#1 — My First Blog Post
This blog will be the first of a series of daily blog posts. At least, that is the goal. I have never really kept a blog so they might be a bit rough on the edges. However, since it is not the goal of this blog to get people to read it, I guess that is not a problem. You are not my target audience. In fact, there is no target audience. Except for maybe myself. Every day for the coming month I will post an (imperfect) blog, so buckle up.
Why am I doing this?
Two weeks ago I attended this AI Safety retreat, a topic that I think about often. On the retreat there was also the opportunity to talk with a career coach: Katie. We started to pick my brain to find the things blocking my progress. I am well aware that I am quite a perfectionist, but there is still a big difference between being aware and actually doing something about it. One of the challenges we came up with was that I would blow some new energy into my Medium account by creating AND POSTING a blog post about a topic that I am not an expert in. As you can see on my Medium account, I did not do this... (But it’s okay to fail sometimes!) Yesterday evening I ran into this blog from Neel Nanda and that really resonated with me. He took on the challenge to write a 15-min blog post every day for a month and describes a motivation for this very similar to mine. Apart from that, he also seems to be a generally very cool person. Doing mechanistic interpretability at DeepMind, does it get much cooler than that? But, let’s circle back to the topic. I think the daily approach suits me well and also I like the idea of starting of the day with a small achievement already. This morning in the shower I was already thinking about different topics and structures and what not.
Another last-minute addition to why I want to do this challenge is that I believe that comfort is the enemy and that I want to challenge myself by seeking just the amount of discomfort that can help me grow as a person. Also, a nice side-benefit is that I would love to become better at writing and estimating my time spent on tasks.
So, to summarize:
- Perfectionism
- Inspiration from Katie Glass + Neel Nanda
- Growing by seeking discomfort
- Becoming more more confident about my writing and time estimations
What will I be doing?
For the coming month, so March 25th until April 25th, I will write and publish a small blog post every day written in approximately half an hour. The topics can vary — just something I find interesting and/or want to share. The blog posts will not be too long and they will probably not be perfect, but that’s the whole idea! For the first week, I planned half an hour at the start of each day to write the posts, but this is just to have a default moment and I can change that to whenever is convenient. At first I was a bit in doubt whether to really publish them, but I decided to do so the deliverable feels a bit more real. That being said, I have no intention of anyone ever reading this. (This is not to say that I don’t value you, my dear reader. It is super cool that you are taking the time to read my random brain dump and I hope that it can be of value to you.)
I am actually so thrilled to start this!
What are my goals?
At the start of any challenge it seems to be necessary to set some goals for the finish line, so here we go. By publishing a blog post every day for the coming month I want to become more comfortable with imperfect outputs. Furthermore, I want to have a mini-achievement every day, which I think will be good for my motivation. Also, I want to get a better sense of what can be done with a set amount of time. I believe that it is perfectly possible to write a blog post with limited amount of time, but it is also perfectly possible for me to spend weeks on it — fine-tuning, postponing, making minor and insignificant changes. I have once read about this thing: the 80/20 rule. If I rememer the concept correctly, the idea is that you work on your work until you reach a 80% satisfaction level of and then send it out so people can give you feedback for the final 20%. This has the potential to increase your working speed big-time because the final 20% is where you (read: I) start overthinking and this will end up taking 80% of your time.
Goal summary:
- Become more comfortable with imperfect outputs
- Motivation: mini-achievement every day
- Get a better sense of what can be done with a set amount of time
Disclaimer
I want to close of this first post with a quick disclaimer, just in case it is not clear and because I think it’s kind of scary to post stuff to the internet. These posts are written within a limited time and their intention is not to create perfect and usable resources of information. The purpose of publishing these blog posts is just for me to publish some blog posts. There will probably be mistakes in the posts. Please don’t take any claims for truth without checking.
Joejoe
With that being said, I am very excited to start this writing mini-journey. I already have a bunch of topics on my mind. HYPE. Joejoe!
