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Hey friends,
So now that my team and I are taking this website more seriously, and now that I’ve decided that being a writer is a dream of mine, I’m starting this public journal.
I do a reasonable amount of writing privately (thanks to Morning Pages, Roam Research and the Day One app), but one of my life philosophies is that everything is better when it’s public.
And so, I’m going to make an active effort to write on this section of the blog more often. I won’t overthink it – I’ll just write stuff into Ghost and I’ll hit the publish button, and maybe share it on Twitter if I feel like it.
In a strange way, there’s something very liberating about having a public blog. It’s almost like Twitter (but a bit more long-form), and almost like Instagram stories (but a bit more long-form). It’s a place where I can write literally whatever the hell I want, and if people want to read it, they can read it. And even if no one reads it, the act of writing and publishing is valuable anyway.
This feels particularly liberating because in the past, I’ve thought of this website as a “serious” place for “serious” blog posts only. Obviously, to publish anything on here, it needs to be SEO keyword-researched and needs to actually be valuable, and have a clickbait title, and have a perfectly formatted cover image etc. And my YouTube channel is a stage worse. When the audience was small, I felt free to post random shit on there and not care about its quality. These days, I care a lot, and anytime I post a video that doesn’t perform well, I enter a spiral of subclinical depression.
But with a public journal, there’s none of that pressure. I can just type away, hit publish and not worry about quality. This is what dreams are made of.
⚡️ The Surge of Inspiration
I’m writing this post sitting on the armchair in my living room at 10:30pm. In fact, why not – here’s a cheeky photo.
What’s prompted me to write this post at night? Well, it was a surge of inspiration from getting off a coaching call with Matthew Dicks. Matthew is one of my favourite authors, and wrote the book Storyworthy which was my favourite non-fiction book of 2020.
I emailed him a few months ago asking if he would be my storytelling coach. I knew I wanted to become a better storyteller, and now that my YouTube channel makes decent amounts of money, I’m in the glorious position where I can literally pay people to teach me stuff.
Anyway, our first couple of sessions were focused around storytelling, and Matthew gave some excellent advice, and feedback on my own stories. But pretty quickly, the sessions turned into a combination of therapy + brainstorming + general chit-chat. Both Matthew and I are huge productivity nerds (he’s also, like me, writing a book about the topic). He’s a fair bit older than I am, but I feel we’ve generally approached life in a similar way, and so the conversations are always invigorating (at least for me).
In our session earlier today, I asked Matthew “to what extent do you set goals?”. He laughed and said “that’s funny, because I’m huge on setting goals, and in fact, I write a blog post every month where I update my readers about my goals”.
He then dropped the bomb that I’d been completely unaware of – that he’s been blogging every day since 2003.
I’ll let that sink in. He’s been writing a blog post. Every single day. Since 2003.
It helps him think, it helps him figure out what his ideas are, and it’s a great way to journal in public. He spends around 30 minutes writing the post each morning. He often starts by writing “I’ve been thinking about…” or “I recently read…” and lets the ideas flow from there.
Hearing this was hugely inspiring, and gave me the surge of energy that’s led me here typing this out straight into my website’s text editor.
🗾 Le Plan
Do I want to try to blog every day? Nah probably not. I feel I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and I don’t want to have yet another thing that I feel compelled to do even when I don’t feel like it.
But it’ll certainly nice to have this as a place to publicly journal whenever I do feel like it.
Have a wonderful day.
