Meta-Blog: Practicing honest self-expression makes you better at it

Time for the start of the June blog! I really can't believe it's only been a month since I started- it seriously feels like May lasted at least the equivalent of 3 months...

This week, I've decided to write a two-parter entry about... blogging. Yeah, I know it's meta and perhaps a bit self-serving, and I'm going to take some risks with this one. Furthermore, there are already lots of similar articles from other people, like this fantastic one from James Altucher. But I'm not worried about being novel, because that shouldn't stop me from writing. Just like it shouldn't stop anyone else who is interested in blogging. So today's entry will be about why one would want to blog. The next entry will be about common reasons why one would NOT want to blog (or take on any other side project for that matter), and why those reasons are all just silly.

Several of my college friends have recently started blogs:

• Scribbles in the Cyberdust: generally awesome person working in the consulting industry. Will be musing on life, relationships, and transitions.
• Greg Poulos: college roommate and computer science major who recently quit his tech start-up job to start writing novels and short stories
• The Literary Fix: humanities-expert extraordinaire writes reviews, reactions, responses to books and literature. 10X more culturally adept than I.

Our monolithic group of friends (aka Blocking Group One) had a long e-mail thread tossing around topic and name ideas for these blogs, so I threw in my two cents based on my own experience. It would seem natural that I offer my advice given my fresh experience on the topic, but I have to admit I was a little hesitant at first because I wasn't sure how it would come off. I used to fear offering advice to people because I was afraid people might interpret it as an I'm-better-than-you attitude. As cockiness or arrogance. Some of that fear was mixed in with a lack of self-confidence, which was compounded by a further fear of telling others about things I lacked confidence in. So I used to be afraid of both acknowledging my strong points and of showing my vulnerability, solely because of what other people might think. That's where blogging comes in.

Good blogging is an exercise in being honest. This is by far the most important thing one can gain from blogging. For people like me who have trouble connecting on a deep level with others, it is a wonderful stepping stone to getting comfortable sharing one's thoughts with all the other human beings who inhabit this planet. For more extroverted individuals, it is a constant exercise and reminder to trust other people and strive to make social interactions meaningful. A blog is a great way to develop honesty because it is public enough to take you out of your comfort zone and enable you to grow, but it's a solitary enough that it lets you develop your thoughts deeply without all the complexities and anxieties of face-to-face interaction. It's an interesting dichotomy.

Opening up to others is undoubtedly scary and opens you up to judgment, but like anything else it gets less scary the more you do it. Just practice expressing your opinions, just practice revealing your weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and just practice giving advice to other people in a way that really shows you care about them. Acknowledge that it will definitely be awkward at first, but have fun working at it. Soon, the questions holding you back disappear. Questions like "What if people have no interest in what I'm talking about? What if it creates conflict? What if this person doesn't like me anymore? What if my concerns or ideas are dismissed? What if I look stupid? What if I'm proven wrong?" When I started acknowledging my weaknesses and vowing to address them, both publicly on this blog and privately with my friends, did anyone judge me? Perhaps, but I didn't hear about it, nor does it really matter. In private, others have done the same and opened up to me- you'll have to take my word for it but I feel more connected to my friends than ever. Heck, because I now feel like I can open up to complete strangers (to a lesser degree than my friends, but still) I also feel more connected to the human race in general. I hope it continues to deepen my relationships. In public, other bloggers bravely share their ideas and opinions with the world, and that is a good thing.

There are many other reasons to open yourself up in a blog:

1. Find other people with similar interests. Lots of people are introverts and won't reveal their personal interests widely, leaving lots of discoveries of mutual interests up to chance. If you post a specific topic, perhaps a majority of people won't be interested in it, but you've have provided a conduit for others who are interested to find you.
2. Practice fully fleshing out your ideas. Good writing demands this. While I'm not a good writer, what matters is that I'm practicing and slowly getting better. I've never been a very detail-oriented person. This is unfortunate for my graduate studies, which require very detailed analysis of numerous experiments, papers, and ideas. I need to be able to communicate not just big ideas but also very specific logic. Now by habit whenever I'm reading a science article or designing an experiment I think about how I'm going to talk about it. You haven't fully mastered an idea until you can teach it. Also, now before I start an experiment I automatically write out all the possible outcomes and what they would tell me, and if it's not enough information then I re-design the experiment. Detailing the logic of your ideas can change what you end up deciding to do about your ideas
3. Make yourself accountable for your goals. Tell everyone what you're doing. In your heart, you will not want to disappoint anyone else. Knowing that others know your goals will make you constantly remind yourself what your goals are. This point might run contrary to some experience- I found that in the past I would tell someone else about something great I'm "planning" to do, but it was just to make myself feel better that I WASN'T doing it. But I only did this if I knew it was unlikely that this person would ask me next week how my great idea was progressing. Again, I wasn't being honest. Because you constantly blog about what you're doing, you HAVE to be honest with yourself about whether or not you're making progress on your goals.
4. Motivation to learn new things and grow yourself. No one wants to be boring. Knowing that I could choose anything happening in my life or any of topics I'm reading about on the Internet to be the subject of a PUBLIC blog entry is a fantastic incentive to try to make my life interesting and learn things I never would have touched otherwise.
5. Do more than click the "share" button. You know the drill. I do this all the time: I read something that's really cool, I share it on Facebook, and then I forget about it. I feel like I'm just observing the world happening. But a blog post is your own creation. And when you make something that's your very own, you won't forget about it.

Finally, a blog is completely unnecessary. Wait, what? That's a good thing? Yes indeed, it is. You know there are dozens of things that you could do that are completely voluntary, i.e. not in your job description. But they help you grow as a person and see another side of life. Challenge yourself.

Anyway, I hope that this blog entry didn't come off as one of those braggy it-changed-my-life-and-it-will-change-yours-too articles. If you decide call me out on it, maybe I'll go cry now. Yeah, I do cry sometimes.

Keep reading Part 2.