A long time ago a friend of mine went to Australia for a year. He was between studies, couldn’t really figure out what to do next, so he took a backpack, a few quid and went for it.
We could follow his adventure through blogposts hosted on a friend’s website.
Later he built up is own website as a platform for a photography project “a place a day”, the goal being to take one photo every day for a year. And he made it.

Since then, the blog platform remained empty. For the best part of 10 years.

One year ago we – a group of 7 inseparable friends – convinced ourselves to start leveraging that website to post articles, blog posts, with the goal to share. Share our views on topics, our frustration, experiences, desires, …

One year down the road, nothing.

And as much as we like the idea of making this work, the first brick, the first piece of writing has yet to come (at the time of writing).

So what’s the excuse?

Lack of time or procrastination?

Our life are so full of activities and chores that time for writing (yet thinking about writing) is close to zero. Especially when you’re building a family like most of my friends do.

Not really for me though, if I’m fully honest. I have the easy way: no wife, no kids, no big commitment. I do have time, I just don’t use it wisely or efficiently.

This first blog post has been started a Friday night (actually Saturday 1.00am) after much browsing on stupid website and YouTube time.

Why am I procrastinating so much?

First there’s simply the lack of writing skills. I know my writing isn’t great in English (nor in French) and that undermines my confidence in translating potentially interesting thoughts into writings that are worth a read by anyone else.
Then, there’s the fact that a blog article seems like a huge well thought after article of x thousand words. It requires a huge time investment, even more so when your writing is poor.
And finally there is the element of regularity. New articles need to come up at a regular (ideally fast) pace, bringing fresh content.
So the feeling is this: getting to climb summits on a regular basis without proper shoes and a total lack of skills or so… It looks impossible.

So why would I try to start then? And if I would start, how could I do it?

Start small and discipline yourself, just produce.

Let’s not go all Everesty from start. It won’t work and I would probably die very quickly just by even looking at the summit. I need training to hope reach some decent summits of blog posting following the aforementioned criteria.

Ali Abdaal in his vlog puts it quite well, discipline matters more than motivation and small regularly is often better than huge only once (in writing blog posts at least). The latter is typically why people fail at writing a diary. More on Ali later.

For the time being, let’s start the “training” with the following rules:

• One article per month
• No need to be long or detailed, just an idea and some comments
• Just write

Let’s be honest, not many people will read this anyway. Train while no one is really looking and let’s see what comes out of this !