Continued… “Ya but you could try submitting some of this work — then you’d get noticed, you’d get paid. You could have sent that last post to some journal as creative nonfiction, or you could’ve developed the traffic guru post into a proposal magazine article or something.”
Well sure, but then I would have been spending a lot more time on proposing and submitting and emailing and explaining then doing what I really want to do — and what I’m good at — which is continuing to learn and challenge assumptions and generate new insights.
In this regard I have the same (hubristic) attitude as Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“I just have my ideas, but I’m not a public intellectual. I’m a thinker. In the end, the only thing that counts is the book. I have an obsessive disorder, it’s not like I’m interested in my own welfare. Tomorrow if someone pays me a million dollars to talk about blueberries, I won’t go. This is what I can afford. If you offered me a million dollars to talk about the weather tomorrow at noon, I wouldn’t do it. No. And I usually turn down the ones that have a lot of people with ties. I have a thing about ties.” [Portfolio]
I write because it helps me think, and I blog because it helps me write. In a sense it is a fear of commitment, which is a legitimate complaint from my perspective. As I mentioned in the earlier post, “continuously learning and being creative” is a biological and unquestionable need of mine.
Everybody likes learning and being creative to a degree, but for most people it is not the highest purpose in life, as I’ve grudgingly found it to be for me. Some people grow up with primary assumptions that they would get married have a family and a steady job, go on pleasant vacations and eventually retire: these are the unquestionable needs, from which everything else follows, including the need to do something creative.
For me it’s otherwise. Of course I would also love a family, a stable career, pleasant vacations, etc., but those aren’t even considerations until my primary need for ongoing creative development is taken care of.
If I start submitting things and getting them accepted, then my subsequent work will be expected to fit within certain creative expectations. I have little interest in forming myself according to last year’s models (much less the decades-old models that many publishers are still going by). What I’m doing in this stage of my development is establishing a discipline and demonstration of continuous growth.
In business terms, my core competence — or my competitive advantage, or my brand — is to be progressive on a conceptual level, to continuously challenge old assumptions and generate new insights. Qualities like being entertaining or authoritative are secondary for me (other people do those far better than I ever could).
But while my work is endlessly developing, it is still necessary to periodically finish something coherent to mark the way forward. An aversion to settling on ideas long enough to accomplish something with them has always been my weakness (even while it is my strength, as mentioned in the previous paragraph).
Combining the need to set things down in a coherent form while continuing to move forward is precisely what blogging is best suited for — and this has helped me tremendously. If that little “Publish Post” button wasn’t so handy I might never have produced anything yet; I might just have continued to develop ideas in my notebooks, trying to get it all perfect (which we know can never happen, at least not indefinitely), with no end in sight.
My break occurred last August when I had some thoughts about the credit crunch that seemed to be worth opening up about. By good fortune I happened to spontaneously decide to set up a Blogger account and by the next day I had worked out a coherent set of remarks. The next weekend the same kind of inspiration occurred on a different topic.
At that point, knowing I had to use this opportunity to work on productive discipline, I challenged myself to write a similar “essay” every week. I did. The momentum stayed up (more or less) and I now find myself able to match that week’s worth of production every few hours.
It’s funny to think about how much I actually disliked blogs back then. I almost never read them and had no intention of ranting, raving, musing, “curating,” sharing quirks, or doing any of the typical blog… stuff.
That attitude has changed through the course of the year as I became more familiar with things, and now I even find myself thinking thoughts about how to be a “successful blogger,” which was kind of antithetical to my original intention.
“Kind of antithetical” does not mean counterproductive. In fact, trying to be popular can be an effective way to invigorate learning and change. And resisting change for the sake of not seeking popularity certainly doesn’t jive with my mission of “challenging assumptions and generating insights.”
This attitude will last for a couple of months, after which I’ll cycle into another phase and find myself developing a new creative regimen and discovering new ways to be productive — could be more or less bloggish, we’ll see.
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