[Reprint] [betterexplained] Why should you (from now on) write a blog?

(1) Why should you (from now on) write a blog?

In a word, writing a blog has many advantages, but there are no obvious disadvantages. (The following is an exception in the case of an American old lady who does not smoke until she reaches the age of one hundred to refute the health damage caused by smoking)

Let me be more clear: using a blog to record your valuable thoughts will bring many benefits, but there is no obvious harm. Note: not thinking, not talking, please and so on.

Below are some of the biggest benefits I personally think of as a long-term value blog:

1) make many like-minded friends. I write blogs and read others' blogs myself. In this age, for the vast majority of people in my life, there is almost only one way to broaden the circle of friends through the Internet, how can we find friends with different tastes on the Internet and determine whether other people and themselves share the same language? Obviously, it is difficult to achieve those diaries that are broken down on SNS every day. Almost all of my friends I admire are those who have used blogs to record their ideas for a long time. Therefore, even if they don't show up with them, they are still unaware. Even if you have never met each other, you can sit down and have a great chat.

Why is the potential of a blog in making like-minded friends far better than the original conversation? It is very simple. First, there is no region limit for a blog. There is only one click distance from A to B on the Internet, while the traditional method of establishing a circle of friends is limited by the region. Second, and more importantly, if you chat with each other, exchange ideas, and then get familiar with it, it will take a long process, what's worse, when you meet another stranger, repeat the entire process to express the thoughts you have already expressed to your friends. However, my blog was "one-time expression, countless times of reading". When I saw a blog that I had been writing for several years, I seemed to have been talking to this person for a long time, what programmers like to hear is that "blogs greatly enhance the reusability of Discourse ".

I once wrote a blog on csdn for nearly six years. A year and a half ago, I established a Google groups (toplanguage). Because the readers of my blog have a common language, therefore, this group was very popular at the beginning, and high-quality technical discussions further attracted more cool people to participate. After the snowball rolled up, it was very difficult to stop, nearly a year and a half, I have benefited a lot from this group discussion [1]. For non-programmers, scientific squirrels are a good example.

2) writing is for better thinking. I have summarized the advantages of writing in detail in "writing for better thinking", so I will not copy and paste it here.

3) "Teaching" is the best "learning ". If you cannot clarify one thing, you have not fully understood it. Most people should know that in the programmer industry, the interviewer often asks you to explain something to him. He will say that he doesn't understand it (if he really doesn't understand it, the effect is actually the best ), your task is about letting him understand it.

In order for a person who does not understand the concept, you must understand the concepts that need to be mastered, this forces us to investigate the entire knowledge system in our brains and dig out all the things hidden under the water, the potential concepts or assumptions in the brain that we know, but do not know, are dug up to pull them from the inner memory to the explicit memory. It is because only those who fully know and know what is going on can truly tell one thing through.

However, you may doubt that, apart from being able to clarify clearly, are there any other benefits you know? If there are no other benefits, why bother me? I am not a teacher.

Sagasw, a friend of toplanguage, once told a story about a bear on the development team's desk in a famous software company, let's talk about the problem to the bear first, and see if the problem can be clearly described. Basically, after the comparison is well organized, the answer will come along. Of course, you don't have to say to the bear that you can create an audience in the brain, an audience that doesn't know how to do it, and then you can say it to him. This is feasible. I often use it on the road. However, if you can sit down, I suggest you give it to the actual audience-that is, write your thoughts, because writing is a better way of thinking.

The vast majority of our knowledge is hidden in the subconscious. In fact, the window of our consciousness is very small, our working memory can only accommodate a few entries (remember the flash game "you can remember the number of digits that flash at the same time on the screen ?), Most of the reasoning we do at ordinary times is automated and occurs in the subconscious, and we can only perceive some intermediate conclusions. I don't believe you recall how many times you think when discussing a problem with someone else, "that's all. I feel it's right, but you ask me, I can't tell you what's going on. "isn't that strange to you? If you cannot logically support your conclusion, how can you be sure that it is correct? Just because your intuition strongly tells you that it is right? If there is another person next to him, he and you hold the opposite idea, and his intuition strongly tells him that he is right. What do you think at this time? "His intuition is wrong. My intuition is right "? Are you so confident that your intuition is the most reliable in the world?

