Everybody should have a blog and here’s why:

Writing is easily one of the best forcing functions for learning about new things, thinking through them, and sharing your perspective with other people. And there’s a reason it’s a forcing function: the moment you start typing, your half-formed opinions tend to crumble. All the blind spots in your own thinking become immediately evident. You can have the most amazing take on something, and the act of writing it out will expose every gap in it. Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” That’s exactly it. The writing isn’t the output of the thinking. It is the thinking.

I’ve also been having a phenomenal amount of fun with link blogging, something I’d wanted to do for years. It forces me to find new things, share them, and almost every time I do, it sparks new conversations with new people and sends me down new rabbit holes.

I was rereading a brilliant post by Bentham’s Bulldog on why you should start a blog, and it hit me: we are all nodes. We take in knowledge, process it, and retransmit it. In that sense, having a blog is almost a moral imperative — whether you’re writing and sharing your own opinions, or just finding interesting things elsewhere and sharing links to them. You are contributing to the cause of knowledge transmission. And you never know how what you write will impact someone else.