While I’ve been writing for a few years now, I never took this blog seriously. It was a fun little hobby, and I would knock out a post each week. The problem was that over time, I grew consistently frustrated by my lack of growth.
Why I Started Writing
In 2017, I was living in Irving, Texas. Just before moving down there to live with my brother, I started listening to several podcasts and reading books. Before then, I hadn’t been much of a reader; the closest I got to reading in my spare time was almost finishing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, until I lost the book with about three chapters left.
The chain of content led me to arrive at the person to whom I believe is truly credited with inspiring my writing, a man named Tynan. His appearance on Noah Kagan’s podcast was the first time I went back to listen to an episode multiple times. His crazy life and interesting stories had me hooked. At the time, I was also consuming everything Tim Ferriss put out, eventually introducing me to Mr. Money Mustache.
All of these influences coalesced into an idea; what if I actually started doing the things I read about and heard? So I started the first trial by riding my bike to work. This was a life changing experience after screaming at Dallas traffic from my car twice a day for months at that point. The cool breeze passing by in the Texas summer sun was nice. It was also a great chance to catch up on more podcasts, leading to more inspiration.
Time to Grow
After years of putting out the same content, I’d grown significantly as a writer but fear I’ve stagnated as a creator. The process has become pretty uninspired. The answer came to me from an unexpected place, an anime podcast. A creator I’ve long followed discussed the evolution of his content over time and said, “if I’m doing exactly the same content as I’m doing last year, to me, I failed.”
In last week’s video, I introduced a more formulaic approach for handling trials as experiments. Giving each post an identity as a piece of the scientific method is my attempt to change the content I’ve been trudging through the past year or so.
In regards to content creation overall, I feel I’ve never really taken it seriously. On a run earlier this week, I thought a lot about how I might work more consistently, as well as tools and strategies I could use to get better. Many posts I’ve written feel like a cobbled together mess, in hindsight. Forcing a post out was a way to stick to a schedule, a good habit, but it also strained my relationship with writing on occasion.
In the past few days, I’ve learned a lot on creating better quality content, methods of sharing said content, and growing. I may not be able to go 100% in all directions at once, but I want to continue making small steps to improve where I can.
Trying Out Before Buying In 