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Hello World

01/01/2025

Back in 2017-18 when I first learned about blogging. It was all about affiliate marketing, e-commerce, digital marketing, etc. Every day there were YouTube videos of how people were earning, lakhs and crores from it. I wanted to replicate what I saw in those YouTube videos, so I decided to try it myself.  However after several trials and experiments. Nothing worked and I stopped it.


In retrospect, I think that I got the impression, that blogging is only about all those aforementioned things. But that is not true. And I realized it later when I got exposed to Paul Graham and Sam Altman’s blog (1). Blogging is so much more. It is a means of self-expression, like vlogging, music, or art.


But to my surprise, neither Paul nor Sam used it like that. They were using it differently — as a thinking tool. Shane Parrish from Farnam Street and Paul both point out that, "Great thinking comes from great writing". And that was their motivation. So much so that Sam even said in one of his blogs that he is not good at writing, and wants to become better, because writing influences thinking.


Early this year, I somehow found, tom macwrights blog. His blog was an eye-opener for me. Because it showed me What are the possibilities of a blog. Previously I only knew that there were either blogs like the earning money ones, or essays like Paul and Sam or there were portfolio websites of developers and designers.


Although, Tom’s one was different. He had an amalgamation of the essay and portfolio style. No exaggeration — he was vlogging in words. After I went through his blog. I felt that I could and should create something like this.


I liked his design and the way he presented his content. He mentioned in his about that the theme is available for use, so I mailed him asking for a discounted rate for my friends and myself. But he was so kind that he gave it away for free.


This happened in May, but I didn’t find time to work on it until September. In September I start going through it. And I realized that however kind of him, I should at least not use it as it is. Let’s change something. Thereafter I decided that I would take inspiration from his theme and design my own. I kept working on it. And on the third iteration, I saw some ray of hope. After which I asked my friend Vivek to code it.


After he was done coding, I still felt this was not reflective of me, and that bugged me for a long time. Later in December, after my fifth semester was over, I picked it again for a fourth iteration. This time, it came as I wanted. The current website you see is that iteration only.


You might be wondering what is my motivation to do all this. It’s simple, similar to Sam’s — to practice writing. I want to master both writing and thinking because great writing leads to great thinking. Both of them are important as a human skill. Writing, to know how to condense information into effecting communication and and thinking, to know what to communicate. Apart from these, there are other massive advantages to both of them. I won’t go into it, but if you are eager to know, you can find that on the Farnam Street website.


With all this on the horizon. The things I am planning to do here are:


For now, this is all I have thought about to share. In future, I might add or reduce some things depending on the situation.


I recently read someone’s blog's first post and they had this beautiful thing in it — mention about AI. What they did was to tell the readers about the use of AI on the blog. I found it very fascinating. And it makes sense to do the same here.


So I'll also mention what kind of AI help was taken for a particular piece. Since the launch of ChatGPT. My AI use has been crazy. But slowly I am phasing it out, especially for writing. Now the only help I take is to ask it to proofread and tell me things to improve. But soon I’ll stop that too. Whatever happens, I’ll be transparent to here.


Transparency is clear but frequency is not. I don’t know what the frequency of my posts will be. But one thing is for sure. Similar to Tom I will post monthly updates without any fail.


People who know me, know that my fascination with videos and YouTube is on just different level. So why am I not filming stuff and putting it on YouTube? ahhh… what I have come to realize after watching so much of YouTube, across genres, is that great video is also a result of great writing. Therefore I would first like to smoothen my this skill. Then definitely jump onto that.


I don't know if you noticed or not but there is no RSS feed or newsletter subscription or even I don't have comments. I have done this on purpose. That being, I have noticed that most of the time, people are just telling how good or bad the piece is. And I don't want that kind of discussion on my website. If anyone has some burning opinion or thought they can always message me on LinkedIn or Twitter.


Ultimately, The goal is not to get social validation from this. Rather I want to make it a treasure trove of interesting thoughts, topics and ideas for my 13-year-old sitting curiously in class fifth.


Notes
  1. I found Farnam Street, Sam's blog and Paul's essay sometime in 2022-23. Since then I have been a huge admirer of their work — particularly the ideas from Farnam Street.