That’s right, I’ve decided to quit blogging.
I’m retiring from blogging to focus on reading, writing, posting some of my ideas online, linking to interesting content from around the web, curating it, making it meaningful and relevant, adding my own commentary and criticism, pointing out insights and fallacies, telling the occasional story, stirring the pot, bringing the laughs — oh, so many laughs indeed…
Continued: Yes, I’m joking. But I’m also serious. I haven’t exactly figured out how the jokingness and seriousness of this sentiment are intertwined…
Looking back at my last dozen or so posts, I’m tempted to delete half of them. My standards have degenerated as I’ve tried to post bits that I hope some people might actually want to read — the kind of thing I see on other blogs.
Another way to say that is I’ve been dumbing myself down — ironically, for a readership that isn’t even out there. I actually get more traffic on the longer and deeper and more challenging posts — the kind I keep being told don’t belong on blogs. After a year of doing this I came to the understanding that nobody wanted to read that type of thing. But as I’ve learned to put up more conventionally blog-like posts I’m surprised to learn those (at least the ones I manage to produce) are actually less popular here.
And it turns out that people I know in real life will never ever read any of this no matter how far I try to bend for them.
Which is kind of a liberating realization. For the past two days I’ve had trouble getting up the energy for this. Now I’m not necessarily any more energized but at least I don’t feel like I have to be energized. Instead I can get back to the mindset I was in a month ago and just let my natural motivation drive me to work well into the middle of the night.
I went through the same type of phase last year too. After a very productive September and October (writing more conventional essays, not really blog-type posts) I found myself out of things to write about in November. I kept writing but didn’t like the results; I felt like I was forcing it too much (like I have been the past few days).
Then I found my way to the next level with A Sense of the Future – the kind of meaningful and coherent and advanced essay I attempted with The Use of History, Philosophy of Enterprise, War as Retreat, and Origins of Creative Genius — an actual research essay that builds on the work of others, rather than just a thousand-word riff — but didn’t quite pull off until November. That graduation carried over into The New Pragmatist and The Will to Relevance — not to mention a relatively monstrous 15,000 word essay about management, strategy, and careers I’ve been sitting on since July.
Now the “thousand-word riff” is something I can pull off almost daily, and I’ve also managed to cultivate the ability (which I had always lacked until last year) to incorporate references into my writing. (In school I used to look up references to use after writing an essay, just to have the required 3 – 5 citations.)
I’m still working on narrativity and tone, using descriptive and impactful language, which has never been my strength but I hope to learn just as I learned to incorporate references and links. A year and a half ago I was all about chopping logic and word control, keeping things lean and analytic. I’m proud of the progress I’ve made and I hope it’s not too conceited of me to say so.
Remember it was never my intention to be a writer or a blogger — it just happens that I have to write to be productive doing what I do, which is thinking.
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