ends and beginnings

Day 30 of 30. There's a song I grew up with called Closing Time, and it has some relevant wisdom here:

Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning's end, yeah

This is the last day of my blog-post-a-day experiment: the end of the beginning of my new digital home. I've had many such digital homes before. My goal with this one was to write about technology and learning (and leadership!) when I feel like it, but not to be too constrained by those topics, to be comfortable with wandering into games and play and sports and the general joy of exploration. I think I've succeeded so far, but perhaps that's only because this is a deliberately vague goal: the real goal is just to write again, and that one I've definitely succeeded at.

When I started on this month-long experiment, I told myself I would never write about writer's block, no matter what. I seem to have managed that, though my early posts did occasionally veer into meditations on the nature of writing itself, which some might consider dangerously close to this taboo territory.

One thing I can say is this: I prefer low-frequency, long-form writing. Daily high-volume writing was never intended to be the format of this blog: technology, learning, and leadership are big topics with lots of nuance and fractal complexity. When we present these topics in simple, reductionist ways, we do our audiences a great disservice: we give them the feeling of having learned something without the substance.

The Internet is full enough of clickbait and vapid "thought leadership" pieces, penned by authors looking to achieve influencer status with the blunt hammer of more content. Blogs like Idle Words or brr or ACOUP, video channels like 3Blue1Brown, sources that explore topics in all their joyful intricacies - these are few and far between.

To be fair, I can't produce that either: the people who do have managed to make a full-time career of it, and that's not my goal. I like my career, one where I get to explore and learn and build, and I have no plans to abandon it. And if moving forward that means it takes me a month to craft a deep-dive post, or I don't go quite as deep as some authors might, that's OK.

So: thanks for reading this far, and I hope you'll look forward to the next post!