I have been writing on this blog for more than 12 years and this is my 851st post. I wanted to reflect on the experience.
For a variety of reasons (some known and some unknown), this blog never became popular nor did I get significant number of visitors. I do not make any money from the blog. So, my friends, family and colleagues have asked me many a times the question:
If you are not making money of this, why do this at all? What is your purpose of spending so much time and effort on writing and maintaining your blog?
Question I have been asked many many times…
Let me attempt to answer this question via this blog and maybe even try to persuade you to think about doing the same.
Clarify and Deepen my Own Thinking:
One of the biggest benefits that I get from writing on this blog is that I get to clarify and deepen my own thinking on a particular topic. When I started the blog and for many years after that, I would write about anything that caught my fancy on the given day and share my opinion on the topic.
However, in the past few years, I have identified key topics that I wanted to deepen my understanding of and have been writing on the various aspects of the same.
If you go back and look at the posts that I have published in the past couple of years, you will find that everything I have published is on and around leadership and “Leading Transformation”. This has allowed me to explore the different aspects of these topics and the nuances of the practice of leading.
So, much so, that now I can claim to have a deep understanding of the nuances of leading in general and leading transformations in particular. This also means that I also know about the gaps in my understanding that I still need to explore.
I can also see the evolution of my thinking over time as I have documented my thinking on the blog on similar topic over time. From time to time, I go back and read my blogs on specific topics to see this evolution and if my thinking has not evolved, I go find something to read or listen or watch, which would challenge my thinking and therefore provides me with an opportunity to learn and evolve my thinking.
Leave a Trail of my Body of Work:
This blog is my body of work. Writing on this blog has led me to write three books so far and two more in the works. Since I am writing in public, this serves as my body of work, one that I am proud of having produced, one that I can claim to be as my own.
When someone asks me about what I think about a particular topic, I now have the ability to point them to the post where I talk about it, in case they want to read it. I would like to believe that by sharing my thinking publicly, I am in some form adding to the collective knowledge so that my insights can spark new ideas in someone else.
Improved Communication Skills:
Irrespective of the job or role we play in our professional lives, being able to communicate clearly and succinctly is a big advantage. Writing for this blog has trained me in written communication.
By the virtue of having written hundreds of thousands of words (maybe even a million) on the blog, my ability to communicate in the written format has improved significantly from where I started, in terms of the speed, clarity and content.
This has many second order effects.
I save time which I can invest either in reading or doing something interesting or creative or use it to write for my blog.
My ability to exert influence over my colleagues, customers and partners has gone up, which allows me to do things that I would not have been able to do otherwise.
Overall, I can attribute a lot of my professional success to my ability to write well and writing for the blog has been a big reason for the improvement in my writing abilities.
In conclusion:
In conclusion, I can only say that as leaders, one of the most important things we do is to communicate with the people we lead and everyone around us who supports us in the journey.
If we can improve our ability to communicate well even by a few percentage points, we will see a significant improvement in our ability to lead well. This by itself is a good enough reason for me to continue to write.
Whether to publish what we write or not is a personal decision (you know mine) that each one of us needs to make for ourselves.
Even if you decide not to publish publicly, it still is a great skill to write our thoughts and store them somewhere for reflections later on, for all the reasons I have mentioned above.
