I have said many times and I still firmly believe that the six months I spent blogging every day, seven days a week, led directly to the creation and launch of Praxis. Creating begets creating. Posting ideas and words publicly every day puts you on the hook. It makes you face fears. It makes you ask “Why not”, instead of, “Why”. It stirs the subconscious and unearths latent ideas and inspiration, and forces accountability.
Not long after launching Praxis, I stopped blogging here daily. I’ve continued to blog once or twice a week at the Praxis blog, but I’ve done very little writing outside of what’s directly relevant to the company and its broader mission. That’s been wonderful and will continue. But it’s not enough. I’m not sure what took me so long to realize it, but I need to blog every day.
I’ve been getting that restless feeling more and more, and wondering what to do about it. I’m having the time of my life and facing new challenges every day with parenting, Praxis, and life in general, but I’ve felt just a little intellectually and spiritually sluggish in recent months. Even my weekly blog posts for Praxis were sometimes a challenge. When writing doesn’t come easy it’s a sure sign that I’m not ingesting enough new ideas. When I’m reading or listening to interesting podcasts or lectures frequently, writing is easy. In fact, it can’t be resisted and I often have to push other things out of the way to get the overflow of ideas out. There is some kind of process my brain engages in when new ideas are fed in. It does something to them and spins them back out reconstituted and reformulated. I suppose it’s a kind of idea alchemy – though as anyone who’s read this blog can affirm, it doesn’t always result in the output being more valuable than the input! It almost doesn’t matter the quality of the inputs or outputs. Nor does it matter if anyone reads it. As long as ideas are flowing in, being processed and transformed, and flowing out, I feel fulfilled and happy.
Blogging every day is the best way I’ve yet found to not let myself forget to consume a steady, healthy quantity of ideas. Faced every day with the blank page, you realize quickly when you don’t have enough material to work with. When you do, the posts write themselves and the challenge becomes keeping it concise.
That’s a lot of setup. The point of this post is simply to say that once again I will be blogging here every single day, seven days a week, until further notice. I’m not sure what I’ll write about or what themes might emerge. I just know I need to do it to be my best self.
Take a listen to this great episode of the James Altucher podcast with Seth Godin and you, too, may be inspired to blog every day.