100 things I learned from starting a blog

Photo via vintagedept on Flickr.

Photo via vintagedept on Flickr.

I started blogging — and by blogging I mean doing it every day — a little over four years ago.

In that time I’ve written over 7,000 posts, transitioned into a job that pays me to blog full time (!), and made countless mistakes.

There aren’t a lot of hills I’ll die on but “starting a blog on something is the best way to learn about that something” is one of them.

Actually I’m not sure that’s a hill. Maybe a fistful of sand, but my blood will be splattered.

Seth Godin recently said the practice of telling himself the truth in public every day is legit itself invaluable. He would pay for it.

I would too.

With that I’d like to kick off a series (possibly a year-long series) entitled “100 things I learned from starting a blog.”

Technically everything on this blog I probably learned from starting a blog but a lot of it is just quotes I collected or instruction from other people.

These 100 things will be things I specifically learned from starting my blog — things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Plant your flags accordingly.

The art of (only) writing

Photo via Angie Garrett on Flickr.

Photo via Angie Garrett on Flickr.

Blogging is so many different things. Connecting the dots, linking to other folks, videos, photos, and the list goes on.

But without words none of it matters. Without words none of it gets pushed forward into the content it eventually becomes. Words tie everything up and send it into the ether.

On Wednesday I had a couple of afternoon errands to run about 20 minutes from my house. I was trying to line them all up so I could bang them out without having to wait or go back home because I’m a fan of efficiency.

I couldn’t so I found myself with a pair of 40-minute empty time blocks. Not really enough time to return home but what to do?

I pulled into a Starbucks during one of them and sorted my email. During the other one I pulled into an empty parking lot and sat there and wrote on my phone. Banged out 400 words in about 15 minutes.

At the time I was sort of irritated that my errands weren’t lining up but now? I’m grateful they didn’t.

The reason is that I was liberated by how little I was distracted in writing on my phone. This seems like a strange thing, I admit, I’m usually trying to get away from my phone.

When writing a blog post, though, I didn’t have time to insert links and get photos — I made notes where those should go later — I just…wrote.

As soon as I was done I wanted to crank out another post. And another and another. It was why I started blogging to begin with.

The other thing this forced me to do, I realized, is to go back and edit everything. Those links I missed, I have to insert them. Those photos that aren’t there, I have to post them. My disdain for inefficiency is only surpassed by my disdain for editing so it’s probably a good thing when I have a system in place that forces me to edit.

I’m back at my computer now — the typing is much easier. No links or videos or photos, though, and my Twitter app is definitely off.

The shortest distance between you and success is humor

Photo via John Ragai (Flickr)

Photo via John Ragai (Flickr)

Everybody does the news.

Buzzfeed does the news, the NYT does the news, your micro local site does the news far better than an individual can do the news.

That doesn’t mean, as a blogger, that you shouldn’t do the news. It just means that you can’t only do the news.

Here’s the deal. Writing and blogging is a news-driven (or more specifically, interest-driven industry). Folks read about the stuff they’re interested in and ignore the rest.

With everybody doing the news — even at the most micro level possible — you have to either be more creative or more funny.

Creative is really, really hard. Especially if all you have is a regular old blog. Funny, though? You can do funny.

If you can do the news in a funny way even slightly better than everybody else does the news regularly, you win.

Building a better take

I’ve been thinking about this post from Dan Shanoff off and on for the last month. In it he discusses taking back the take and what it means to be smart in a not-so-smart world.

Actually, I can’t stop thinking about it.

All of this came to a head after the Ryder Cup when I was writing what I write after all rounds of a big tournament or game: 10 thoughts on what I just watched.

Each of these thoughts is a take, of course, and when melded together they form a Big Take on the entire day. The problem? The post usually goes 1,000+ words which is a lot for a one-day event on golf.

What I realized, though, on Sunday during the Ryder Cup is that each of those thoughts — a paragraph or two (usually about 100 words) — is my wheelhouse.