I cherish such an opportunity very much, that is, when "I strongly think it is right, but I can't tell why ", at this time, it is often the time when the brain is rummaging through the box, understanding the ins and outs, and in-depth reflection, to correct the potential premise assumptions that have been wrong. On the other hand, "I strongly think this statement has a problem, but I cannot tell why it has a problem or what the problem is." This is also a very meaningful moment, it almost always means that you have potential deviations in your understanding of a problem. It must have introduced a potential hypothesis and stolen an important concept where you are not aware of it, and so on. This is the time for in-depth reflection. When you finally dive into the bottom layer of the problem and touch the essence of the problem, when you see the iceberg in the water, you will feel comfortable.

Why? This is because you have to wait for this opportunity to reflect on your knowledge. However, if you choose to summarize your knowledge system and give it to your readers, you will find that you have created such an opportunity. If we do not reflect on things at ordinary times, we feel that many things are of course, but if you want to speak to others, we often find that things are starting to become less obvious, as you said, you began to find that you need to use the word "anyway.

So the opportunity for reflection came.

Once you pull things in your subconscious out of the background, you have the possibility to face and reflect on them, rather than letting them implicitly influence your thinking behind the scenes. In many cases, if we have a problem, we do not have to reflect on it, but do not know the implied assumptions in our thinking. If you only feel the answer, but I don't know what reasoning your brain had made before getting this answer. How do you know which part of the question might have gone wrong? On the other hand, once you have figured out what you think, it's not far from realizing the problem. It's a simple truth-if someone else always positions only when arguing with you, it is hard for you to argue with him, but if he exposes the original reasoning process to you, it is always much easier to criticize. (For this reason, many people keep their logic behind them and do not dare to expose it)

Most of the time, we will come to some conclusions without thinking about them, just like an automatic machine built on the wind, but we don't know how these conclusions come from, what happened behind our thinking, so when we found that our conclusion was wrong, we were confused and couldn't find out where the error was. If you pay attention to the speeches of many people (forums, blogs, etc ), if you divide their speeches into four parts: "Premise", "hypothesis", "logic", and "conclusion", you will find that a lot of people will only keep making conclusions and positions, however, the premise, assumption, and medium logic of these conclusions or departure are not that they are unwilling to write the logic, but that it is difficult and difficult to reflect on their own thinking process, A large part of our reasoning process is under the surface of consciousness. This logical chain will only pop up when there is an important conclusion, let our consciousness capture. What's more, most of the time we use is not a complete and rigorous logical thinking, but a shortcut to thinking.

It is the most powerful and thorough reflection way to teach a person who does not understand anything. Because he does not have any preparation knowledge, he must understand what you know, you must thoroughly reflect on your knowledge system, find out where the foundation of the building is, find out where its skeleton is, and how exactly is it built, you cannot stand on layer 11 on your own, and assume that your reader is standing on layer 10th, expecting to let him understand what layer 11th has. Your readers stand on the first layer. You must know how the other 10 layers are constructed. This forces you to thoroughly and deeply reflect on the things you have mastered or those that you previously thought are correct. The more you understand your audience, the deeper you need to reflect.

4) discussion is an excellent reflection. On the other hand, in many cases, we do not have the opportunity to speak to people who do not fully understand it. The larger possibility is to speak to people who have a certain foundation in the same field. At this time, it does not mean that reflection cannot be promoted, in fact, you will find that if you publish your ideas, you will almost always see people who disagree with you. Then, by comparing the differences between you and your ideas, you will find that there are differences in your thinking at the beginning. Where do the differences come from? In further discussions, you will constantly force the other party to come up with deeper reasons. This is also a very effective method to encourage reflection, in the course of the discussion, the reasons for both parties will naturally become deeper and closer to the nature of the problem. Some deep differences that are hard to be noticed at ordinary times will gradually emerge, you also have a rare opportunity to review the errors in your thinking.

5) inspire you to continue learning and thinking. If you do not have the habit of continuous learning and thinking, your blog will soon have no content to write, and you will be able to read or repost the content in part, and then you will lose your readers, then, you will turn off your blog. Once you turn off your blog, you will die and write your blog. Then, there will be no incentive for you to think about and summarize, then you become less happy to sum up and think, and then...

To break this endless loop, do not stop updating your blog permanently. Even if you haven't written your blog for two or three months, as long as you write every article as a product of your own thoughts and valuable things, on the Internet, gold is always shining, because there are countless information aggregation platforms looking forward to these valuable content. A search engine provides you with a large number of potential readers for your content, A large number of humans are manually exploring and reprinting valuable things. The worst decision we can make is to stop doing something that has no harm but has a lot of advantages.

