Every month, like clockwork, I’d get a charge to my credit card for $10, a torturous drop to remind me of this, this website, the personal blog that I perennially re-design and post my commitment to filling it with words, but ultimately abandon, like the tulip that didn’t make it through the spring frost. Or maybe more like an ugly weed. we’ll never quite know until it peaks its head through.
Personally, my largest barrier to writing is self-doubt, that feeling that what you’re writing needs to be important or original. Around the time I last attempted to revamp this blogging thing, a relevant Paul Graham essay had hit the top of Hacker News: How to Write Useful.
Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn’t already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.
He sets a high bar for his essays and goes to great lengths to test these criteria before publishing.
(11/12/2020) Update: As can be seen from the rest of my blog this plan obviously didn’t work out. While part of me wants nothing more than to erase this post from my history I’m going to leave it here as a reminder. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll actually write those 100 posts.
At the beginning of the year, as a card-carrying member of the religion of New Years Resolutions, I set out some goals for myself, head high and future bright.
Have you ever gone to tell a coworker about a book you just read or a friend about a show you’ve been watching and completely blanked on the name, standing there for a minute and staring into space like the information you’re waiting for is a meteor that’s going to hit you at any second? No? Just me?
I have notoriously unreliable memory and it’s always been a fault of mine I’ve wanted to improve but the weight of it’s effect never quite hit hard enough.