On June 23, 2020, almost at the dead of the night at around approximately 1.30 am to 2 am I suddenly bought a domain name through WIX, set up my own personal website and started writing blog posts.
Now the question will be why suddenly in the middle of the worst Pandemic known to mankind, I decided to start blogging although blog posts as a product had already passed by its utility date. In the current 15-second attention span of our generation when Tik-Tok and Youtube videos seem like the most viable option to give an outlet to your creativity, why should someone start writing a blog?
I don’t have the most authentic or original answer to this question, but I certainly do have the reasons why it sounded like the best idea to someone like me. So as my MBA days had taught me, the best way to put forward your ideas are to put them in bullet points, insert “Sarcastic Smile”, here it goes –
1. As long as I can remember I have been someone who liked reading things outside his own domain or subject matter with much more interest than things within his purview. And this would give me little bits and pieces of knowledge about a lot of things. So basically, I’m someone who has a lot of trivia about a lot of things, can be a curse can be a blessing.
2. Now once you have all these trivia what do you do with it? When you’re enjoying your student life, this kind of information can be great conversation pieces or ideal ice breakers amongst friends or with the opposite gender, if you play your cards right “mischievous wink”.
3. But once you have left your friends behind and entered the corporate drudgery, these seemingly benign pieces of information can play havoc with your mind as you might not have the people of the same wavelength around you who might enjoy your wise-ass quips related to certain topics like movies, films, politics or overall global trivia.
4. Now I’m not saying that you will never find someone in your workplace to share your general worldview with, but those will be few and far between and if you’re amongst the lucky few who have got a fair amount of them, treasure them.
5. I also have a few of them but because of this god-forsaken pandemic, those conversations have taken a backseat. On the other hand, my content consumption has rapidly increased with the help of services like Blinkist, Medium, Audible, Refind, Kindle subscription and Twitter threads and a few very good newsletters. Now, how and where do I share my opinions and create a healthy discussion on the topics I like.
6. Now for married blokes like me, many would say you’ve got a partner to share all your views with, but it's easier said than done. Like, if your better half starts discussing her favourite brand or shade of lipstick, you’ll give some attention to that, not out of curiosity but rather due to a feeling of impending doom, if you don’t. Similarly, if you start, discussing Jurgen Klopp’s tactical nous against Manchester City, or Christopher Nolan’s long shots in Dunkirk, she will listen to you, but it’ll mostly be a sort of one-way conversation. This is certainly not for the lack of trying from their part, but just that these are somethings which are of interest to certain kinds of people and not to all.
7. Now coming to the last point, I have always been someone who had a voracious appetite when it came to reading, be it books – fiction or non-fiction, blogs, magazines etc. etc. But when it came to writing, I was not always the most passionate or creative one. I guess my writing was mostly limited to essays in school and marketing answers in MBA (which require a lot of creativity, coz you don’t know what you are writing about, and it's mostly GAS). The only piece of writing I feel a little good about is my MBA SOP, but even there I had help from two of my good friends.
Sorry for dragging this, lets cut to the chase.
So to summarise, for me blogging has been a way to let out to the world all the silly trivial things I read about on a daily basis and also a way to increase my skill set when it comes to writing original content on a lot of things by borrowing ideas from better creators.
So, if you relate to any of the above-mentioned points, I suggest just start writing, it doesn’t have to be remotely good, currently, I’m writing utter rubbish. But hopefully sooner rather than later, I’ll improve.
If you’re writing about things, you’re passionate about and it gives you some sense of satisfaction, it has served its purpose.
HAPPY BLOGGING!!!