Reflecting on my first year of consistent blogging

Several weeks ago, I told a group of fellow writers that I was having trouble coming up with a topic for this month’s post. “Why don’t you write about writing?” one of them proposed. At that moment, I wondered, how many months in a row have I been posting? I checked the history. Since I started my blog back up, the first post I published was on August 31, 2020: exactly one year before I’d click “Publish” on the post you’re reading now.

On this monumental occasion, I decided to reflect on what I’ve learned after a year of consistent blogging.

One post per month is enough.

This is actually the second incarnation of “Trying New Things.” Nearly a decade ago, after years of telling people, “I work in Information Technology, but my real passion is writing,” I was part of a “workforce reduction” (a.k.a. laid off). I decided it was time to try writing for a living, so I conducted a one-year experiment as a self-employed copywriter. This blog was supposed to be a vehicle to help me promote my business.

That year sucked almost all the joy out of writing for me. I spent a lot of the time trying to promote myself with little response. I did land a couple of good clients, which was fun. However, most of my prospects had unreasonable demands: some wanted to pay me a fraction of my rate, while others wanted me to basically lie about what their product could do in order to lure in more customers.

Then there were all of the “experts” out there with infallible formulas for generating blog traffic. One of the keys, many insisted, was to write as often as possible so subscribers would be perpetually bombarded with new content and my high activity level would boost my ranking on search engines. The notion of constantly churning out new content felt like a chore, and I only published two posts on my blog that entire year.

When I restarted my blog a year ago, I decided to give myself a clean slate: I archived my posts and rewrote my “About” page to focus on helping people with no strings attached. Knowing my tendency to overcommit, I decided to start with the humble goal of publishing one post per month. But as I went along, I realized once a month was perfect for me: it alleviated the pressure of “publish, publish, publish” and instead allowed me to take my time with each topic. If I wrote every day or even once a week, I wouldn’t have time to really process what I was writing. But after a month, I’d not only have a more thoughtful post, but it might even change my own life for the better.

This leads me to my second realization.

Writing helps me learn.

When I was in school, I always did better in classes that favored writing essays over taking standardized tests. I assumed this preference was due to my love for writing. But this blog helped me realize there’s more to it. When I write about a topic, it forces me to put ideas into my own words and to relate new ideas to things I already know. It’s these mental connections that make the difference between storing information in short-term memory (i.e., just long enough to pass a test) and in long-term memory.

For example, I wasn’t a very good student in science classes. My grades were average at best in biology, chemistry, and geology. I always found either the teachers or the subject matter boring. The one exception was a particular assignment in my physics class. We had to measure the relationship between the slope of a ramp and the speed of a marble rolling down the ramp. In retrospect, it seems like it should have been tedious–setting up the ramp, measuring the angle, measuring the time the marble took to roll to the bottom, tweaking the angle slightly, and starting again, and again, and again. But because our main assignment was to write an essay on our findings, I was able to turn the experiment into something personal. I wrote a thorough analysis and my teacher gave me a perfect score along with one of the most glowing evaluations of my academic career.

As with that paper, every blog post I’ve written in the past year has been a learning experience.

I’ve been trying to “hack” my clutter problem for most of my life, but it wasn’t until I decided to write a blog post about it that I took the time to dig beneath the symptoms and unearth some of the root causes.

Before I wrote about my experience climbing Half Dome in Yosemite, all I could focus on was getting lost in the woods on the way back down. But once I drafted my post and shared it with some colleagues, they showed me what I couldn’t see: reaching the summit was a big accomplishment, regardless of what happened afterward.

The 3-part series I wrote about exploring career paths taught me more about how to find fulfilling work than I got out of decades of job hunting and reading self-help books.

But as rewarding as writing these posts has been for me, that has never been my main motivation.

I’m a people pleaser, and that’s OK.

I’m much more likely to get something done if I feel like I’m accountable to someone else. Ever since I recognized this tendency, it’s bothered me. Why does something have to benefit someone else in order to be worth doing? Why isn’t doing it for myself enough?

For years, I’ve seen this as one of my deepest flaws. But recently, I decided to just accept this weakness and use it to my advantage. As much as I enjoyed writing, I had never managed to stick with a writing project for more than a few months. Then, late last year, someone introduced me to the concept of a “writing mastermind group.” Think of it as a support group for writers: we get together, share our writing goals, and then hold each other accountable and help each other overcome whatever obstacles we might be facing. My goal was to maintain a habit of publishing a post per month throughout 2021.

My group checks in once a week, and each week we share how much progress we’ve made and help each other get “unstuck.” We all feed off of each other’s momentum, so I feel like I need to stick with my commitments in order to help the rest of the group stick with theirs. I think a big part of the reason I’ve managed to publish a post every month this year is because I don’t want to let my group down.

Even the “trying new things” theme, at its core, is based in accountability: I believe that in order to persuade you of the benefits of trying new things, I need to lead by example. This drives me to not only stick with my monthly publishing schedule but to really think every post through before I click that “Publish” button. I spend almost the entire month thinking about my topic, drafting ideas, challenging them, learning about the subject, and learning about myself. I make sure every post I share is about something I strongly believe can help my readers.

But as with every other post, developing this one helped me discover a valuable lesson. Yes, I’m a people pleaser. But doing things for other people feels good. It validates me as a writer. It helps me feel like I’m able to do something meaningful, and possibly even leave a positive legacy someday.

This blog is my gift to both of us. Thank you for making it worthwhile.