Every time I watch a Dwarkesh Patel episode, they always talk about why blogging is valuable and why everyone should do it. Not only because it helps you share your opinions with more people and influence them.
Tangent
Is the purpose of all writing to influence people’s actions? It seems like it. Like telling a joke makes someone laugh. Telling a sad story makes them sad. Writing is kind of like programming people’s minds. Although those examples are more about the power of stories than writing itself. Even consider a shopkeeper who keeps a list of inventory with profits and item counts. They're keeping those records to influence someone's future actions. One use case: giving the list to a tax collector, who then calculates how much they owe. In that way, the records influenced the tax collector’s decision.
Blogging also lets you flush out your ideas and analyze them deeply. Only then can you tell the difference between your good ideas and the bad ones. This effect trains you to come up with more good ideas and fewer bad ones, which is a great skill to have.
So I guess this will be like an introductory blog. Although I’ve published a couple of articles here, it’s been years since the last post. From now on, I’ll try to be more consistent with it, and we’ll see where it goes.
The reason most people cite for not blogging is that they don’t have enough ideas. I suspect that’s wrong for most people. I think we all like to think, and most of us probably have unique ideas, whether they’re good or not. Also, not sharing your ideas is kind of a bad thing. What if you're the first person to have a particular idea? You won’t know that unless you share it.
Some of you might say blogging isn’t the only way to share ideas, for example, you can talk to your friends about them. But I don’t know many friendships where one friend just calls the other to share an idea they had. I don’t think that’s a common part of most friendships. Sure, they could talk about it next time they see each other, but there are problems with that:
- The person who had the idea might forget it.
- The friend might not be interested in that particular idea.
- The meetup might revolve around a task or event, making it hard to introduce a new topic randomly.
Blogging has an extra feature that makes it incredibly powerful: it's on the internet. Potentially, the whole world is your audience. If your blog is good, someone who’s interested will eventually find it. Also, readers can check it out whenever they have time, just by clicking a link.
Blogging also gives you a superpower. It’s one of the best ways to play the status game. Even many smart people and subject matter experts don’t communicate much with the general public. Their communication is often limited to close collaborators. So if you start blogging about something, even if you’re not an expert, and people find it interesting, you become the expert in your readers’ minds. That opens a lot of doors and earns you respect.
So because of all of the above (and more), I’ve always thought blogging was cool. I just kept giving myself reasons not to do it. But I guess that stops today.
I’ll be back tomorrow with another blog (article, same thing).