Seth Godin to the World: You’re Still Not Blogging Daily?!

Seth Godin has moved to Wordpress, which has prompted him once again to tell us about the importance of blogging daily on his podcast.

“I’m encouraging each one of you to have (a blog). Not to have a blog to make money, because you probably won’t. Not to have a blog, because you’ll have millions and millions of readers, because you probably won’t. But to have a blog because of the discipline it gives you, to know that you’re going to write something tomorrow. Something that might not be read by many people—it doesn’t matter—it will be read by you. If you can build that up, you will begin to think more clearly. You will make predictions. You will make assertions. You will make connections. And there they will be, in type, for you to look at a month or a year later. This practice of sharing your ideas to people who will then choose or not choose to share them helps us get out of our own head, because it’s no longer the narrative inside. It’s the narrative outside, the narrative that you’ve typed up, that you’ve cared enough to share.”

To find this even more inspirational, you may have shrug off the fact that Seth spends hours every day coming up with a single post to publish (no one I know has that kind of free time). But what really gets to me after hearing this podcast a few times is that thought about the “narrative." I can’t deny the truth in that.

Nothing has been healthier for my idea generation than to throw out ideas. Once they’re in the public, they feel completely gone. I’m free to come up with new and better ideas. And I do.

When I don’t put those ideas out into the public, they fester. They cause uncertainty and anxiety. They kill the possibility of new and better ideas.

Maybe I need to create the time, even at great cost, to blog more often if it means I can regularly free my brain of festering ideas. Maybe I shouldn’t say maybe: it seems like an invitation for this idea to fester.