In order to make your blog valuable, you must constantly summarize your learning results. You must constantly think and give insights that are more profound and unique than others. This looks a little upside down, but it will be coming soon.

6) learn to do one thing persistently. Many people may feel lost in their lives and do not know what they want to do because nothing can be done continuously. In other words, there is no backbone. In the words of positive psychology, there is nothing that can create a stream experience, while writing your own ideas is something that is easy to generate a stream experience. When writing, especially when writing rationally, the brain gradually enters the reasoning analysis module, and all unpleasant emotions and irritability will gradually fade away. However, the premise is that you have to start and stick to the initial failover period. In the future, everything will become natural.

7) A long-term value blog is a good resume. The "resume" here is not a narrow-sense resume. After all, there is no value blog era yet. Many people write blogs and repost them everywhere or simply break them apart, therefore, the interviewer may not use his or her personal blog as a more reliable window for understanding a person. Here, the "resume" refers to a window for others to understand themselves. Although we may not be able to get a blog like Luo Yonghao or KESO, personal influence is enough to support a career (niubo and 5gme), but at least you will get to know more people, the higher the value of your blog, the more people you get to know, the more people you get to know. Communicating with a cool person will greatly broaden your horizons and open one door after another that you didn't know, so you become more awesome... This is a virtuous circle.

(2) How to Write a value blog for a long time

I noticed that I didn't say "How to keep writing a value blog for a long time", because when thinking and summing up become a habit, turning to words and using writing for further thinking has become a natural thing, and it has become a thing that "you must write down because you are thinking and summarizing, A blog becomes a by-product.

At the beginning, you thought hard and summed up hard because you wanted to write a blog, hoping to give something eye-catching. Later on, it became because you were used to thinking and summing up, because you realize that writing is a better way of thinking, you must make your thoughts a word. At this point and the end will be restored to the original location, and will not be reversed.

How can we write a value blog for a long time? Some people may give a lot of interesting and useful tips to provide motivation and motivation, such as how to do Seo, how to encourage readers to leave a message, etc. But I don't want to say this, I just want to say the most important thing, that is:

Let yourself be a person of continuous learning and thinking, and write only the product after your true thinking and summary, everything else will come along.

Just like the words that are frequently circulated: only do what you are most interested in, and money will follow [2].

You can pay attention to the specific examples in this regard. If you can see them everywhere, it will be different. I would like to repeat it again. Do not let it go. I can understand the impulse of everyone to complain occasionally, but now there is a good window: Twitter, so immediately stop reading your blog. People who read the blog want to get information, not noise. If you can't help but want to break down your mind, you may wish to change the location and tell yourself: If you see someone else coming up with such a paragraph, will you be interested in watching it?

(3) possible problems and how to deal with them

Even if n blog writing reasons are given above, sometimes one reason for not writing will stop people from doing one thing. Therefore, I have added the section "possible problems and how to deal with them". Chapter 5 of influence 2 [3] proves that "Much of will is skill ", willpower is largely due to the correct method, rather than being born.

1) worry that others think there is no value. The truth is, there will always be problems you face. If you think independently and no one else has, Your article will be of value to them. Of course, it will certainly have no value for some people. They have known it for a long time, but even if you are more powerful, there will always be someone better than you, it cannot be said that because of these reasons, you will not record your own ideas. After you think about it yourself, you will understand it most deeply. Even if someone else has thought about it, there will always be something that someone has never imagined. Besides, thinking becomes a habit, and your thinking ability will become stronger and stronger, and your articles will become more and more valuable. Repeat, no matter what puzzles you face, there will always be many people who face the same, so the results after your hard thinking will certainly be meaningful to many people.

Or, after you think it is easy, you don't want to write it, but you must know that the problem is always simple after you think it is done, the difficulty of the problem lies not in how hard it is after you think it is done, but in the way that you think it is difficult, but in the way that you think it is easy and how much physical thinking is required. The longer you spend, it means that the more people there are, the less people they finally don't want to understand (the longer the road goes, the less people there will be ).

Finally, although I have read an article a year ago and I think it is quite immature, I will not think more mature if I don't have any immature ideas, after a few years, I still feel immature when I look at what I have written.

