Why share?
I’ve always enjoyed consuming and processing information. As a pre-teen boy in small-town Iowa I spent weeks creating a fantasy baseball leagues from scratch – the draft process, the point system, everything. I didn’t share with anyone…and I remember it as great, a time of flow and fun!
So why share? Brandon’s Baseball League had notebooks of rules, modifications, scores, learnings, and general organic messiness…and they are all gone. Today a few minutes of digital photographs would capture the information, but a minimal amount of presentation/documentation effort would be needed to make it understandable to my future self. My current self is lazy…so putting ideas in public is an attempt to force some amount effort on presenting (and not just slapping everything into Evernote/roam/binders).
I will take what I’m learning, consuming, processing and make it understandable to my future self (and maybe other people). Understandable is required, but not enough to be useful. Useful will be up to future me (or maybe other people).
Not on a social platform?
For me the public pressure for understandability is high enough that it’s not a goal to be read by anyone in particular nor a certain number of readers. I plan to review my words later and I have no interest in a platform influencing me when I look at my own works. So I went to the hassle of spinning up WordPress (which I don’t love). My preferred workflow starts in emacs…and right now I haven’t invested in making it easier to get to WordPress 😉
References
- Your words are wasted, Scott Hanselman
- Selfish Writing, Morgan Housel