As a man on a mission to build intentional communities, a central pillar of my mission is authenticity. We can’t have thriving community if people can’t be themselves. And I believe people are inherently creative. One of my favorite books on the subject is The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield. I highly recommend it.
I wish I could say I’ve found the cure for creative block. Over the years, I’ve had countless ideas and started all kinds of projects that remain unfinished. I estimate that I’ve got around a million words of unfinished content sitting on my hard drive that no one’s ever seen.
So I decided to start a purely personal blog, designed as an outlet for me to write whatever I feel like writing. I have had a lot of ideas that don’t really fit on my business blog, which as of this writing has grown a few cobwebs. The restrictive nature of a business blog seemed too confining to serve as an outlet for writings of a non-businesslike nature.
I was initially thinking of calling the blog “Dave Unfiltered” (perhaps with a pack of Lucky Strikes up top), but that would have been disingenuous. This blog isn’t unfiltered, nor do I think it’s possible for anyone to be completely unfiltered. I’m not particularly writing for any given audience in general, but I might choose to write certain posts for specific audiences. This blog doesn’t particularly have a theme by design, but perhaps a theme will emerge naturally over time.
This isn’t my first rodeo with blogs. My first-ever blog was called “The Black Pawn” and I started it on Blogspot in 2003. The blog has since been deleted due to inactivity, such as is the case with other blogs I started since then, such as “The Wizard’s Blog”, which was a chapter story that I wrote one post at a time until I fizzled out. Then there was the Introverted Entrepreneur blog that I started in 2007, which eventually led to starting a meetup group. I also started two religious blogs, a mental health blog, a political blog, and a blog about marriage and dating. In each case, the result was the same. I fizzled out. Finally I decided that the Seinfeld approach might be best: make a blog about nothing, or at least, nothing in particular.
I decided to pay for a hosting platform this time, for several reasons. Most importantly, I want to know that my content won’t just disappear. I also wanted the autonomy to control the content and design of my own site. Last but not least, I don’t want spammy ads polluting my blog content and slowing down the site for visitors. As a side benefit, I feel more committed to the blog when I pay for it.
An interesting dilemma: I’ve often believed that writing “for oneself” is fundamentally different from writing for an audience. Awhile back, a friend challenged my assumption and suggested that I was creating a false dichotomy in my mind. I have learned to think about the problem in a more multifaceted way. There are certainly different ways of approaching the writing process. I might be primarily motivated by my own therapeutic needs of the moment and find that my writing strikes a deep chord with someone else who has similar struggles. I think it’s possible for a writer to be too self-indulgent and lose touch with the audience, while it’s also possible to hyper-fixate on a hypothetical audience and produce content that is bland and uninteresting. My default way of writing today, it seems, is to share my experience as authentically as I can manage, and trust that the message will find its way to those who can benefit.
We’ll see how it goes.
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