This post, and tens of others, have been writing themselves inside my head over the past few months since I last posted. I have thought about writing time and time again, but each time I’ve stopped. I have no readers, no post has ever received more than 100 visitors, and I have nothing to lose by writing – yet for some reason I find there is nothing harder in the world than sitting down and writing in a public form. I can’t imagine how someone like Seth Godin does it, knowing hundreds of thousands of people will read every single word he writes.

At the same time, this is the type of stuff that takes practice. This stuff is hard, which is probably why there aren’t enough honest bloggers out there. The hard stuff is the stuff worth doing. Just because it is hard, most people will not do it. Eveyr time I sit down I want to write something epic. And every time  I think that whatever I have to say has already been written by people who are much better thinkers and writers than I could ever hope to be. All I can think of when I sit down to write is that I’m not smart enough, not interesting enough, to have a public opinion on anything.

Reading Ryan Holiday and others, I think the only way you can bear to put something into the public domain is to have an unshakeable confidence in yourself. I definitely don’t have this, but I’m working on it – and I want this blog to help form that confidence. I want to become used to putting strong opinions out there, until it no longer frightens me to say something publicly. I want to be wrong, and and have people tell me so, because that’s the only way I know that I’m doing something worth talking about.  Being “Remarkable” as Seth Godin puts it, requires doing something worth talking about. I’m not there, but I want to be. Everything good that has come in my life has come about by putting myself out there and being willing to take criticism and rejection.

Every single person who I admire professionally writes in some way. Every single one. 

Why do I want to write? It’s a way for me to push myself. I am getting too comfortable. I work hard, but don’t often reach outside of my comfort zone. Too many times in this past month I have sat down to write and instead read Hacker News for the 100^th time, or checked each of my separate email inboxes 3x each. There are enough distractions to last a lifetime, but that’s why this stuff is hard. And I’m determined to do the hard work and ship.