What Blogging Every Day For A Month Has Taught Me

It’s the final day of October, marking a month since I started writing blog posts every day. It’s crazy how fast time flies. Honestly, a bit… spooky.

So today I wanted to reflect back on what one month of writing a blog posts every day has taught me. Here’s 5 things I’ve noticed through writing daily blogs:

1. Blogging = Discipline

First, writing every day has required a lot more discipline than I expected. It sounded simple at first (just use your little fingers and write some words on a keyword, it’s not rocket science or open heart surgery buddy!)

But I’ve come to realize how daunting it can be.The seemingly mundane nature of writing makes it sneaky hard. Carving out ~60min per day to write is hard. Coming up with new, interesting things to write about day after day is harder. But I think that all makes it a worthy experience, and I am proud to look back at roughly ~20,000 words written this month.

2. Blogging = Thoughts Refined

Second, I am realizing how useful blogging has become for crystallizing my thoughts and ideas. The very nature of having a public, daily, blog (that people like you might actually read) is a powerful forcing-function for pursuing new ideas and knowledge on a regular basis, and for sharpening my thinking.

Once you get words down onto a page you realize that they actually have to make sense, and it reveals how jumbled your thoughts can be when you just leave them floating around inside your head. Writing is like an oil refinery for your ideas.

3. Blogging = Lead Gen

Third, I have realized how useful a tool writing each day can actually be for growing my business. Even despite having only a handful of active email subscribers (thank you to all of you), I am able to use the ideas and content from my blog in other places like Twitter and LinkedIn. I can cherry pick smaller pieces from the blog and post them as threads or videos elsewhere.

This has been sneaky useful, because ultimately growing an internet business in 2024 necessitates having some sort of online following, which in turn requires consistent, quality content. By sitting down and forcing myself to write for an hour a day I usually end up with things that I can use as lead gen content for my social media.

4. Blogging = Therapy

Another unexpected aspect of writing everyday is that it’s been surprisingly therapeutic. Simply getting thoughts out of my head is like a cleanse for my brain. It can be so easy to get overwhelmed in this fast-paced world we live in; much of that is simply having cluttered thoughts.

Some people meditate, others go to therapy, others might take up boxing. I think it’s all the same thing: flow state. Getting into a flow state is the ultimate cure for anxiety, because anxiety is when you get stressed about things you should be doing. And when you are in flow state you are only thinking about the thing you are actively doing. For me, that has become writing.

5. Blogging = Exploration

Finally, and probably least exciting for you, dear reader, blogging has become an excuse to go out and explore. First, I mean literally explore. I just moved to Chicago at the beginning of the month, and blogging on my laptop is a perfect coffee shop activity. So I have used it as a reason to go visit new coffee shops and write whenever I can. (if you haven’t noticed by now, most of the cover photos for these blogs are new random coffee shops in Chicago).

It’s also a figurative exploration that blogging enables. It’s been an excuse to dive into new, unknown concepts and learn a bit about them (like this blog about SEO for LLMs, which I knew nothing about prior to writing, or this blog about visiting the Chicago AI Meetup and learning about what’s going on with AI). Ultimately, it’s a reason to go out and learn more about what’s going on, so that I can have the privilege of writing about it and crystallizing some opinions and thoughts.

So to any of you who are reading this, there are the 5 reasons you should go out and start your own blog, even if it’s something you write once a year.

Appreciate you for following along on this little journey of mine. And if you aren’t reading, that’s okay too — this blog is for me :-)

Peace,

Ramsey