Writing a blog has never been easier. You can host it on your own site or a service like Substack very easily. The process improves your writing skill and deepens your knowledge but on the flipside, there’s inherent risk in putting yourself out there because if your prose stinks, you’re broadcasting your deficiency to the world. On top of that, writing can be quite a grind if you don’t set yourself up for success. However, despite the difficulties and risks in publishing your work, the rewards are rich and worthwhile.

Why don’t most people already have a blog?

Few people love writing. Very, very few people enjoyed writing essays and papers at school, but that’s basically what writing a blog is, so naturally it’s not a popular pastime. There are tricks to make it less painful, but at the end of the day, it boils down to writing essays. This simple fact is the first deterrent.

Writing often feels very effortful. Again, there are tricks you can research and practice, but writer’s block is real. If your heart’s not completely in it, it can feel like a monumental effort to string a few words together.

You can get around most writer’s block by writing about topics where you have a lot to say. I found that writing during English class stunk, but a big part of that is being forced to write about nonsense I couldn’t care less about. I can wax lyrical for far too long about tradeoffs on minute details of code, so it’s much easier for me to write about that than breaking down why Shakespeare strayed from convention for a soliloquy.

The solution for writer’s block and general disinterest in writing is to steer towards your interests. The blog as a medium is free-form and you can write about your interests and get satisfaction from the sharpening of your ideas. In my case, I’m planning to delve deeper into specifics of some coding language implementations, which is the confluence of several of my interests. Another personal example is this blog post itself. I procrastinated writing for a long time because of utter nonsense, but by examining the question of why I didn’t have a personal website after years of being a software developer, I found a clear topic to get started.

Publishing your writing is like public speaking, in the worst way

There’s this feeling that if you write badly, people will get a bad impression. It’s very similar to the fear of being exposed that public speaking elicits. Your readers aren’t randoms either, they are people interested in you or your capabilities enough to click on Your Website. You feel like you’re going to be harshly judged by all who bear witness.

We forget how little we judge crappy content online. Usually, we either never see it or move on once we realise it’s bad. Sure, there are certified haters who spend their free time flaming content creators, but this shouldn’t be a concern for a quiet blog you make to show off and improve your writing chops and link on your resume. If you’re pushing to go viral and get clout, you will get haters regardless of the content’s quality anyway. You can easily prove this to yourself by trying to find any creator of note who doesn’t have a dedicated set of haters.

Regarding the content quality, it’s helpful to remember that most content creators made crappy content for a while before they were good. Even still, there’s this persistent feeling that if you produce a stinker, you will cringe for the years to come though. This can be harder to defeat. If you ever find your old YouTube channel from when you were 13, or you look back at recorded presentations from university, you cannot help but die a little inside. You might think back to stupid things you said or did as a kid and wonder why this would be any different.

I think the only remedy for lookback-cringe is maturity. Realising that you will always cringe at yourself is part of getting older. Accepting it as part of getting older is restorative on a deeper level. You wouldn’t judge a 13 year-old making a YouTube channel so harshly today, so why is it different looking at your own? Once you grow to give your younger self grace for how darn cringe you were, life gets a bit more pleasant, and blogs become a bit easier to publish.

Good feedback is hard to come by

AI is not the answer here. The sycophancy can be tough to overcome. I try to write how I speak, but I don’t sound like AI, so when I get it harsh enough to give real feedback, the suggestions strip my voice from the piece. I naturally use the rule-of-three, sure, but I absolutely don’t sound like a corporate robot, and I don’t want to either.

Finding thoughtful reviewers is non-trivial, to say the least. Most people don’t have a queue of peers who (a) are willing to read their work in full, (b) are capable of good criticism, and (c) will actually give it to you straight. You can find blogs with acknowledgements of people who read drafts, but this is a luxury. People barely read over each other’s work these days - how can you ask them to read a couple thousand words of less-than-mediocre prose?

The positives of writing a blog

Writing is an important skill in your career. You might be able to get away without writing as a software engineer at a startup where you’re pumping out code 24/7, but if you work in another role or somewhere with a writing-heavy culture, then it might be the most important skill. The skill-ceiling of writing is so insanely high that you don’t have to worry about diminishing returns on your time invested. The yield on time spent improving your writing is tremendous, to the point where you can even make a strong argument that it’s worth going even further and getting coaching.

Blogs push you towards deliberate practice. When you’re trying to improve a skill, you can spin your wheels a tonne without actually improving. Many chess players would improve faster if they focused on specific aspects and analysed their games with intention, rather than spamming bullet games without giving them a second look. It’s similar for sports. There’s a reason that professional football teams play very few full 11v11 games in training, even though that’s 100% of what their sport is. Strong, deliberate practice rarely involves spamming the full activity all the time. The feelings you get writing and publishing a blog naturally push you towards the good habits that define deliberate practice.

In the same way, blogs are a generalised drill for writing and communicating. You aren’t going to improve your writing skills much by instant messaging 8 hours a day. The process of writing a decent blog requires more introspection, reflection, and ideally external feedback, which are key pieces of actually improving. Zero-shotting a blog and never editing a word wouldn’t have this effect, but the extrinsic pressure to produce something not totally crap guides you toward the actions that naturally improve your writing.

Creating a periodic blog keeps you on track. If there’s a schedule acting as a forcing function to get you writing, it’s much easier to motivate yourself. Deadlines work unfortunately, even when they’re self-imposed. They can also stop you from grinding to a halt because of perfectionism. If you don’t have something pushing you to publish, it’s never good enough, because perfect is the enemy of the good.

Getting your ideas across succinctly is transferable across media of communication. Long-form writing forces you to distil your ideas in a similar way as you would in verbal and informal communication. To improve at long-form writing is to improve at expression and exposition generally. If you can write a sharp 1500 words, you’ve worked on the skills of sharpening your points down to their essence, which is the exact same process you use for exposition in person and over email.

If you’re good at writing - or become good by writing regularly - you can generate some clout in your industry for your blog. You don’t have to instantly be good either. I’ve discovered many blogs after years of regular posts and have taken serious joy in going through their backlog. In this sense, a long period of gathering skills and gradually getting recognition serves as a pure positive. Some examples of blogs I found after years of posts where the backlog was a tremendous boon include Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo’s, Paul Graham’s, Aaron Swartz’s, Wes Kao’s, and Dave Anderson’s.

There ends up being three cases:

  1. You have rudimentary writing skills. The time you spend writing the blog serves as ultra-high-yield deliberate practice.
  2. You have some writing chops. You might produce a few blogs which go semi-viral and increase your industry profile, while making strong improvements to your writing over time.
  3. You are an excellent writer. You are capable of regularly producing high-quality pieces that cement you as a thought leader or industry titan, which compensates for the diminishing returns to your writing skill from the practice.

At each level, continuing to write and produce articles has clear, distinct benefits, on the spectrum of skill refinement and content recognition.

You should have a blog

For all knowledge workers, writing is worth spending time on and improving. Blogs take a lot of effort and can be a real grind to produce, but they are a reliable, consistent vehicle for deliberate practice and continuous improvement of one of the most important skills to have. Even if your writing is impeccable, the benefits of producing the blog are rich and worthwhile. There are roadblocks and pitfalls and traps that make it difficult, but each has a solution and the ends justify the effort. You’re not going to be able to avoid writing in your career, so it makes sense to invest in it. Start a blog.