Yes, I am back. My last post was 6.5 years ago in 2017, rambling about customizing Vim, which I never really take advantage of (I still use Vim but not those fancy plugins). Since then a lot has changed both to my proffesionally and personal life. I plan to document about my current life here and my thoughts of various things. I promise to be persistent on writing regularly but a voice in my head(and probably yours as well!) said well you said the same thing last time and probably many times over at similar promises, what makes this time different?
Well, it could end up same like last time or many other attempts to be consistent doing something such as doing excercise or eating healthily etc. Looking back this time is not so much different than previous ones in terms of motivation and formats etc. But it shouldn’t be a reason for not doing it, right? This is probably the best of way I can think of of achieving the goals I have(will be revealed later) so I have to keep trying, right? Just like the guy who did many experiments and failed but finally succeeded in making the light bulb. The experiment he did each time might be very similar to previous ones I assume. But eventually with enough variations accumulated the ones that work will emerge.
So why do I start writing blog again? Many reasons. The immediate cause is that I think writing helps me think better, improve my communication skills. Over the past few years, more and more I realize that thinking clearly is both important and difficult. It’s important both to making decisions at work or at home. I always blame myself of not achieving certain goals for not working hard enough. While there’s definitely a certain truth to it but many times I was running hard on a wrong or sub-optimal path. If I were to have a clear thinking and chose the right path, the likelyhood of success will be higher.
But thinking is hard. Very hard. I’d avoid hard thinking by resorting to watching YouTube videos or doing other chores. It’s so easy to get distracted these days. Mobile phone is the most sited source of distraction but you can at least set DO NOT DISTURB or power off. Can you set DO NOT DISTURB or power off a baby or your other loved ones? No, you have to deal with them. All these things will take away your time to think properly. So how does writing help with it? I think writing is concrete form of thinking, which makes it easy to measure. Instead of saying I need to think more, which is hard to measure and take accountability for, writing more is much easier to track and evaluate. There’s a quote which I can’t recall where I read it goes something like “What can’t be measure can’t be improved”. So if want to improve my thinking, making sound decisions, I need to write more.
Besides being easier to measure, writing is inherently a mental exercise. To write somethings, even just a simple topic, I need to let different viewpoints in my head to “battle” with each other and pick the one that’s most convincing. I believe doing these exercises more often will lead to better thinking ability.
The next reason for blogging is I feel there’s too much going on in my head and I need a place to dump them. Yes I have a private note (it’s Notion BTW) and I regularly dump things to it but I feel it’s not enough. It’s like taling to the walls. Not that it’s not helpful but it has limitations. For one, there’s no feedback from other people. What I view as brilliant or stupid ideas might turn out to be the exact opposite if I put it to test in the real world. And writing to myself will not force me to think as hard as I were writing to the public. I cut slack in writing notes because I know the only audience is myself and those notes will not be as useful as they appear to be.
There’re other benefits of blogging and writing such improve communication skills, which I won’t elaborate this time. The key thing is I’m getting back to it and I’m going to do it regulary(one post per week for now). I will also spend some time later to improve the site a bit as I noticed the theme I’m using is falling behind and I want to give a fresh look. Also as mentioned I want to have a comment section so visitors could leave comments. But one thing at a time.
I’ll see you in next post.