I was at dinner last night with some entrepreneurs and VCs in Berlin and we got talking about my ritual of blogging every day. I told them that many days I stare at the blank screen and think “ugh, what am I going to write about today.”
They asked if there was any correlation to knowing what I am going to write about and the quality of the post. I told them that I don’t think so. The best posts come out in real time and often they start with me staring at the blank screen. Same with the worst posts.
Posting every day isn’t easy for a host of reasons but for me the hardest is that much of what I work on every day is off limits. I wake up thinking about a drama unfolding in one of our portfolio companies and I can’t blog about that. I wake up thinking about a new product one of our portfolio companies is going to launch and I can’t blog about that. I wake up thinking about a neat company we just met and I mostly can’t blog about that.
So on a typical morning, I run through four or five ideas, tossing each out for a variety of reasons, before settling on something, and then I start writing and I go from there. I enjoy the real time nature of this approach to writing. I often don’t know what the gist of the post is going to be until I write that last line and hit publish.
Sometimes this process produces great insights for me and possibly others. Sometimes it produces garbage. But I’ve come to realize that the daily post, and its quality or lack thereof, is not really the thing. It is the ritual, the practice, the frequency, the habit, and the discipline that matters most to me. And, I would suspect, the same is true of the readers and commenters who frequent this blog.
