For literal years, I intended to start this blog.

Intended.

I was neither lacking ideas nor a base of actual content, and being intent on something must prove the existence of some form of motivation as well.

Yet, I was and still am encountering resistance at quite unprecedented levels. A lot of my time is spent by doing stuff that consists of sitting down, staring at an illuminated rectangle, fluctuating between creative endeavoring and dull rote work. Naturally I assumed that my thereby acquired skill of actually doing would translate decently well to writing.

It did not.

After all this time, I finally got myself to at least write words by allocating a time slot in my day where if I would do anything I would write. Words being the appropriate unit of measurement here: I averaged about five of those a day within the first week.

Writing is hard.

Why?

Short answer: I am not sure.

Slightly longer answer: My working theory is that writing is very close to the ego, you cannot hide. Put out software side projects of questionable quality and there is always “I was testing out a new tech stack” and “It is made for a specific user type”. Writing…not so much. It feels way more like thinking, and what if you are less of a thinker than you would like?

Solutions

If I had a solution to the aforementioned challenges, this blog post would probably be titled differently. However, one solution that did help was the misuse of the concept of “An Audience Of One”. Originally “One” with a capital “O” and stemming from a sports concept, the expression meant something like playing in the felt glory of a greater being. The bastardization of the concept in lowercase that apparently trickled into the self help world is much more mundane. Here the idea is to write for an audience of the size of one, the lone attendant being yourself. And honestly, I love that. It removes the perceived aura of high art from writing and leaves something very similar to writing technical documentation. But it is not documentation. It does not have to be complete, categorized and held up to a high standard (nor dry), it just has to be useful to yourself. Very pragmatically, it also provides some easy question to overcome a blank page. “What value do I want to get out of it?” “How will I use the article?”.

Well, there is nothing left to do but to try this piece of pretentious philosophy in the field. The measurement of success is this: Will there be a part two of this post?