Just over a year ago, I started a consistent weekly journaling habit. After abandoning many blank notebooks, I attribute my current success to the first two entries. For the first entry, I wrote the reasons I wanted to keep a journal. All my previous attempts had been motivated by brief fits or inspiration or vague notions about what “successful” people did. Writing down my personal reasons forced me to think about what I hoped to get out of it which helped me continue the practice even when I didn’t feel like it.

For my second entry, I wrote rules that would help me realize those goals. Where my previous attempts ended after the initial excitement wore off or when I got sufficiently scared my family would find my stream-of-consciousness thoughts, this time I focused on maximizing for consistency. I allow myself to write short entries as long as I do it consistently, and I don’t write anything that would be too embarassing for my family or close friends to read.

Now, a year later, I’m starting a blog the same way. Here I’ll list my reasons for starting a blog (and personal website more generally) and what I hope to get out of it. Next week, I’ll write about the rules I will try to hold myself to. This is my first entry, so it should go without saying that I have not yet achieved any of these goals. If you are thinking about starting a blog, you should read someone who’s been at it longer. This and the next post are mostly for my own benefit, but you’re welcome to read them if you like.

To generate and organize thoughts

My primary reason for starting a blog is to help create and organize my thoughts. Paul Graham conjectures that writing generates ideas as well as it communicates them. In my own brief experiences journaling, I’ve found that even when I feel like I don’t have much to say, I am easily able to fill a page with thoughts I didn’t even know I had. At a basic level, I hope that blogging can do for the way I think about the world what journaling has done for the way I think about my personal and interior life.

But I also hope blogging can do more for organizing thoughts than journaling. Journaling is audienceless. It’s more about the practice of putting thoughts on paper. Blogging is about communicating. I want any writing that I put out into the world to be coherent and well-written. This forces me to be discriminating about my thoughts. Rather than simply generating them as I do when I journal, I want to be forced to figure out if and how they fit together. I want to figure out how to best word them and order them. And I especially want to figure out whether I actually endorse them.

To expand my village

Ali Abdaal uses the village analogy to motivate blogging. Imagine you’re living in a small village. The only people you’re likely to interact with are the other people in your village plus the few travelers who pass through. Creating a personal website, he says, is like traveling around to different villages yourself. The number of people you could meet increases exponentially.

I’m not necessarily looking to meet a lot of people, but I’ve heard how hard it is to make friends out of college, and I can use all the help I can get. Even if this website only ever results in meeting one new person I would consider it to be a success. I would expect to have plenty in common with someone who contacted me after finding and reading my blog.

To lower the activation energy for other projects

The obvious benefit of setting up a personal website is that it’s a place where I can put other projects as I complete them. People who visit my website can see what I can do. Hopefully my projects can be useful to some people. They may lead to working on projects with other people with similar interests. Potential employers can get a sense for my skillset and interests.

Perhaps less obviously, any project that involves putting your work out in public makes it a little easier to do that in the future. You improve at the technical skills involved, but you also become less intimidated by the fact that other people are looking at your work. At least that’s what I hope.

To learn in public

I am also using this website as an impetus to transition to Vim and Linux. I know there are many easier ways to make more attractive sites, but at least for now I like the feeling of doing it all myself in html and css. At least for now I’m enjoying the chance to feel totally lost and fiure everything out by myself from the ground up. Maybe I’ll eventually switch to something easier if I want to focus more on the actual writing, but for now, that is why this website is ugly.

To create an archive

As I’m approaching the end of college, I’m realizing just how much work I did is sort of meaningless now. Problem sets don’t mean anything outside of their classes. For this blog, I want to be able to produce an archive of essays that I’m proud of and maintain some value even as my views change.

To create something of value

Again, in this most unordered list, I intentionally left this reason to the end to set it apart. While all the other reasons are self-centered, it is important to me to that this is not just some vanity project and that there is some potential for others to find value in the things that I write.