When starting this blog, I thought I would be writing a bit more than I am doing right now. What happened? One reason is that it’s not as rewarding as I initially thought. For instance, I used to think that writing a post on some topic would somehow be a less-effortful shortcut to becoming knowledgeable on that topic. This turned out to be false, at least in my experience of writing previous posts. The second reason is that I don’t have many thoughts that are worth writing more than ten sentences about. Unless I am focused on some specific problem, most of my thoughts do not have much direction and are random pieces of intuition that are at most one to two sentences long. And those thoughts don’t last for long in my memory anyways. In retrospect, I regret not writing as much as I could have, because:
- It’s a shame that I spend so much time of my life thinking about stuff, but at the same time it is unproductive. (At least writing them out would be less so.)
- Writing them out would have laid a clear picture of what I have been interested in.
- Some of those thoughts were actually more insightful than I felt like back then, and writing them out would have allowed me to get back to and expand on them more often.
- Writing them out can be rewarding, if I let down my expectations and the fear of being judged.
To avoid falling back to the same pattern of not writing, I will set out some rules for myself. These rules are not meant to constrain, but to inspire and motivate me to write without being too self-aware.
- I will not be obsessed with filling a post with my original thoughts.
In fact, I will find at least one other reference related to the post, and summarize it in my own words. - 700 characters suffices for a post.
- If I feel an urge not to publish the post, I will still publish it and write concrete plans on what I should research or study to improve it.