It seems natural for a first post to be a kind of constitution or manifest of just what this thing is supposed to be. The most difficult thing is to begin, so you’ve got to at some point just do something. So here goes.

I was pushed to make this site after reading Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work! In this book, Kleon lays out ten principles “for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion,” geared to help them well, self promote; but he’s not thinking about promotion in quite the same terms as you usually encounter in books about networking or marketing.

What he lays out therein is a way of thinking about what you do that includes sharing it. Just as “networking” is best thought of not as some skeezy, psychopathic manipulation, but as the basic human function of simply making friends, sharing your work also does not have to be some try hard carnival barking; you can simply do what you’re doing while interacting with others.

In a nutshell, Kleon advises that you stop thinking you have to know everything. Instead, you need to focus on developing your unique perspective. This can come from any skills or expertise you have, but you don’t need to be some rock star or trailblazer; you can work with what you’ve got. He wouldn’t even have you think about what you plan to produce; the idea is not to create a specific product, or to hatch some master plan. The idea is to build a creative process that gets you in the habit of putting things out there and iterating, or as he says, I think quoting Derek Sivers, “practice in public. He recommends sharing something small every day, teaching about something you know, telling good stories or sharing things you are interested in. He cautions against becoming “human spam,” and also warns that you will have to deal with naysayers and assholes, but if you keep at this process you will develop your ideas and this can result in real benefits, even of the monetary variety, later on.

So writing a blog isn’t some project engineered to collect eyeballs to monetize, as so many online business and marketing gurus preach, it’s just a way to practice talking about what interests you in a way that is interesting to others. You don’t have to seek out some topic or angle; you’re already reading, thinking and writing, so just take some of that and put it up where someone might see it. That’s it. We’ll see how it goes.