I originally started writing this blog with the very basic but concrete goal of writing one article per day, and I set up a Facebook page to promote it. About a week into it, I realised that some of my articles would make for good narrated videos, so I decided that I would launch a YouTube channel. And couple of days ago — feeling self-doubt about the project — I decided that I would need to commit to it — to tell myself that this is a final decision in order to ensure that the project didn’t end just because I was having a bad day. I set as my goal to write at least 500 words a day, and publish at least 1 video a week, and that I would have to commit myself to all of this for one year. I made my goals very concrete so they would be easy to remember, and I wrote a list of rules for what I’d allow or deny myself during this time period.
One of them was about routine: If I allow myself one weekend off, then I must allow myself all weekends off. It serves a dual purpose. It allows me to take a break if I need it, but it also forces me to consider if I really do need a break, because it would force me to commit to taking such a break every weekend. I get bored on the weekends, and might risk trading away many future productive weekends in favour of many boring weekends, just to get this one weekend off. If I really do need time off, the rules say, I must schedule it ahead of time, and it comes out of the vacation budget I’ve allocated for myself. And no, the rules do not allow for a one-day vacation that falls on a weekend — I must take a whole week off at the minimum.
If you think about it, year isn’t even all that much. There are people who produce content for several years before it catches on, if it even catches on at all. You can’t embark on a thing like this with the expectation that you’ll be successful. If you do, and you have no natural drive or intrinsic motivation for it other than wanting money and fame, you’re most likely going to fail. You really do need to have a passion for what you’re doing.
For me, passion wasn’t what I had expected it to be. When you hear the word passion, you imagine something a bit intense, relentless and emotional. Passion was so unlike this for me that I have to resist putting it in quotation marks. A real passion for a thing doesn’t look passionate. A passion is something that you find yourself doing out of habit — constantly — without even thinking about it. You may not be doing it in an organised and refined way, but it just keeps happening. Maybe you make little drawings all the time, so you become an artist. Maybe you find yourself taking care of people, so you become a certified nurse. Or maybe you can’t help but tinker with any electronic device that you come across, so you become an electrical engineer.
In my case, my passion — the thing I kept habitually and effortlessly doing whenever I had a spare moment — turned out to be writing. I had originally directed this energy for writing — which I understood as a preference for written communication — toward social media, because I felt I had a desire to socialise. However, I gradually came to realise that I was spending far more energy on writing posts than on reading them. I would end up writing spontaneous yet extensive monologues about things because it came so naturally to me. At one point — in a hilarious metaphorical case of looking for your glasses while you’re wearing them — I was posting monologues about how I just couldn’t find my passion. My passion wasn’t right under my nose — it was right on my nose.
On a few occasions, people did tell me — sometimes out of an annoyance at my high posting volume — that I should write a blog. I had a couple of false starts doing that, but it felt hard to write. The words didn’t flow as naturally as they would when writing a post. I also didn’t see the point of having a blog. “Who will read my blog of all blogs? If you’re really going to write a good blog, you have to do it full time anyway, and I can’t do that. I can barely finish this article.”
Seeing as I didn’t consider myself a writer, didn’t have a writer’s routine, nor a commitment toward writing, these attempts inevitably failed, and I concluded that I must be very different from my father — who was a journalist and wrote for a living. If you’re going to be honest with yourself though, understanding what your parents have a knack for could be useful for figuring yourself out. As you mature and learn to deflate your ego, this should hopefully become somewhat easier to admit.
As part of this one-year mission, one of the things I have committed to is to have an income from my Internet presence. The backup plan is freelance writing — or to get hired as a writer for a company — plus a part-time job. The more mindlessly dull this part-time job is, the better, because that will leave my brain free to think about what to write next. If the job has plenty of dead time, I could get some actual writing done too.
My main focus for the time being is to write this blog. In the long term, however, the YouTube channel is likely to get more subscribers than it, and I expect video to be the primary medium through which people are going to be exposed to my writing. Nevertheless, it all has to start with the blog and my commitment to it, or it would all fall apart.
In order to monetise the blog, I have enabled paid subscriptions — starting at $5/month or $50/year — and will begin to promote that on my YouTube channel as a way of supporting me as a creator. My articles will remain free and won’t be disappearing behind a paywall any time soon. Instead, what you’re getting when you pay for a subscription to my blog is the actual blog content itself. No, I didn’t just contradict myself.
Allow me to explain…
Narrowly speaking, blogs are weblogs — fundamentally speaking, they are public journals in which you bring things up that aren’t necessarily a good fit for a full treatment in the form of an article or a book, but are interesting nevertheless. The subscribers of a blog are a community of people who share a common interest. As a paying subscriber, you are joining this community in order to gain more opportunities to engage with it. You are also encouraging the continued existence of the community, with the blogger as the driving force behind it.
That’s what I’m selling — for the price of one cafe latte per month — not access to articles. Needless to say, if you’ve read this article all the way to the end, and you thought it was a good read, thank you for enjoying my sales pitch. Signing up for a paid (or free) subscription to my blog is highly unlikely to be the worst decision you will have made this year. But it might have been one of your best.