My blog probably has between one and five readers (I’m not doing any traffic analytics, so it could even be less than that). So why bother?
There are some benefits to writing in general. In particular, it sharpens your thinking and communication.
A blog, tough, is different than writing, say, a book or a scientific paper. Writing for a blog forces you to pay attention to the world in order to find relevant topics to write about 1. It forces you to take a stance. And in some cases it can eventually change the world.
It is a trope that ideas can be powerful. But in many cases it is more subtle than that. For all his faults, economist Milton Friedman was right about one thing:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman2
One of the objectives of this blog is thus to continue lying alternative ideas around. So that when the time comes, real change can happen.
Kudos to Seth Godin for this insight. Seth has been writing a blog post daily for talmost 20 years, without missing a single day. ↩︎
Friedman did get his crisis. In 1973, OPEC cut off the global supply of oil, and plunged the world into recession. Friedman and his cohort were able to convince people that their pain was caused by labor unions, civil rights and the EPA. In the crisis, his ideas moved from the periphery to the center. ↩︎
