Skin in the Game

I am always inspired by beginnings, no matter how arbitrary they may seem: start of the day, start of the week, start of the month, start of the year. There’s something about beginnings of a new period that inspires me to start something: a diet, a project, a fitness regime–name it, I’ve probably started it or tried to at some point.

I know it is silly. As many of the productivity self-help books I have read would say, you do not need it to be the start of anything to start anything. You can just start. Now. Whenever now may be.

Yet here we are, at the start of the year, starting something new again. A blog, no less. So what’s my reasoning behind starting this blog? A few things, actually:

• I want to move my journal online so I can organise my thoughts into categories and make it easier for me to go back and review them if I wanted to. As it is, I have many journals lying around the house, probably would never be re-read again, just eternally lost in the ether. This way it is all in one place, categorised and chronologically aranged, easily accessible online.
• I want to learn how to work with wordpress. I know a bit–enough to start this blog at least. But I want to learn more about it. And doing is the best way to learn, so here I am, doing.
• I want to improve my writing. When I blog on my pen-and-paper journal, it is so easy to be lazy. I often doodle my words to a point of illegibility. I don’t care about grammar or punctuation or using the right words. Somehow, typing it in a blog forces me to write properly. We’ll see.
• I want to learn about many things. I am currently reading “Someday is Today” by Matthew DIcks, “The Diary of a CEO” by Steven Bartlett, and “Feel Good Productivity” by Ali Abdaal. All of these productivity experts swear that the best way to learn is to teach or to do. So this blog is my attempt at “teaching” by blogging about the things I want to learn.

So here’s to a 2024, the year of Learning, Teaching, and Doing.