Writing is hard

There’s a lot of temptation to churn out something simple — perhaps an immediate reaction to an article I’ve read or video I’ve watched, a longer response to a tweet or something a coworker said, or perhaps something controversial and AI-generated to draw people in — especially when I haven’t put much of my own writing out there before.

But I’m suppressing that urge. Whatever I put out there needs to be good. It needs to accurately represent my ideas, and while it doesn’t need to be perfect or timeless, I don’t want to look back at this blog and feel that everything I posted was transient or rough.

My goal is not to win internet points or rile people up; ideally, it’s to be a useful source of information or inspiration in areas I have a reasonable amount of experience or done some level of thought.

The aim of this post in particular is to help me understand why I decided to add a blog to this site in the first place. I’m sitting on a medium-length list of ideas and thoughts that I may write about (I won’t list them here, as that would reduce my motivation, which is already lower than I want it), but it might take some time before I am ready to publish something that fulfills the above desires.

Part of the issue is that I just haven’t had as much experience yet as many of the folks whose writings I read and find valuable. But I don’t think that I shouldn’t try at all until I reach that point, as this is a skill that I believe is important to develop, and to develop any skill you need to fail a bit and learn from it. So I need write something sooner than then.

And that brings me to my next point — it takes actual effort. Yeah, for a post called “Writing is hard” I took a while to get there, didn’t I? In order to get something that reaches the level I’ve specified above, I’ll need to take some time with one of my ideas, polish it a bit, and come up with something that actually adds value to the conversation. I need both the raw time allocation and the motivation in order to get there. And “there” seems like it requires a positive feedback loop of feeling like I’m getting genuine, useful thoughts across as I work on a post. Or perhaps I’m wrong and it’ll always be a difficult mountain to climb until I’ve reached the top.

Unless I’m the one reading this: I’m not really publishing this for you. It’s for me, but if for whatever reason you did get all the way to this point — thank you. You must think that I have some useful ideas or thoughts for you, and maybe you’ll see them published here at some point soon! Or maybe you relate to something in here, in which case feel free to share any thoughts with me. For now, I apologize for the gratuitous navel-gazing, but I did just want to get something written and posted, and this felt like a reasonable way to start.