Quality & Content

Tim Sanders ruined my blog post.

I had a post planned and the rough draft written. All I needed to do was to add some citations, make sure the thoughts flowed well, and the layout was clean. Then Tim Sanders happened. More specifically, Tim Sanders posted to his blog. He wrote about how some bloggers will sacrifice quality in order to meet a self-imposed, artificial deadline. That post could not have come at a more perfect moment. 


I set a goal for myself when I started this project to update every Wednesday. Why Wednesday? Because it works with my schedule; Write the post over the weekend, review it Tuesday evening, and it goes live on Wednesday. Why a deadline on a personal blog? That comes back to the purpose of the blog, as outlined in my first post; I want to think through things, and get my thoughts out where I can wrestle and deal with them. That is never an easy process, and being a procrastinator by nature doesn't help either. So I set a deadline in order to force myself to sit down and wrestle through something at least once a week. 


So how did Tim Sanders ruin my blog post? Well, somehow I had started to forget the primary reason why I started the blog; My own personal growth. It is a blog, and I know other people can (and some do) read it, and I genuinely hope that it helps and edifies those who do. But somehow I got bit by the blogging bug in just the few short weeks have been doing this. I began to think less about "What things do I need to think & wrestle through" and more about "What can I write about this week?" But this blog was created for personal reflection. And I genuinely believe that the people who read my blog are drawn to it not because they can count on a Wednesday update, but because I am open and honest, and fairly transparent as I think and wrestle through different topics. 


The blog post I had written was pretty good, and I may use it or draw from it in the future, but this seemed to be more important to me. Somehow I lost focus on my true intent, and I need to maintain that, or I will lose the reason why I created and have loved writing this blog in the first place. So I promise to do my best to have a post every Wednesday, but  I also promise to never post a lackluster blog just for the sake of making an update. I value my time, and yours too much to waste it on a mediocre effort. I will never sacrifice quality for the sake of content. 


...And then God kicked me in the gut. Anyone who knows me, knows I tend to talk....a lot.  I come by it naturally. Both sides of the family can talk for hours on end, and my dad is a preacher. We're a family of talkers. So much so that silence is awkward for me. It seems like empty space, which can filled! And since I am never short of something to say, I start talking. But are my words beneficial, helpful, edifying? Or is it just noise? In truth, I should let that awkward silence hang in the air. It is awkward, and the longer the silence, the more someone will want to say something! Awkward silence will leave space for my quieter friends to have an opportunity to speak. This will help me get to know them better, instead of them always getting to know more about me. And when I do speak, I need to make sure my words are worthwhile to listen to.


Plato said "Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something." And the Bible says "...many words mark the speech of a fool."  So bottom line, I need to speak less, say more.

Like I said; Tim Sanders ruined my blog post. But he may have saved my entire blog, and so much more!