I write to learn, not to earn income
For me, writing isn’t about fame or fortune but a journey for knowledge and wisdom.
I started writing by a happy accident.
My writing journey began with a visit to my wife’s counselor, where she was working through some difficult emotions from her past, and the counselor recommended writing as a way to help her deal with her emotions. My wife’s understanding of the counselor’s suggestion was for her to get those suppressed emotions out of her head and move past them. But the counselor also suggested writing as an ongoing routine that would help with daily life, not just the past emotional pain.
I took this to heart, even though the counselor didn’t realize it she was helping me too. I started writing about my feelings, as the counselor suggested, but I’m not a touchy freely kind of guy so this did nothing for me but this wasn’t the end of it. I made a discovery that changed the way I thought about writing, I learned that writing is a great way to solve problems, set goals, and dive deep into subjects I was interested in. Since it wasn’t just helpful for touchy-feely stuff I realized it could help me in other ways and this is what motivated me to keep writing.
My writing journey.
Once I began thinking about writing as a tool for processing personal thoughts, not just a communications tool, it became part of my daily routine. I began searching online for tips on daily writing, research, and note-taking and stumbled across the concept of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Building a Second Brain, and Zettelkasten.
I read online and watched videos on PKM methodologies and gained a good understanding of the topic. While I learned a lot about PKM I realized it was focused more on tools and organization than capturing valuable ideas or thoughts and was a long way from my original intent for writing so after months of studying I found PKM didn’t satisfy my purpose and decided to move on.
From curiosity about writing to a new thinking process.
One nugget of insight I learned from PKM was the idea of Digital Gardening, a metaphor for cultivating thoughts and ideas from a fleeting thought to a full topic. At its core, it’s a note-taking system for capturing ideas, linking them together, and curating the content for later reference. This was my eureka moment, I found a way to think about note-taking and make it useful.
One of the tenants of Digital Gardening is writing in public so others read and comment on your writing so you can improve your thinking. This idea was a huge step in my journey, previously I only thought about writing in private, but public writing changes everything. Now I wanted to write so that others could understand my thoughts, this made them much more comprehensive and valuable.
I considered the possibility people might not be interested or reading by stuff. But in the end, I think there’s value in writing so that other people can read and understand my thoughts. This type of writing means I need to consider other perspectives and be prepared to explain my points which makes my writing and thinking better.
How I ended up on Medium and why money isn’t the motivation.
To realize the full potential of Digital Gardening you share your thoughts with others so they can comment and hopefully improve your thinking. This sounds simple but it’s not, deciding where to write is important if you want people to find, read, and leave thoughtful comments.
There are a plethora of social media platforms you can write on but I found all of them to be superficial with users only interested in short Twitter-style posts, not full-length articles. So I decided I should start a blog but had no idea where to start. After a little research, I came across Medium and decided to give it a try.
I signed up for a free Medium trial and started reading articles to get a better understanding of the type of user content that exists. My initially impression was positive, user content was ad-free, well written, and most articles had good substance and not just short tweets designed to catch attention.
My only critique is all the pointless self-help and money-making articles. I guess it’s to be expected on a platform designed to pay writers for good content, you’ll also get crappy writers trying to turn a quick buck, but this is my only turn-off so far. From what I can tell it’s easy to block the content you don’t want to see or find content writers that you like and read their stuff.
Conclusion
I started writing by accident but found it was a powerful way to improve my thinking process. After spending time researching writing tools and methods I was inspired by the concept of Digital Gardening where you cultivate your ideas and publish them for others to read and get feedback. I hope my writings get at least some readers and feedback so I can continue to grow my knowledge on the topics I write about.
Writing online gives me knowledge, from reader feedback I gain understanding!
So why am I writing? Writing online gives me knowledge, from reader feedback I gain understanding! For me, writing isn’t about fame or fortune but a journey for knowledge and wisdom.
