I have decided to publish something every day, and I want to explain why, partly so that I am on the record and cannot quietly stop.
The obvious reason is the wrong one. Yes, it helps people find me, and yes, it builds the thing everyone calls an audience. But if that were the whole motivation I would have quit already, because it is thin fuel and it burns out around week three.
The real reason is that writing is how I find out what I think.
I have been doing this work for twenty years, and I have carried a lot of convictions around without ever having to defend them. It is easy to believe something quietly. It is harder to believe it in a paragraph, where the reasoning has to actually connect and a lazy thought shows.
Half of what I have written this year has changed my mind mid-sentence. I sit down to explain a position I have held for a decade and find, by the third paragraph, that it does not hold — that I had been repeating it rather than believing it. That has been humbling, and it has taught me more than any course.
There is a second reason, which is that I would like to leave some of this behind. Twenty years of small lessons live in one head, and a head is a fragile place to keep anything. The designers coming up behind me are making the same mistakes I made, and paying full price for lessons I already bought.
So I am writing them down. Not to be admired — to be useful, and to leave the ladder where it is instead of pulling it up.
Every day. A thing you only do when the mood strikes stays a hobby, and I would rather this be work.