I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but here I am sitting at Hong Kong International Airport with two hours until my flight to New York, and something just came over me, so I started typing away. Here goes nothing.

I started this blog for three reasons: 1) clear writing = clear thinking, 2) exploring unknown unknowns, and 3) accountability.

Clear writing = clear thinking

I spend the vast majority of my intellectually demanding time consuming information and content, rather than producing/creating it. Books, podcasts, blogs, articles, my Twitter feed, YouTube videos… it’s pretty much a one way street of information input. That information, combined with my experiences, represents the building blocks of my knowledge and ideas.

Translating ideas from thoughts into comprehendible written words challenges us to more deeply understand what we think. I might think I know something and attempt to write out my thoughts concisely, and I’m often shown how hollow that thinking can be.

There are other areas of life where I write - occasionally at my day job, for startups/side projects I’ve worked on, job hunts, and so on, but it’s pretty infrequent. Forcing myself to write more reinforces and challenges my ideas and improves the depth of my thinking (if I was on the fence about that before, writing this first blog post proves it to me).

This blog is a pursuit of clearer, deeper thinking about the things that interest me.

I have a rough idea of what I plan to write about (entrepreneurship/business, health & fitness, learning, productivity, travel/living abroad, anything else I come to be interested in), but I’m excited to see where this goes. Which brings me to my next reason…

Exploring unknown unknowns

Ideas beget ideas. I don’t understand the brain chemistry behind this, they just do. I don’t know what I’ll uncover or what ideas will occur to me by challenging myself to write more, but I know I’ll uncover something. It would be cool to see what that’s all about.

Accountability

I could just write in a journal, but there’s something about the act of posting online for the world to see. We’re not talking high stakes here, but it does hold me to a higher standard. The internet is forever, so there’s an incentive to really think through what I’m writing about… clear writing = clear thinking.

Those are the main reasons, but this is also another fun coding challenge! I’ve picked up a bit of programming on the side, and a personal blog or website is a great early practical application of that skillset. This blog is completely self-developed and hosted using GitHub Pages, Jekyll, basic HTML/CSS, and Namecheap.

As an aside, despite having read it for some time, I only just noticed that a high school friend of mine has been running his awesome blog for what appears to be the exact same reasons! One inspiration point to you, my friend.

What’s in a name?

“E Mikes”, “Eddy Mikes” or many variations thereof was given to me as a nickname in high school, and it’s stuck ever since. Keepin’ it rolling!

And BOOM! First blog post complete. Stay tuned for more, I hope you enjoy reading!

Thanks to Sarah for reading a draft of this post.