Why Should You Blog?

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. - Henry David Thoreau

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it. - Benjamin Disraeli

These are 2 contradicting quotes. Aren't they? On different levels both are correct. The first one motivates me for taking action. The second one motivates me for writing. I shall explain below.

What is Blog?

Wikipedia defines it as "A blog (a contraction of the term web log) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video."

It is the easiest and simplest way to express your creative ideas and sharing (expressing) it to the world. Just like music, painting or dancing, I think writing an art, a form of expression. It has manifested into many forms such as Books, Blogs, Twitter, etc.

Blogging vs. Other Journaling Techniques

Journal or a diary is where you record your personal thoughts, ideas, happening or feelings. There are many ways of writing a journal and many advantages to them. Simplest being, Solving problems – if you write your problems down (rather than retaining in your mind), you gain more clarity, thereby a step closer to solving the problem. Blogging is a way of journaling.

The advantage of blogging compared to other forms of journaling is that, presenting of the ideas creates a mild pressure for you to work on an idea for a longer period of time and actually completing it. Earlier, before my blogging days, when I had an idea, I rarely recorded it. Even if I had recorded it, I didn’t have enough push to pursue on the idea later or I was just embarrassed to look at it and work more on it. I could not get the motivation on the idea back. But now, if I have an idea, I immediately note it down. Later, I choose on the various idea bits that I have and work on them because I am going to present it to an audience [Sometimes I assume that I have a huge audience]

Even if you don’t have audience (now), the reason that it will be presented in public is enough to work on it and finish it. I am not saying that that reason alone is enough. But, that surely is an important reason to give you a nudge in right direction.

For me, Blogging is the first step towards efficient journaling.

Self Exploration: Tool for Unearthing Your Creative Talent

Have you ever had a conversation with a friend that went for a long time and you got insights and ideas through the course of conversation that you were surprised to know that you had them in you?

Have you experienced great ideas popping up in your head while reading a book?

What happened to those ideas? They just float away. This has happened to me many times. There were some topics/ideas that I was very much interested in and wanted to explore more on it. But, the next activity consumed upon it and eventually, I dropped those ideas as I lost touch with the emotional splendor that the idea created when I first conceived it.

As I mentioned before, when ever I have an idea while talking to someone or reading a book, I immediately make a note of it – a small piece of paper, type it up in a notepad, compose an email and send it to myself, or sometimes I even record it or tweet it. Later I go and work on those ideas to convert them into blog posts.

Blogging helps me to consciously choose on an Idea and explore on it with my current knowledge on the subject. It urges me to do active research on the subject and gain more knowledge rather than reactively spend (waste) time watching TV. [I say ‘waste’ because I later regret having spent time on TV].

If you keep blogging regularly, you are in constant touch with your creative self, Creative either in the ideas or while communicating it or both. It’s an interesting experience. Try it

If you keep constantly digging within yourself, you will keep proceeding closer to your heart and find out what is in it. I think it is better explained in this article: How to find your life purpose in about 20 Minutes

Share without Care: To create happiness for yourself & Value for Others

Until recently before I started blogging, I believed that I did not have anything worthwhile to share to others that they could gain value from it. That thinking got me nowhere in my desire to become a writer. I did not write a word, but the feeling of emptiness because of not writing remained.

So Instead, I thought, I would share whatever I can assuming it is going to be of greatest use to a huge audience that is going to read it. I just changed my perspective of looking at the problem. And that did the trick, gave the motivation I needed. At least I am able to create something as against creating nothing and this process has made me immensely happy in the past few weeks. And about the value creation to others, I still don’t know if I could provide some big value to others. To find that out, I have to share what I can and see how it helps others. I have decided to wait on it for feedbacks.

But, I believe this: No matter what situation you are in, if you are a person who is not dead, you can provide value to others.

Revenue Generation

The awesome part!

It’s generally said that, if your content is good, you can attract more readers, the more the clicks on ads, the more revenue you can generate through Google Adsense.

I have taken the first step towards it. I signed up for Google Adsense and my approval came through 4 days back.

I earned $1.39 in the first 2 days. It was an awesome feeling.

I have just started on revenue generation and not going to focus much on it yet. Anyway, I am doing more research on it which I shall share in the future.

Motivation & hunger to learn

The more you write (blog), the more you will consume your ideas. The more you consume ideas, the faster your resource gets used up. You will start to consciously pursue for ways to generate ideas. You need to take in a lot of input in order to generate output.

Books, movies, Blogs are the main sources of input for me. I have been reading Robin Sharma’s “The Greatness Guide” and there was a chapter of his book based on him asking a bottle of water to the the air-hostess. Indeed, it was a very short but it was a very educational chapter.

I see myself getting more engrossed in consciously searching for topics and doing research for my blog post. In the process, I am learning a lot.

Conclusion

I don’t have to write on how the “internet” and “being online” is stunningly awesome. If I have to tell you, open your orkut or facebook account and you will get it. A blog is more like that, except it is more tailored towards expressing what you are doing as against asking someone. If you are a kind of person who spends time in above mentioned kind of social networking sites, then it’s a safe bet that you like expressing yourself. Just try blogging and see how much fun it is.
There are lots of interesting people and ideas involved in the blogging that are waiting for you to join them.

There are certain tips and ideas I had implemented to fuel my creative flow and generate some ideas. My favorite blog post by Scott on the topic – how to increase your creative output is very insightful.

There are some other tips (other than what is mentioned in the link) that have used some of them to keep myself motivated. I shall write that in my next post.