Why start a blog that nobody will read?
I believe that nobody will read this blog. Why, then, am I starting this blog?
I’m writing for my future self
First off, I’m not being completely honest that I expect nobody will read this blog. I hope at least my future self will read this blog and get something out of it. The tutorials I write will help me make things faster, the explanatory posts I write will teach me, and the food reviews I write will help me pick a restaurant. My own posts will contain my personal tastes and assumptions, so they will hopefully be more helpful than any random blog. For this post in particular, I hope that in a few months time when I still have no readers and I’m struggling to write another post, I can come back here and see why I should keep writing1.
I’m writing to improve my communication skills
Next, writing is useful for a huge number of things. Communication is everywhere and writing is one of the most common forms of communication. At Amazon, my current employer, I constantly write emails, messages, and documentation. Being clear and concise in my writing is incredibly important. When I don’t pay attention to what I’m writing, comment threads can go on days with both sides taking past each other. Better writing means less of that and more time spent on things I enjoy.
In my experience, I only get better at a task when I practice. That’s not to say practice always makes me better, since I don’t believe that. I played a huge amount of Squadron Tower Defense and League of Legends and I didn’t improve at either of those games. What I’m saying is that the minium requirement for getting better at writing is to practice writing. So, writing this blog at minimum gives the chance to improve at writing.
I think the second part of improving is self-reflection. What made writing a post hard? What made writing it easy? These king of questions are extremely useful. For example, writing this post became much easier once I figured out that I was writing for my future self. In the future, I can try writing with specific people in mind, rather than an ambiguous “public” and I can see how this strategy affects my writing.
Teaching is the best way to learn
I believe that teaching is the best way to learn. I’ve found that trying to teaching a subject for an hour makes the information stick in my head longer than studying a subject for an hour. Writing about the subject forces me to connect all the information in a simple way, which helps my own understanding. I took a quick look to see that there’s some scientific research to support for the idea that teaching is the best way to learn, and that’s good enough for me.
Writing is engaging
Finally, I’m more engaged and involved when writing than when I’m reading Reddit. I spend a lot of time on Reddit and I think I’d personally enjoy life more if I just wrote instead of going on Reddit. I don’t put too much stock into this reason since I believe that there’s a huge number of activities that I could find engaging, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Conclusion
These are my personal reasons for starting a blog even though I don’t expect anyone to read it. It might be useful for you to ask yourself whether or not the benefits I expected actually came true.
Personal notes
What did I learn from writing this post?
- Setting a goal made writing the post easier
- What’s my goal for this article? I want you to read the article and to use my pros and cons to determine whether or not you should write a blog.
- Focus on one topic
- It was hard to write about learning in public, why I’m personally starting this blog, and justify my beliefs about writing all at the same time. The concepts sound related, but I found it hard to fit them all together, though I did end up justifying why I believe writing and practice is important.
Footnotes
Or why I should stop writing, if the benefits I listed here are no longer convincing.↩