How Writing Changed My Life And Why You Should Start Your Own Blog

I have a confession to make.

I’m not that great a writer, I have no secrets for how to trick the search engines into displaying my content higher in their search rankings, and I’m a mediocre online marketer at best.

What I am however, is a damn good story teller, ridiculously obsessive, and stubborn as fuck. If I had to use three words to sum up my personality they would be, curious, creative, and controversial.

I also strive for perfection and can be a royal pain in the ass. And before you go getting all “But no one can ever be perfect!” on me…

I know that perfection is not attainable, and that I am far from it. But I also know that striving for it will bring out my best work, and that is what I expect from myself every time.

I also understand that most people are not working as hard as I am to change the world around them, so by default, my efforts are more than enough.

I understand that sharing my unique thoughts and ideas openly allows me to set myself apart in world that chews the ordinary up and spits it out just for fun.

Ideas that lie at the root of my life philosophy and fuel my entire online efforts. Ideas I may never again sum up more succinctly than I did in my most popular article of all time: 7 Reasons Why You Will Never Do Anything Amazing With Your Life.

I wrote it a year after moving back to Sarasota Florida to start my own marketing company. An effort that was not going very well at the time.

I was flat broke, my car had just been repossessed, and finding new consulting clients seemed impossible with a website that let my every emotion hang out publicly. Everything seemed to be going wrong, but I was able to find strength in my words.

Writing gave me a way to keep going when everyone else told me to give up. When everyone told me to give in and “go get a real job!”

Because I didn’t want a real job. I needed more than that. I needed to prove to myself that I was not a quitter. That I could finally see something through to the end, no matter how much it hurt, or what price I had to pay to get there.

And maybe that’s the wrong way to walk through life, but it’s the way I’ve chosen to live. Because when I die, I want to lie there knowing that I had nothing left to give.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post, almost exactly two years after writing that article; on the edge of actually doing something amazing with my life.

Wondering if I am even capable of living up to the expectations I’ve set for myself.

Wondering what would happen if the world found out I was actually a fraud.

And as I sit here thinking those thoughts, it occurs to me that none of it would be possible if I had not taken the time to write those words on that day. If I had not taken the time a year before that to start my blog, and if a few years before that, I had not started capturing my ideas on paper with the hopes that one day my grandchildren would find them and learn that their grandpa was quite the character.

Between my website, Medium.com, and the rest of my distributed network, more than 5,000 people still read that article each week. It’s been translated into more than 15 languages, and has been read more than 20 Million times around the globe.

It earned me access to the Huffington Post, Elite Daily, and is one of the most popular articles of all time on Medium.com.

It has allowed me to start a revolution of ideas, and connected me to the people who are helping me take the next step in this amazing journey.

It has shown me that I am capable of influencing the minds of millions, and that I may do things a little different than most, but that I can still leave a lasting impression, and do it all with love and integrity.

That I can be human, and hurt, but still do things that no one ever thought I was capable of doing. And to show others that if I can do it, so can they.

To prove that we still live in the greatest country on earth, and to show that we live in the most amazing time our species has ever seen.

So if you are sitting there reading this, wondering whether or not you should start a blog, the answer is yes.

If you are sitting there wondering whether you should take the time to invest in yourself and start sharing a more complete version of yourself with the world, then YES, you should most definitely do that.

You should step out into this beautiful sea of opportunity known as the interned and start learning how to use these tools to set yourself apart from everyone around you.

Because the people who ignore these ideas are doing so at their own peril. At the cost of missing out on a brand new world that is being built by people just like me. All around them, and in plain sight.

Because soon things will be different, and those of us who took the time to stake our claim will become the new arbiters of influence, and those who did not heed these warnings will be left wondering why they are unable to keep up in a world that no longer moves at the pace of people. Completely lost in a world that moves only at the speed of information.