It’s been more than three years since I’ve written anything here (wild), and I’ve been thinking about how and why that’s happened. In part, it’s that life and work have been hectic, but that’s mostly an excuse. The real answers are that:
I just haven’t made time for it, and
We’re in a moment of ‘content creation’ that doesn’t really resonate with me.
‘Content creation’, at least as I perceive it, is about building an audience. It happens on a schedule - you always need to have something to say.
I find that there isn’t always something worth saying, at least not something that’s going to be relevant beyond the present moment. So I’m going to try to do something a bit different with this website. I’m going to turn it into a record of the things that I’ve learned and believe are true, and I’m going to make this blog a personal changelog - a record of new learnings and updated beliefs.
I’m doing this because I find it more interesting to uncover things that are true in the long-term than to have a new opinion on a weekly basis. I think we could use more of that in the world right now - a little less noise and a little bit more humility.
While this will be mostly for my own purposes, I also believe that there’s value in exposing your models of the world to other people so that they can understand you in a way that’s hard to get at otherwise.
Lastly, some credit is due - I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Startupy, Rosie Sherry, Shane Parrish, and Will Larson. Brian Lovin has discussed the concept of a personal changelog before, though he means something a bit different than I do.
So with that, an unattributed quote that I read today for the first time today (here) and that has become a new favourite:
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”