I can go smaller on the thought for Twitter or bigger for a 400-word column but building around takes (or thoughts or whatever you want to call them) like these is ideal for me.

So let’s start there from now on — 100 intelligent words on something that happened or something it reminded us of — and either strip away or build upon.

But let’s be smart about it because as Matthew Ingram wrote here, all that matters is how good you are:

It doesn’t matter what it says on your masthead, or how many centuries you have been publishing, or how many industry accolades your columnist has. All that matters is whether people want to read it or not — and that force is as mercurial a mistress as any newspaper editor ever was, and then some.

Why I’m starting to hate Twitter (but not really)

This is something I wrote in summer of 2013 on Medium but I figured since I started this blog I didn’t have a real great use for Medium anymore. This still applies, by the way.

This is not a post about the pitfalls of Twitter or why it’s spammy underbelly is slowly stealing the will of people to go on living.

Nor is it a post about how I don’t get Twitter or a complaint about how all my friends do is post silly photos of their hoity-toity ALL NATURAL hamburgers and $6 Dove chocolate milkshakes.

No, quite the opposite actually. Twitter is why I have my job. Twitter has changed the way I consume news and think about the world.

Twitter, as simply beautiful as it is, has killed Facebook for me (I no longer have to figure out whether or not I have to sell my pigs to get coins so I can send messages to people — GLORY!)

I’m starting to hate Twitter because it has become my main event online.

I used to get on my computer and write and think and write some more and maybe pick up a book or photoshop a picture for a blog post. If I wasn’t productive I was at least moving forward.

I wasn’t toiling circularly.

Now though, I have succombed to the scrolling feed. It consumes me. I don’t mean that it consumes me in a way that takes me away from my wife and kid (that’s probably a separate post which I will write and my wife will dictate to me at gunpoint), just that it soaks up all my time set aside for work to the point that I no longer know what it feels like to get lost in a great album and a lengthy blog post.

That’s why we do this thing in the first place, isn’t it? I mean besides all the fame and fortunes that come with sports blogging, obviously. Don’t we get online and write and think because, somewhere and in some way, it changes who we are and who we want to become.

I don’t know what that feels like anymore because all I do is spend my days letting other people (the people I “follow” is what Twitter calls them) tell me what I think and who I should be.

There is a sweet spot that evens the scales, I know there is. There has to be. But I am nowhere near it — I am closer to defeating Usain Bolt in the 200 meter dash than I am to finding a balance between work and Twitter.

There are times (yesterday’s Aaron Hernandez murder news was one) when we’re supposed to be riveted as a Twitter community. I didn’t feel bad about being locked in at all. But the incessant and mindless scrolling of my feed to find out that Alex Rodriguez is not as intelligent as we thought or that President Obama will be speaking for 14 minutes in wherever, USA. It has to stop.

The problem is, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that to be a good blogger and to find the Aaron Hernandez moments, you kind of have to have it on all the time. There is the idea that you can take a two-hour break and come back to find out what you missed. But two hours on the Internet in 2013 might as well be two years.

So I’m at a loss (if you have any thoughts on this post I guess, uh, tweet at me).

So as you can tell I don’t actually hate Twitter but I do plan on turning Twitter off more in the future if only so I’m reminded of why I once fell in love with her in the first place. But I don’t know what the happy medium (NOT A PAID ADVERTISEMENT) is.

I plan on reclaiming my own thoughts and reinvigorating some original ideas. I plan on being changed less and changing more.

I plan on reading 140 pages of a book instead of 140 characters of a tweet.

I plan on digging up some super-hipster albums on Spotify (I have to find someone who’ll teach me which ones are “super-hipster” and which are just “uhh, that’s weird, bro” first, I guess) and getting lost in some work.

Because, like I said, that’s the point.

