A shitty first blog post

This is the third time I start to write a blog. The first two times I started one, I almost immediately stopped writing it and deleted everything. I didn't know where I wanted to go with it. And I put a lot of pressure on myself over this.
But instead of working on getting specific about what I want to do, I started to read about how to start a blog, how to monetize it, and how to pick a niche to attract an audience. This created a tremendous amount of overwhelm and increased the pressure I felt. Finally, after a long time of procrastination, I figured out what I am going to do with this blog.

I read a lot of different stuff and I believe that any tactic I read about might be worth trying. Additionally, the reading further fostered my interest in marketing. After all, who cares about the best novel ever written when nobody even knows it exists? But for now, the most important thing I can do is to just ignore everything about this topic.

The main reason I want to start this blog is to have a constant creative output and to improve my writing skills. This is the one thing I care about. I don't want to earn money from it. I don't care if anybody is going to read it. I want to write one post a week and don't want to constrain myself to a niche in order to attract an audience. I want to write about topics I find interesting and fun to write about. I want to find my voice to explain things I'm passionate about in a way they will actually be understood.
I don't want to do A/B testing to optimize my titles for a maximal click rate. And I don't want to get into SEO. It's not that these things aren't important or that I will never do them. But right now, they are not as important as getting started with writing.

I still don't know where I am going with this blog. Especially in the beginning, I will fail to add something meaningful to the conversation about the topics I will write about. For any topic I might pick, there is somebody more talented and practiced out there, who will have written about it. For many posts, I won't achieve the quality I am striving for. For example, Derek Sivers's blog is one of my favourites to read. I adore his style of writing and the signal to noise ratio of his posts. Most of them can be read in less than a minute and yet I have taken more from them than from some books I read. There is no way, I will achieve this quality of writing from the get-go.
Knowing this certainty comforts me. Why should I worry about something, that is going to happen anyway? Just get on with it, continue to work, and improve.
What matters is to get started.

Failure is the mark of a life well lived. In turn, the only way to live without failure is to be of no use to anyone.

Wit, my favourite character from the Stormlight Archive Series by Brandon Sanderson

To further distance myself from my endless self-doubts and insecurities about this blog, I imagine a successful photographer.
He didn't want to become famous, and started out just enjoying to take pictures with his smartphone. One day, he decided to level up. He bought himself a camera for the price of a small car, with all the technical gear that expert photographers use and I don't even know exists. The first picture he took with it was of a glass of wine. And it looked horrible. It was blurry, the composition didn't work and the contrast was off. His first instinct was to stop trying and to sell the camera again. But he kept going. Each day he took pictures, a lot of them. He started a photo album. Whenever he took a picture he found special, whether it looked great or he liked the story behind it, he printed it out and put it in the album.

Now, after ten years of doing this, he has almost completed his 4th album. He learned how to see the world as a photographer, how to spot a great scenery. He knows what is important for him and how he can express himself. Whenever he visits a city, he doesn't just go to the tourist spots but focuses on other sights. Often, he just captures the rush hour traffic.

Sometimes, when he feels stuck, he looks through these albums to visit past times. He browses the first album right now and comes across his first, blurry picture of the wineglass. He smiles. He remembers his insecurity about it and the feeling of not knowing where to go with it. He reflects on the journey he went on, how much he enjoyed it. And he is grateful for this picture, because he knows, that he wouldn't be where he is now without it.

Taking a deep breath, he closes the album and starts writing his first novel. He doesn't know what he's doing, but that's ok. The knowledge will come over time.