Like most of you, we consume a ton of content from the internet everyday. My childhood reminds me, I did not have access to this massive knowledge bank (today’s internet) at that time. As a result most of my curiosities remain unanswered for years. This memory makes me feel so privileged, I can feed my mind whatever I want at my fingertip!
Though, when our turn of sharing comes, most of us feel shy or impatient to capture our own research, thoughts, realization, journey that might be valuable to someone on the internet. I am not considering a tiny social media post as a medium of sharing here, as those get lost very quickly, not searchable and not well organized to remain relevant and interesting in the longer term as today.
The Trigger
Honestly speaking, we attempted a similar journey multiple times in the past. We attempted blogging for the first time in 2011, exactly a decade ago. Needless to say, we were not persistent in any of our attempts and none of our old blog posts live anywhere on the internet. That might be an interesting journey to share in future.
What makes us repeat?
When we already have a decade of experience of failure in blogging, why another attempt? To answer this question, I have to recall what didn’t work previously, and what we are doing this time to overcome those.
Motivation
Though we wanted to share our research/work openly on the blog, the main motivation was to earn money out of it. Which made us impatient very quickly for obvious reasons. Over time we have realised the issue. It's not the money anymore.
Sharing thoughts/ideas to connect with other minds on the internet and learn back — is our main driving force now.
Expectation
We do a full time job for our living. There are a whole lot of family & social responsibilities before we can spend some time writing, posting & maintaining a blog. Sometimes it made us frustrated when we couldn't contribute on the blog for a month or so. We are aware of it now and will not feel guilty if we can’t contribute to the blog for sometime. We believe, sharing content slowly and steadily will have a compounding effect over the long term. Whatever it takes, we will ensure all our creations will be alive even after our death.
Running cost
When our motivation & expectations were not right in the past, we used to spend more money to keep the blog running. We really haven't considered running the blog for long without earning. As earning money from the blog is no longer a goal for us, we planned well this time and made running costs very low, so that we can sustain without earning from it and without cutting our pocket.
The book: Show your work
I recently read the book Show your work by Austin Kleon which I consider as the prime influencer to start blogging again. I highly recommend this book to anyone willing to pursue similar interests.
