The Dent - Blog Like No One’s Watching

Despite barely posting to my blog for months, I’m still weirdly precious about what I post there. I always feel like I should only post longer form posts or something that I’ve over thought.

And then I read this post by Nitin Khanna:

[S]top moleskinning your blog. It’s not a perfect, pristine place which must always reflect the best work you’ve ever done. It’s alive. It’s a creative space where your ideas should stare you in the face so you can always work on them, and when they’re presentable, you can show them to the world. If you don’t ever want to, that’s fine too.

This is the 2,402nd post to this blog. I have many posts that I feel precious about over the years, but my process for writing is all about speed. I want to get my thoughts out as they exist in the moment, and then move on. If I change my mind in a few hours, weeks, or years, I’ll just write a new post with my new feelings.

I know other people feel differently about their blogs, and we all probably have one or two sites saved to our RSS feeds that post once every year, but that one post is always worth catching. I totally respect those creators as well, but it’s not how I operate.

I believe in quality, but I also believe in shipping. And not treating any single post as if it must be perfect before it goes out the door has helped me ship more posts than I ever expected I would 10 years ago when I started this blog.

While I am not as precious as others about what I post, I think that over time, my volume of work has made me a far better blogger, and writer in general. No post is perfect, but simply doing the work has hopefully made it so that there is a clear trend line of quality that goes up and to the right over the years.

Finally, by publishing and getting feedback constantly, I’ve reduced the friction between idea and blog post. At this point, you could wake me up from a deep sleep, tell me I am going to die unless I get a post up on my site in 15 minutes, and I’d basically shrug, write the post, publish it, and go back to bed all with a few minutes to spare.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is blog however you want, and be as precious about each post as you want to be, but hopefully this gives you a peek behind the curtain of how I think about this site. Thanks for coming along with me ❤️