad stuff.
This time I found it interesting because it’s the opposite of how I approach things. Generally if some thread of thought surfaces in my brain that I feel is good enough to at least start writing a post about, I’m going to write it out and probably publish it, even if the end result is not super coherent. It’s part of my blogging process being mostly unfiltered - you kind of get the bad with the good here. It’s part of an evolving thought process: if ever I decide to revisit the topic in the future, I have this reference for my thoughts on it at the time and see how my views and opinions may have changed or become clearer or whatever.
How you blog is of course a mostly personal affair. What topics you discuss, what quality of writing you expect from yourself, these are all personal decisions, and what works for some people may not work for others. I don’t expect other people to blog the same way I do; it’s not like I’m a wildly successful blogger worth emulating, but I think my methods generally work for me.
I do find that recently my standard for “what deserves a blog post” has gotten a bit too high though, as I am blogging less and mostly reliant on the weeknotes to document my thoughts, and I may be leaving too much on the table, leaving quick thoughts mostly to social media or the notes folder. I’m kind of tempted a bit to lean in towards blogging more like I did in the early days before social media, with shorter, more frequent posts. We’ll see how it goes.
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