I wanted to start blogging for a long time but it took me ages to overcome my fears and blockers. I write company internal blog posts but that’s different.
Here are a few things that held me back:
- fear of my content not being good enough
- having nothing to contribute that hasn’t been said before
- fear of being judged and embarrassing myself
- feeling that I “just” need to read a bit more, to really understand, and then I can write
- I wasn’t clear on why I wanted to write
In this post I’ll talk about the last point, getting clearer on the WHY.
For a long time my procrastination strategy was reading more. I kept telling myself that, once I “knew what I was talking about” I’d have enough confidence to write. It doesn’t work that way! You can read 100s of books or papers and still not have enough confidence to write in public.
Learning about the benefits of writing helped me finally get started. Through my reading I ended up learning more about how people learn. It turns out I was thinking about it all wrong. I was thinking about writing as an output after having done the learning and thinking.
In How to take smart notes Sonke Ahrens tells the following story about Richard Feynman that stuck with me:
Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”
It changed my perspective on writing and helped me identify why I want to write.
I need to write more because it will:
- facilitate thinking
- help getting better at articulating and explaining ideas with my own words
- help remember what I read
- validate my understanding and find gaps
- help me improve, allowing others to poke holes into my arguments and provide useful feedback
- allow me to be more vulnerable and more confident
- help find interesting people to talk to, allowing others to engage
That’s it for today. I still have many other hurdles to overcome. I’ll do that by writing more, but shorter posts. Talk to you soon.
Pirmin's blog 