Over 43 years Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote 1318 essay papers. At the rate I am writing blog posts I should overtake him in 37 years. This is if I keep going at 1.5 weeks per blog post.

An aspirational blog is typically one that has 1-4 essays all dated about 3-7 years in the past. We can further identify these blogs when they contain a post that says something along the lines of "Hey this is my blog, I hope to write in here frequently, stay tuned!" and we never hear from them again. So having a blog seems to be something that people wish to have, but not something they ever get around to publish content on.

Then there are blogs that are full of content and insight. When I've come across these you tend to leave with a strong opinion of the writer and you might even think, "damn, I want a blog like this".

So what makes the difference?

Motivate Yourself

A number of people have asked "How do you motivate yourself to keep writing your blog" and after putting thought to the question I've realised that all motivation can be broken down into 3 steps.

The first step is defining your goal, and in this case we can say the goal is "Create a blog, or a blog post." Goal setting is shallow. Often there's nothing unique about anyone's goal, as with aspirational blogs, showing one's thoughts and personality seems to be something everyone wants to do.

The second step is where we attach meaning to our goal. Try to get deeper than the six year old that want's to be president. Why do you want a blog? Why do you want to be president? The six year old might wish to give their class mates chocolate every Friday maybe they want to make a positive difference in people's lives, on these two reasons alone which six year old do you think is most likely to become a president.

So why do you want to write a blog? Some of my reasons include; I want to receive feedback on certain topics. I want to use it to connect with colleagues, friends and others interested in the same thing as me. I want to build credibility and become a source of insight. I want to get better at writing. Now we've defined Why.¹

Throw Away Your Goal

At this point we can get rid of our goal of "Create a blog, or a blog post" because the next step is to figure out "How".

How can I receive feedback? How can I connect with colleagues? We need to make assumptions and list all the possible ways we can get feedback or develop connection. It's important to highlight that we are out to prove or disprove these assumptions. If we write a blog and don't get feedback or we end up without creating connections then we should be happy to throw it away. At the end of the day our goal is not to have a blog, it's to create connection and the blog isn't working.

We can apply this to other goals that people typically have such as "Get a Job". If we aren't able to find work then we need to think about Why we want a job. It might be money, it might be being part of something greater than yourself. Well there are ways of making money and being part of greater things that are not contingent on getting a job. If we are too attached to the goal we might be blind to opportunities which will help us achieve the underlying driver that's causing us to want a job.

Recession Proof

Knowing the Why is an important part of the motivation. If you can't get yourself to sit down and write on a Sunday, one of the easiest ways to get yourself into gear is to reflect on why you want something. I'm doing this to get better, I'm doing this to build credibility. These reasons are often bigger than your current self and bigger than the dilly-dally of your procrastination session.

Where else are your ideas going to go? There's no point in collecting and holding onto your ideas for the slim chance that you get the right moment to apply the nugget of wisdom. You're more likely to get these moments if you are writing about them. Prove you know something by writing it, and avoid forgetting things by having it written. Finally; write for yourself - not for others.

Getting Started

Beyond trying to motivate yourself, you can make writing easier by making small notes of the thoughts you have throughout the day that you think make an interesting tidbit to tell someone else. Having one place to gather these notes is helpful as you have a flock of thoughts you can collate and group into some coherent essay. That way when you sit down you're not starting with the blank page, you've got a jumping-off point.

Once you are in the habit of doing this you'll tend to be eager to find things that bring you inspiration. It is important that we motivate ourselves to seek inspiration and we are not sitting and waiting for things to come to mind. Being active in sparking inspiration will change how you approach how you consume content and the conversations you're having with others.

Through the process of creating my blog I've found that I've started to engage more with others on topics that I wish to find out more about. I'm fleshing out my own ideas through conversation. I'm trying to find books that touch on topics that I'd like to explore and write about. There's now a loop of being eager to write which is making me eager to learn which is making me eager to write. Which is funny, because I've found that the process of writing a blog post is fulfilling my underlying motivations more so than just having the blog.

Giving yourself a deadline helps too.

Something I found to be cute about the docker engine is it's feature to create a random name for your containers, when one is not specified.

I've had some good ones e.g:

objective_galileo
distracted_euclid

Occasionally I'd be spinning up the odd VM and have to provide some generic name like dev-sebastien. So instead I thought my own arbitrary name generation could save some time here.

Random names

The idea was to combine <adjective>-<pokemon> and use this as the VM parameter.

Thus defining the following in .create_name.sh

function gen_name()
{
    pokemon=(
        "pidgey"
        "pikachu"
        "cubone"
    )
    adjectives=(
        "hungry"
        "adorable"
        "jittery"
    )

    select_pokemon=${pokemon[$RANDOM % {#pokemon[@]}] }
    select_desc=${adjectives[$RANDOM % {#adjectives[@]}] }

    local result=sebastien-$select_desc-$select_pokemon
    echo "$result"
}

Call this in your .bash_aliases file.

source .create_name.sh

And every time you run gen_name in your command line, you'll get a new "vm" name.

I've coupled this with:

create_instance(){
    gcloud compute instances create $(gen_name);
}

Here are some of the names of my machines:

sebastien-livid-quagsire
sebastien-lonely-metapod
sebastien-gentle-rattata