One of the privileges my work and community involvement offer me is interaction with a large number of interesting people. About once a month, someone I meet will tell me they read something from this blog and that it had a meaningful impact on them.
In fact, this happened about 2 hours ago at a hackathon we're hosting at my workplace. One of the participants introduced himself and said he appreciated my post about how I royally screwed up in school. He shared how he went through a similar challenge, failing several classes and thinking he should just drop out, before finding his passion and turning things around. Like me, he ended up at one of the world's top software companies.
That conversation meant a lot to me.
Despite these kinds of experiences, I haven't posted in over 9 months. Still, I jot down notes all the time and have over 25 pending posts that are half-written. So, why haven't I posted?
The reasons mentioned in my first blog post, titled "Why Blog?" and published Nov 2011, are still relevant. Shared experiences are valuable. In fact, I've learned that there's even more value in creating content than I originally saw. Sharing experiences publicly has given me amazing opportunities to connect with and learn from others.
I think my biggest issue has been with agonizing over perfection. I spend hours writing, re-writing, regretting, revising every post. In that original post I said, "anyone can take 15 minutes while waiting for the bus to jot down a few thoughts." What I didn't realize at the time was that I'd never feel satisfied enough to publish after 15 minutes. Or 30 minutes. Or 120 mintues.
I crave more experiences like the one I described at the beginning of this post. Opportunities to form deep connections with others means the world to me.
I'm going to give two things a shot for a while. First, I'm going to relax my standards to a point where I'm less comfortable publishing, but still willing to hit the publish button. Second, I'm going to write on a regular basis, starting with 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Over time, I'm hope to see a rise in quality and a fall in time spent per published post post.
Well, it's been about 1.5 hours since I started working on this. Fuck it. I'm hitting publish now...
[Edit: 2 minutes after hitting publish, I saw that I'd forgotten to give the post a title. *sigh* Well... that gives me a good idea for a title.]
