How I wrote my first blog post and why you should too

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#writing#learning
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My reading habit has played a huge role in my learning for a long while now. Reading is not enough to master most ideas though.
Playing with them, setting them in motion by producing new thought is a much more powerful tool. For someone who loves reading, what better way to do that than writing?

I recently published my first post on my newly created blog (as of today, the website is a bit rough around the edges) and enjoyed this experience.
What stopped me from writing before that?

"What do I want to write?"

Here's the list of the answers my brain usually comes up with:

All of them are wrong, and the right answer is... ANYTHING. Really, Anything that will make it easy for me to right more. Anything so that when I want to understand more deeply or I want my future self to remember, writing is a piece of cake.

My goal is not to write something amazing. I know I won't for a while (and maybe never?)

So, let's ask the question again:

What do I want to write?

"I'm almost done..."

I actually lied a bit, but I promise it was only for the sake of a catchy title.
My first blog post on Thoughtful Fiddler was not my first post ever. And I believe each of my previous experiments holds a valuable lesson.

I wrote my first article for the company I work at with a team-mate in 2019. Back then writing something made me intimidated and I felt the need to do it with someone else in order to commit to a result and not give up.

My second one I wrote without noticing. I worked on some documentation on how to use a specific library with Typescript and did a training on it for the rest of the team. I had found no other documentation on how to do that online. Since what I wrote was already pretty clean, it was effortless to put it online.

My third experience was not a successful one. I worked on my own on a first draft, and then got it reviewed by someone else. I updated the structure based on feedback from the review, then had it reviewed again. You guessed it, I started doing some changes again. Before I was done, I cared less about getting it out and more about wanting to work on something else. Of course, it never got released.

My takeaways are:

"If I'm writing to myself, why should I make it public?"

I love starting projects and never finishing them and I'm probably not the only one. As stated by the 80-20 rule, starting something new is exciting, finishing is much less so.

Writing about these projects creates checkpoints.
Even with an unfinished project, there's always a bit of learning happening, something worth remembering. Writing helps getting focused on this gold nugget and making the most out of it before the fun of the project disappears (and if the fun doesn't disappear, new gold nuggets will come for sure!).

However, writing to myself is not that interesting. I don't need to make it fully readable and pretty. I don't need to get into the nitty gritty of what I'm thinking and make sure it all makes sense and articulates well.
I want to do that though. I want to learn more from what I do. Having hypothetical readers makes writing a goal in and of itself, and the benefits of writing a reality.

In a nutshell

Reading Why working quickly is more important than it seems was a great help in getting me started and a lot of what I say here comes from this read, go have a look!

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