It seems like the greatest deterrent to actually being where I want to be lies in just starting.



For example, when starting my blog I kept thinking that I had to keep reading other people's blogs in order to figure out what I'd like to have in my blog. I kept thinking about all the content I should be adding in, and all the stuff that other people's blogs have. And I've been thinking about starting a blog for months, so I have been doing all of the aforementioned things for months.



And just now, I caught myself thinking about doing the same thing again. But, it does me so much better to actually start something than to just read something . After all, I've been reading the same type of content for months, and looking at the same sites for just that long. And yet I don't have any life-changing realizations that have come from that. So If I continue on that path of consumption, will I come up with something? The answer, of course, is no. It seems ridiculous to keep doing the same things expecting a different outcome doesn't it?



So that's why I have this. I wrote something up real quick. It took around five minutes and just like that I'm much farther in my goal than I would've been if I browsed Twitter/blogs/product hunt/hacker news for 50 times the amount of time it took to type this. Is this a quality piece of writing? Probably not. But the only way to get to that level of quality I'd like is to keep practicing. And this is practice.



[edit: adding more to this essay. 11/29/19]



Now, I'd like to address the other side to starting with writing a post. Why?



The main reason is I've noticed that the way to influence people, make changes, and achieve what I'd like to do is through writing. “Words make worlds” as my comparative lit professor would say. This is an especially powerful idea. Revolutions and wars have been started and ended through writing. To give an extremely recent example, Bitcoin started through a white-paper anonymously published online. That's a piece of writing that created the entire space of blockchain. Kinda wild. And it makes sense.



Now it's time for me to practice making worlds.



Onto the more practical reasons for writing, the main art form which I consume content from is literature. I love reading, and I read tons and tons of books/articles and everything in between every year (including reddit, twitter, etc). It's time I start contributing to this body of knowledge. Thanks to the web, this is a relatively easy task. I don't need to get published in any kind of way. No one needs to read my content and decide it's good enough to be spread on a platform. The only thing stopping me is myself, and the quality of the work I output. Also, most of the people I admire are skilled writers. Why wouldn't I want to join them? To name a few: Obama, Paul Graham, etc. To be frank, I think writing has more power than code. It's the oldest impactful skill there is.

"Most of the people I look up to are skilled writers"



Also, it's time to start making an effort to breach into the fields I'm interested in. Which is mainly just the startup ecosystem at this point. If I want people to take me seriously, I'm going to need evidence of my past work as well as reasons for people to discover the work that I've created. I've seen creators do this through Twitter, youtube, blogs, podcasts, and more. Out of the options I've got, I think writing is the most effective for me personally. As a side note, I'll definitely be making more of an effort to engage with the community on Twitter. I don't really like the idea of publicly sharing my opinions and ideas because I don't really like the idea of putting myself out there in that way. That's a blog post for another time, but for now I'll have to grit my teeth and push through.



It's time to build an audience, because once I have an audience I can launch the products I want to build and have people actually use them. Having an audience means a group of people who take you seriously and listen to the ideas you have. Writing is the path for obtaining that audience.



Or something like that.