CJ Chilvers and I emailed back and forth briefly. I have been reading CJ’s newsletter for many years. I find newsletters to be an engaging medium, partly because the subscriber has made a tacit choice in subscribing, and partly because the writer knows their’s audience’s intention and wants to make it count.

CJ send me a link to Mike Crittenden’s blog post about writing 5x more but 5x less. This advice was poignant. I tend to write on and on, tackling evermore large topics. Nothing wrong in writing longer text. However, unelss you write full-time, you produce long articles infrequently. Writing infrequently prevents formation of the habit of writing and sharing.

Austin Kleon further makes this point in his book Show Your Work. Writing longer means you show less work.

Another benefit of writing shorter — the brevity invariably leave gaps in the idea. These gaps are essential in growing ideas. Itay Talgam makes this case in his book The Ignorant Maestro and also in this very popular TED Talk on Leadership.

With this I posted five articles last week. This is a new habit for me and one I am hoping to stick with all year.

2021 In Review

Here I got into what worked and what didn’t last year. 2021 was a challenging but illuminating year.

Books I Read in December

I list the books I read in December. I had 10 days off from work which allowed me to finish six books, one of which was 530 pages excluding index and notes!

My Reading Habit

I have started reading more and this post explains how I am trying to do this. I am hoping this is a habit that will grow and morph this year. Just last week I finished two books but I lost harmony between reading and understanding.

Fleeting Notes

I go into the first step of understanding when I read books. Understanding gives meaning. Or else reading regresses into watching mindless TV.

Literature Notes

This is the second step of understanding. Writing Literature Notes is like re-reading the important parts of the book well enough to be able to explain it to someone!

I am traveling for work next week. This will be a good chance to practice reading in a very distracting and noisy environment of airport gates and airplanes. If I can be successful in reading on a plane, I will treat myself to a pair of noise-cancelling headphones!

I discovered C.J. Chivers when I was having my second stab at trying photography. My camera: a shiny new iPhone 4s. Mr. Chivers wrote about being a lesser photographer which resonated with me. The photography world was filled with high speced DSLRs with expensive lenses and Mr. Chivers' words were a relief.

C.J. Chivers stopped posting on Lesser Photographer a little while ago. He started blogging daily on his personal page. This really got me thinking about blogging daily. Especially since I dusted off my old RSS feeds on Feedly, I was able to recently read his post about blogging daily

"It's a great practice as a writer, photographer or creator in general to read intelligent content outside the walls of social media and create your own. It's an exercise in mental health more than promotion." -- C.J. Chivers

He quotes Seth Godin who is a daily blogging pioneer.

"Everyone should write a blog, every day, even if no one reads it. There’s countless reasons why it’s a good idea and I can’t think of one reason it’s a bad idea. If you know you have to write a blog post tomorrow, something in writing, something that will be around 6 months from now, about something in the world, you will start looking for something in the world to to write about. You will seek to notice something interesting and to say something creative about it. Well, isn’t that all we’re looking for? The best practice of generously sharing what you notice about the world is exactly the antidote for your fear." -- Seth Godin

These are my two points of inspiration for blogging daily. I am trying to post this piece in the last fifteen minutes before my wind down time (9:30 PM) when all electronic devices get put away...which means I am serious about both, the wind-down time and the blogging daily.

I think I know why I want to blog daily but I want to distill that thought a bit more before I write about it here.