Cohesion and confidence

I’m really happy with how this blog is starting to come together. I certainly took my time coming to it, but once I realized I wanted this to be a book blog it’s begun to seem like it should have been obvious from the start. Reading is my main hobby, so of course that’s what my blog’s about. I think I just didn’t have any good examples. The most attractive blogs (to me) are all about travel, and then other common topics are things like entrepreneurship or self-help or cooking. None of those easily translate into how to make a blog about books. But I’m figuring it out. And finding Gates Notes helped immensely. But now that I have direction I’m very happy with the progress I’m making. The Best Read in 2017 post is one of the posts I’m most proud of on here, and I’m just happier with the quality of posts I’ve made recently in general. I think it comes down to practice. I’m settling into a format, and I’m getting better at pulling together thoughts for these. Posts aside, I also now already have two new reviews for this year (one done, one almost done), and four(!) books that I’ve already finished reading.

Getting out more is also helping me distill my thoughts better. Two recent cases come up in particular; one, a guy observed that I seemed to read a lot of self-help books, and asked my thoughts on how much they contradict one another. I said I didn’t really think they did, and then even offered a little summary of the common thread that they all seem to just be variations of. In another case, I had been going on about how great Mastery was, and the guy asked me what I had applied from the book to my own life. In that case I told him about how I was now making more of a point to work on my writing every day, and about these different projects I’m working on. It didn’t occur to me until later that there’s another important takeaway I’m applying to my own life — the emphasis on working with other people and improving social skills. So that kind of comes full circle.

If we’re just patient, often things can come into bloom of their own accord. It’s not like there’s even that much that’s been happening. It’s just really starting to feel like things are working out.