2) fear that the idea is too naive or has loopholes and so on. People are not sages. It is precisely because a single person's thoughts are always prone to loopholes that it is worth sharing (writing is a better thought, and discussion is an excellent reflection). Being pointed out by others is the space for improvement, the hidden ideas will never become more mature.

Much of intelligence is knowledge, has such a very thought-provoking classical psychology experiment [4]:

Divide the children into two groups and give them different reading materials to make them believe that intelligence is born and cannot be changed the day after tomorrow, the other team believes that intelligence is actually synonymous with knowledge and skills, and is completely acquired by the day after tomorrow. Next, let them do a group of tasks. The children who believe in intelligence are naturally inclined to avoid difficult tasks and select easier tasks. The logic here is presumably like this: if you do a difficult task, it increases the chance of failure and lowers your own intellectual value for others. To protect this intellectual value from being lowered, you should avoid projects with risks of failure. Another group of children is eager for challenging things, and obviously they are not frustrated when they fail, because failure is also a new thing to learn. In any case, it is an increase in intelligence.

Moreover, the only people who criticize and laugh at others are those who do not know how to build them and ignore them.

3) do not receive incentives. This is actually the most boring problem. Only blogs with broken ideas can face the "incentive" problem. If you write your own summary and write your own thoughts, writing and understanding are a great incentive. Even in your own private notebook, you also have a sense of accomplishment. Besides, if you write a value blog, you do not have to worry about your opinion being spread. It may take a little longer at first, however, this is a necessary initial stage in everything. The core character of the Gmail group, Paul buchheit, founder of friendfeed, and Jeff Atwood, the blogger of the programming domain name bocoding horror, have all lamented: overnight success takes a long time (1), (2), but for value blogs, there are so many aggregate services on the network, machines, human flesh, and half human flesh are all there, and the situation is much better, and I believe the situation will get better and better.

4) It cannot be written. This problem is also boring, and it is not an urgent task to think about it. My friends who have subscribed to my blog for a long time know that I usually post three or five articles a month. In fact, I have not published articles for many times in a month. The reason is very simple, either there is something at hand to deal with the time to think, or it takes a long time to think about and accumulate when you encounter a large or difficult problem. It doesn't matter, if you don't think clearly, think about it again. There is an essential difference between people who love to think and those who do not love to think. The former is always stuck with several questions in the brain in life, they often harass you and let you think about it. If you don't want to think about it, you don't have to think about it. If you have a problem, you need to first think about whether you can find a shortcut (ask someone for help) to solve it.

In any case, you don't have to worry about success. If you think deeply on a single topic, you can always find the corners that others cannot find. The longer you can let a problem stay in your brain, the more you can discover new things. Generally, I think that if there is a valuable problem, I will let him stay in consciousness or subconscious for a short period of one week, a long period of one month (depending on the problem size ), using the time spent on walking and eating (I found that many people I admire also have this habit), sometimes even if I have figured it out and wrote it out, the brain will continue to review the problem, I haven't moved it out of my subconscious, and then I suddenly felt new when I saw an article or book.

It is a skill to dock a problem for a long time in the subconscious, which brings great benefits. The longer you stay, the more you think about it, the more you will see. We must look at things with wrong glasses to discover new perspectives. Otherwise, we will turn a blind eye. Let alone others. The well-known example is Archimedes's "Ulica !", If you don't have to worry about a problem for a long time and keep thinking about it, you won't understand the "drainage volume test" from the bath, otherwise, why didn't he find out after taking a bath for so many years? [5]

Therefore, if you are used to thinking, there will always be something to write, think first, then summarize, and then further think in the summary.

Of course, you can also try to write down immature ideas, try to organize them into clear texts, and then see if they can go further in the process. This is often feasible. For example, this article has only three lines (containing about 10 memo keywords) in my note ), in my mind, there was only one question that emerged when I walked. Why do I need to write a blog?

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[1] let's take a look at some of my favorite topics.

[2] Although I do not fully agree with this sentence, I agree with it in the spirit of solving more basic problems in the problem chain.

[3] The name "influence 2" is very clever. In fact, it is not written by the author of "influence.

[4] I forgot the source of this experiment, but the spirit of this experiment is still fresh in my memory. Which of the following reminds me of the original source.

[5] There is a controversy over the authenticity of the story of Archimedes. After all, who has made things clear for thousands of years. However, the truth of the story is essential. We often have similar experiences. In addition, Archimedes's "Ulica" is too famous, so I believe it is useless.

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