What Motivates Me To Write

Gergely Orsoz, author of the blog Pragmatic Engineer, recently wrote a post How I Motivate Myself to Write. He talks about how he was concerned about who would be reading his blog.

When I (re)started my blog, I was wondering who would be reading my articles. In the end, I decided I don't care: I'll just write them for myself, as a reflection of the ideas and observations I have come across.

Approaching writing with this approach, it has been surprisingly therapeutic and a tool that helps me reflect. Writing my ideas down, in a form that makes sense requires a surprisingly large amount of thinking.

I've had a similar struggle in past blogging attempts. I thought blogging was about writing for other people. For months, I would write posts about topics I thought others would want to read, but weren't the topics I was most interested in.

Since then, I have decided to write about subjects I am interested in. I write about the stocks I've invested in, career milestones and progression, books I've read, and so forth. Writing has been a great way for me to process my thoughts. It's helped me make difficult decisions that I would otherwise procrastinate on.

So writing for myself is what motivates me to write. I'm thankful I learned that I can write for myself. That has made all the difference in my excitement to write.