Why I stopped posting daily
My last post is from January 22, 2021. From one day to the next, I went from posting every day like clockwork to total radio silence. Over the past year, I spent a while wondering why I stopped. Well (obviously), I'm writing again – and I think I know what happened.
At the beginning of 2021, I was posting every day, and I had two goals. One, I wanted to get better at thinking, and two, I wanted to build an audience at the same time. Since then, I've since changed my mind about a couple of key things.
After I had written every day for a while, I ran out of stuff to talk about. On a subconscious level, I began to see that I had written most of the stuff that I'd been ruminating on for a while, and all I was left with to talk about were the daily, surface-level thoughts
I started experiencing serious cognitive dissonance between the effort I was putting in and the perceived value I was receiving. I wasn't thinking new things when all my time was spent writing up the things I'd already thought. I gradually began feeling that the things I writing were a waste of time for anybody else to read.
Eventually, I realized that the two goals I had were in conflict with one another: nobody wants to read your sh*t, as Steven Pressfield puts it. Writing for myself and writing to build an audience were diametrically opposed ideas. The one requires a constant flow of low-quality, low-information-density content that is valuable only to you, and the other more sporadic, high-quality and high-value writing that is mainly valuable to others.
As these two realizations slowly dawned on me, I toughed it out and kept going. I'm ashamed to admit to posting a lot of largely meaningless fluff in an attempt to keep my streak. Not long after that had become my sole reason for writing, my willpower ran out. I didn't write about stopping writing (because nobody was reading my posts anyway), nor did I miss more than one or two days before I stopped cold. I quietly came to the conclusion it was no longer worth doing, and stepped away.
With all that said, I started writing again purely because I wanted to. I want to share the things I'm learning with others, and I want to build an audience and get feedback on what I think. Moving forward, I'll be talking about the things that I find are worth sharing, things that I won't cringe at the thought of asking others to spend their time reading.
What kinds of things?
Well, this is an entrepreneurial software engineer's blog. I feel like writing about engineering from time to time. I'm going to. Same is true of real estate, of building a SaaS application, and – as of recently – of studying to get hired at a FAANG (the rigors of FAANG entry, even for experienced engineers, is a blog post for another day).
Oh, and the bonus reason I stopped writing is because I discovered we were expecting Kid #2 shortly after Kid #1 turned five months old, and life devolved into absolute and total chaos for a while. I'm sure that had something to do with it too.