On most days it is impossible for me to come up with an original blog idea to bring to life. But some days, in between the dreary unsuccessful ones, it is difficult and but not impossible to capture on paper that ephemeral output from the collision of disparate ideas in your head, like atoms smashing into each other in the LHC. An event that you fervently hope produces something unique or interesting, truly worth sharing with the wider world. Lightning in a bottle when the mental cadence is captured with skill on that blank page in front of you. In the last 760 days, I tried it many times and on 84 tries I managed to capture proof of this effort. I say ‘capture proof of ‘ and not ‘succeeded’ consciously. For the effort is best judged by the reader and not the writer.

Who is going to appreciate it? Writing is HARD. Coming up with something original to say is HARD. Making an original remix is HARD. The fields you and I will toil on, our blog a lone digital raindrop among the millions, will give little in terms of immediate return, if by immediate return you mean wider recognition from a busy world. Did you know at the end of 2011, there were 181 million blogs, compared to only 36 million in 2006. At best a few close well meaning friends and strangers will drop by and give your blogpost a cursory polite ‘LIKE’ click and even fewer will maybe subscribe, hoping your future output gets better than the preceding lukewarm ones.  At worst, for a long dispiriting stretch, you will write for an audience of one. You.

But I am not here to argue the downside. But you needed to know it.

I am really here to argue that that lone audience is worth writing to. Even if you start writing a blog that till your dying day is never seen by anyone but yourself (the very definition of a personal diary) you should relentlessly persist.

The reason came to me on a run, when I was feeling a bit underwhelmed with my blog view metric. I was hoping to close the year with 10000 views and had not even crossed 5000.

The Reason to blog : The best thing a blog does is force you to rise above the daily cacophony of life and people and all the mundane minutae that is urban life, even if briefly, into that wondrous cloud of IDEAS. And that reason alone, that brief visit to the world of ideas, makes all the toil worth it because that idea cloud is the pinnacle of your own intelligence, the REAL reason for your education, inside and outside of school and the genuine proof of your original analysis. 

It’s succinctly captured by this below admonition :

Harvard Business Review says that people who are serious about ideas are blogging. They also added “..Writing is still the clearest and most definitive medium for demonstrating expertise on the web“. So in 2013 I urge you to stop being average and small and force your way into the better club.

Start blogging.