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Don't blog daily

When I first started consulting, I followed the advice of a very smart guy who encouraged people in my position to blog (or publish a newsletter, or similar) every day for at least 90 days.

The assumption was that you'd hone your ability to talk about your area of expertise in the first month or so as you burned through all the easy "how-to" and "didja-know?" topics in the field. And then you'd hit a wall, where you were out of obvious topics, and in pushing through to keep writing, you'd begin to discover your unique perspective. Which, presumably, would signal your expertise and attract clients.

It was a great suggestion and it worked exactly as planned. I went for about 100 days and ended up with some seriously hot takes. And there were other benefits, too–I quickly found I had to craft myself a morning ritual to support this daily habit, which ended up looking like "take the dog out, go to yoga, shower, go up to the deck, look out at the city and start writing." Healthy and satisfying.

And yet. Where are those blog posts now? I took them down in the early days of the LLM fetish era, horrified at the thought that they'd be scraped and regurgitated, sometimes-incorrectly, to people asking questions about my area of expertise. I still have them in plain text format in a Backblaze bucket somewhere, but what use are they? The people who used to pay for my services would prefer to ask a chatbot for advice, then ask a chatbot-that-spawns-chatbots-and-runs-shell-scripts to implement it. I've seen how this works out for them–it doesn't–but the results are no longer the important part, just the tokens burnt and the feigned awe of their colleagues (who are really just waiting for their turn to speak) as they recount how cleverly they're burning them.

Even the very smart guy who initially spurred me to blog daily no longer seems to have a blog on the internet. I can't find the post, or podcast episode, that originally espoused this idea. Instead, he seems to have a website dedicated to "Using AI for Content Marketing," which ... if nothing else, I'll point out it's the exact opposite of what it looks like to "push through to discover your unique perspective."

So: Don't blog daily. You're just feeding the bots. In a few years nobody, probably not even you, will care about what you wrote. And the last thing you need is a healthy daily ritual that engages your mind and encourages you to think independently.