Why am I starting a blog in 2021? Am I too late to the party? Have people moved on from reading online journals? Several questions crossed my mind which made me think about why I should be blogging anyway. Is there a point in doing this at all? I then realised that my mind was just coming up with excuses to stop me from taking a step that would help me become a better writer, build a serendipity vehicle and add value to my readers. This realisation was a result of a few factors that contributed to the ‘push’.
I’ve never shied away from sharing my life on social media. In 2008, I received an invite in my gmail inbox to make an account on a website called Facebook. I took the bait and I was hooked! I could find my school friends here (we all had passed from school in 2006) and connect with them again after a gap of nearly two years! In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was very active on Facebook. I made sure I carried my point and shoot to every event and then made an album by selecting the best photos to upload to Facebook. Getting likes and comments from family and friends felt momentous and it encouraged semi-regular Facebook postings. Towards the mid and late 2010s, I shifted my focus to Instagram. Since I was always interested in photography, Instagram was an easy choice to showcase my love for photography. The filters are what made the app unique in my opinion and I totally overused them. So, no I haven’t been social media shy.
For all of these years I’ve kept most of my social media profile private though. I’ve never thought of letting strangers on the internet into my social media bubble. This was partly due to my aversion of being potentially cyber-bullied, stalked or trolled. And partly because I never thought that I had an interesting life to share. This assumption always kept me from starting a vlog. I never thought that I could entertain a large group of people as I didn’t have anything ‘crazy’ to share. So I buried my mainstream vlogging dreams and I decided to stick to sharing my content with family, friends and acquaintances.
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the courses of several lives across continents. The shift in my life was geographical, from Manchester to Mumbai in August 2020. I wasn’t happy about the shift at all. I intended to start my life in the UK and the pandemic had detoured me back to my home country. In my hunt for inspiration to help me get back up and start working towards my dreams again, I came across Matt D’Avella’s YouTube channel, wherein he talks about minimalism, slow growth and the importance of maintaining a healthy outlook towards life. Through his channel, I discovered Ali Abdaal’s channel. And through Ali’s video about the three books that changed his life, I came across a book, Show Your Work.
I decided to give this book a go and its now a big reason behind starting my YouTube journey, and now my blogs. Here are some of the quotes from the book that were key in helping me take the plunge.
As an MBA graduate, this quote resonated with me. The consultancy focused MBA at Alliance Manchester Business School allowed me to work on three different live client consultancy projects. As a part of deconstructing and solving business problems for various firms, it was important to collate, filter and visualise data.
When I was thinking about what I could share with the world, I thought about applying the consultancy principle to my thought process. I started by journaling on a semi-regular basis and the purpose was to document daily tasks, inner struggles and tiny achievements. My Instagram account is something I have been documenting on unintentionally. So I looked at some of the photos from 2012, when I first started using the app. Also, my CV has bits which can be converted to engaging and valuable content. This process helped me visualise themes and patterns within my life and I now have a personal ‘database’ to pull ideas from.
Perfectionism does have several benefits, but it does bring with it some cons. One of the biggest cons of perfectionism is the concomitant resistance to upload a YouTube video, a blog post, a photograph or an artwork until we’re completely satisfied with the end result. While yes quality is definitely worth striving for. But when you’re starting out, quantity supersedes quality.
A brilliant blog post by Austin Kleon titled, quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable) states the importance of consistently producing content without obsessing over the quality of the content. In the article he talks about an excerpt from a book titled, Art & Fear, wherein the author cites an experiment conducted by a ceramics teacher. The teacher divides her class into two groups, A and B. She asks group A to produce as many pots as they can till the final day of the class and asks group B to produce only one pot, a perfect pot to get a good grade. Group A and B were given the same deadline. When the teacher eventually got to grading the pots, she discovered that the works of high quality came from group A. She attributed this result to the fact that since group A was making pots consistently, learning from their mistakes and improving, they ended making high quality pots. However, group B, obsessed with creating a perfect pot, read all the books they could find, couldn’t come close to the quality achieved by group A.
The key takeaway for me was that quality will be a result of consistency and a long term commitment.
This quote from the book reminded me of an article that I came across on James Clear’s website. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits has a fantastic post about the importance of continuous improvements. In the post, he talks about the power of tiny gains through a graph which highlights the power of compounding. If we stick to improving by 1% at anything we do on a regular basis, the improvement in the long run is significant. Becoming an engaging writer is a marathon and not a sprint, which is why I intend to write consistently and to make minor improvements with every blog post.
I’m determined to put the learnings from the book into practice and I hope to slowly become an engaging writer and story teller in the long term.