Surprising your future self

In preparing for the 2014 Oklahoma State football season I realized I needed to go back and rank all the uniform combinations OSU had worn over the last three years for some content I was working on.

I wasn’t looking forward to the work I would need to do and the research I would have to put in to doing this. It was going to be a pain.

Then I remembered I’d put together a partial list this time last year in Evernote so I went searching for it and when I found it I realized I’d actually put the entire list together as the season wore on last year.

It was already complete! I just had to add a little bit of content around it but that surprise to my future self from last year was something I’m not used to.

I’m an awful planner of content so stuff like this rarely happens but when it does I realize how much more often I should do it.

What blogging is actually like

I always struggle to explain to people what this thing called blogging actually is. It usually feels like I’m a tween trying to show adults my online journal and they roll their eyes and go back to their real jobs and I always feel pretty silly.

But a good metaphor finally descended upon me (or at least, I think it’s good) and I wanted to share it.

Blogging is like feeding a baby.

My seven-month-old child could conceivably figure out a way to feed himself, undoubtedly, but his resources are limited and he largely relies on me (okay, mostly his mother) for nourishment.

We must gather the food and divvy it up and ultimately stick it in his mouth — both for his enjoyment and well-being.

We are the bloggers in this scenario, he is our audience.

We (and he) have access to all of the food in the world but because he is limited in his resources (both time and skill) we must choose something we think is good for him and break it down into bite-sized portions for him to consume.

Does that sound familiar?

It gets better, though. Sometimes we pick two or three foods and connect (or combine) them and feed those to him. Those are his favorites. His nose twitches at the intrigue and he is satisfied.

It is a simple process for him but sometimes complex for us. Should we give him the organic or the non-organic? Should we make it ourselves and spend a ton of time building these foods or do we take the simple way out. In the end all he knows is what the final product is.

We have done our job.

He is fed. He’ll be back for more tomorrow.

What’s the point of (home) schooling?

I put “home” in parentheses because that’s where the quote comes from but I think this should actually be the point of all schooling.

From an article in the Tulsa World on home schooling:

“The bigger picture is to teach them to love learning and to find information for themselves.”

Instead, as Seth Godin writes in the Icarus Deception, we’re bent the other way.

We transformed school from a place of inquiry into a facility optimized for meeting standards. This is something the industrial age taught us — that there are answers and that you need the answers in order to succeed. Memorize enough answers and you’re set.

I hope you never feel the need to memorize the answers.

Outsource everything

Okay, don’t outsource everything but outsource everything you aren’t elite at which should be close to everything.

One of my biggest regrets over the course of the last few years is how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent trying to hone things that aren’t my craft.

I’d try to design t-shirts or make logos or build websites instead of just paying the couple hundred dollars to somebody to do it for me and focusing my energy on refining my craft — blogging, writing.

That’s the opportunity cost I so often speak of and I’ve ignored it in my own life which is a deflating thing to consider.

I think a lot of it has to do with being scared of The Work. With being afraid of just sitting down and banging out the work. Maybe it’s just laziness.

Whatever it is, I think what separates the best entrepreneurs with the other entrepreneurs is a complete understanding of this topic.

I’m still learning.

How much surprises matter

The one thing you have left in a world of so much noise is the art of the surprise.

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out how to find interesting stuff to read that nobody else is reading and I started signing up for all these email newsletters.

I signed up for probably 10-15 and I’ll probably keep 2-3 of them but I was struck by something in the very bottom of one of them.

It’s an email newsletter called 5 Intriguing Things and it’s written by a guy named Alexis Madrigal.

Anyway, at the very end he always includes a definition or a word or something language-y and this was the one from a newsletter last week:

Screen Shot 2014-07-21 at 10.24.14 PMThat’s pretty funny, right? And it surprised me — it was a little bit at the end of a newsletter that I wasn’t expecting and it made me laugh and that’s pretty awesome. It also means this is one of the 2-3 I’ll be keeping around for a while.