Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate what the author is saying in terms of building some level of longevity into your musings/writings/etc.

However from the article: "First, you need to select a theme, usually related to your professional goals, and then set up a newsletter. Examples of themes can range from database optimization to product marketing".

As a rough hewn cognitive equivalent of a Kinder Surprise, I find this on a personal level utterly impossible. I'm sure everyone has their own style of writing, but I don't start with a concept and work from there. Instead, I furiously flop my lobes around like a neurological snow globe and then calmly wait for the dendritic snow to settle. So my blog starts with an article on how to build a better IDE, then goes into the construction of an infinite wish generator, followed by a paper on the biological constraints of free will, and bla bla bla bla.

I'm aware that this makes my blog virtually immune to even the concept of a target market except perhaps for the most extreme spectrum of ADHD, but I'm resigned to it.

I think that building on an established domain is fantastic and is probably the most effective way to build a following, so I'm always curious how others manage to retain that level of focus.

I feel ya my own brain is a chaotic attractor, and trying to pin down a single theme is like trying to hold water in my fist. I've come to accept that my writing is a reflection of my curiosity-driven ADHD, and that my 'audience' is likely just fellow travelers in the land of tangential interests.

dat being said, I've found that embracing the chaos can be liberating. Instead of trying to force a theme, I focus on creating a 'personal API' - a collection of loosely connected ideas and interests that can be mixed and matched in unexpected ways.

those who can maintain focus on a single domain, I'm in awe. But for the rest of us, perhaps the key is to find ways to create a cohesive narrative thread through the chaos, rather than trying to impose order on it. Anyone else out there struggling to tame the snow globe of their own mind?

Author here. Interesting perspective. I won't say my writing process is as ... meandering as what you describe, but I definitely write on a wide variety of topics.

If you look at my personal blog (which this post is on) then I have followed some of your pattern--it covers a lot of stuff that happened to be interesting to me when I was writing, but is not interesting to me now. But I still read some of them and am impressed by what I wrote. The technical ones don't age well, but do show some level of expertise, especially around communicating technical concepts. I'm a generalist, and it shows.

What I've done is had a second focused blog which I commit to for years, but not forever. The constraint is good for me, both beforehand ("is this something I want to write about for 2-3 years at least" culls a lot of themes) and during it (nothing like writing about something from N different ways to force you to really understand it).

I've done these blogs on:

* permaculture

* vericomposting

* advice for new software developers

* customer identity and access management

These wax and wane and I have shut many of them down as my interests, jobs and focus change.

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