I haven’t blogged in about a week. I was away on some boot camp for a new job, so I was not in contact with the outside world on a regular basis. I will probably get to write only once a week, but I’ll try to keep up. Still feels great to be back.

As far as blogging goes, I am a noob. But I already feel myself that blogging teaches you many things that will be useful for later. Some examples from my own short-lived blogging experience:

  1. Staying up-to-date – This has two parts: feeding your curiosity while managing your time. These clearly contradict. You constantly search for new information, but can’t get off track for too long. When I started posting I started constantly looking for themes for my blog. It became a commitment for me. Like a faithful journalist whose living depends on it, I started looking deeper for more interesting stuff to read on the internet, and attending more events and interesting meetups. Just to get ideas. But be careful,  internet searches can easily throw you off focus. So if you want to stay focused and get things done, you have to remind yourself what you are doing this for. You find a cool subject, you dive into it, digging information conscious of your time constraints. This forces you to learn how to skim a lot of reading material and also know in advance where you are going on the internet in order to get more done with your time. At the end you have your sources of information and you know better how to pick your battles, and this is invaluable.
  2. Structuring your thoughts – Internalizing the fact that other people may read your blog makes you think differently. You suddenly gain this “air of reponsibility” in what you put out. So it definitely forces you to think if you have anything to say. Once you find that thing, you take all the analysis you did and structure it into a nice piece.
  3. Developing originality and creativity – I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. But I never took the time to do it. I thought that I have nothing original to say to the world, so the blog would be worthless. Adding value does not mean that everything you write or talk about has to reinvent the wheel. You can just start by reacting to some things that you read on other blogs or websites or see in your life. You can share about experiences, or you can just tell your friends about links to cool new things you found out about. That’s what I do mostly in this blog, because other people do it. I realized that you don’t become Einstein or James Brown from day one. It takes time and practice. And I sure love this kind of practice :)
  4. Save, don’t erase – This is actually something I learned from my time as a musician, and not from blogging, but I try to apply it to my posts as well. A friend of mine who is a musical producer would always record tracks, and even though they sounded really bad in the beginning he just saved them. I erased mine, because my sense of self-criticism and shame would not let me keep them even in the drawer! In the meantime I didn’t become a producer, and he went on to produce some acclaimed works and develop his own unmistakable original sound. Since he saved his work, he advanced little by little and learned from his mistakes. Every time he powered on his workstation he would already have something raw to begin with. Something to which he could add or from which he could remove. And he kept on perfecting it iteratively. This also relates to creativity. Yes, it’s true, it takes some talent, but it’s much more of an iterative process. It’s something that you hone by providing your mind with the right environment and the freedom to create. Your field of interest doesn’t really matter, you just get out there, jump in the water – you can always change things later. Companies constantly change their focus and their business models. Managers are not and should not be afraid to make mistakes or come out with a sub-perfect product, that maybe people from the engineering team are not comfortable with. They realize that a statement needs to be made to the outside. There is experience to be gained, and the only way is to learn from mistakes. Don’t be afraid to create something, and just leave it lying out there, until you come back to it the next time.

I am sure that all of these skills will walk with me to the future and will prove themselves useful at some not-so-distant point.

To summarize, blogging gives us a platform to get out there and say something to whoever is willing to hear. It keeps us conscious, and it’s a great practice in creating. If you are intersted and not sure how, or have any questions about any of the technicalities involved, feel free to reach out to me at james at sir-james-a-lot dot com