Time to treat blogging like playing a game

Or at least, treat blogging like a game in some respects.

I’ve started to write and/or written a lot of different blog posts, all in various states of imperfection. Some just barely start exploring a topic, with no more than a paragraph or so of content. Others are virtually finished, and just need some further polishing up. I haven’t posted any of them.

It occurred to me that I was thinking about my blog in the wrong way. I was thinking about it like a showcase, to be filled with perfectly polished and immutable works. If I had near infinite amounts of time to devote to my blog or it was generating income for me, and I had a huge readership, this would be a fantastic way to view things. Unfortunately, none of those are the case.

Instead, I'm going to treat this blog like playing a game. That probably doesn't make any sense. Let me elaborate.

By treating it like playing a game, I mean posting without fear of failure and without (excessive) concerns over imperfection. If I write a blog post and it sucks, so be it. I can edit it. I can delete it. More importantly, I can learn from it and do better next time, at least in some respects.

I'll be able to better gauge the quality of my posts, and the interests of whoever actually stumbles across my blog, at least in the case people leave comments. This is far more useful than having some word files on my computer that I pull up and go "no, not good enough", and then decide not to work on anymore because I've lost interest in writing the post.

By posting, I feel like I'll gain some momentum as far as posting goes. In a way, this is like deciding whether or not to play a game; the more often you play and the more you enjoy it, the easier it is to find even more time to play. This might actually translate into more momentum as far as polishing my posts goes, or, maybe not. We'll see.

If this post is any indication, my new strategy might be working. I've written this post in a few minutes, with almost no editing, and it doesn't seem all that bad. I could probably find a better metaphor than playing a game, running perhaps, but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to post this.