The importance of writing
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
The last two months have been a wild ride. I have attended the London Real Business Accelerator, an 8-week intensive course in business development and online marketing. The course has pushed me to my limits and beyond them and expanded my comfort zone. As an engineer who has a tendency towards analysis paralysis, it is a healthy exercise to attend a program like the Business Accelerator. Every week you are given new assignments and if you don’t have them done by Friday, you will fall behind quickly, and you are in trouble. “Start before you are ready” has thus been a central theme of the course. One of the assignments was to start a blog, and for me it ended up in the one you are reading this very moment.
I have never blogged before, but I have kept journals for a couple of years which is similar. My experience with writing is that it is a fantastic way of getting your thoughts out of your head and down on paper. That way you will get something concrete to which you can take a stand. Kind of like having a debate with yourself. I have found that to be immensely valuable to sort yourself out. My intention when starting this blog was to write about acoustics in wooden building, the central component of our business Acouwood. However, this is not what actually happened. Let me tell you about my writing process and why it turned out this way.
As I wrote about in a previous blog post, Consistency matters, you can supercharge your life by introducing habits. How long does it take to create a habit? I have heard answers like “two weeks”, “three months” or even longer time frames. The true answer is forever, because the moment you stop doing it, it is not a habit anymore. I write in my personal journal daily, which is probably where many of my ideas materialize. To write a daily blog post however would not be sustainable, so I decided to post weekly. Early Saturday mornings are my time of choice. I get up very early in the morning, two hours before wife and son, get a glass of water and start writing. This introduces a time constraint on me. The blog post needs to be finished by the time the rest of the family gets out of bed, otherwise you will lose the flow. It is absolutely crucial that I do not receive any external impressions or thoughts before my writing process is completed. I cannot stress enough how important this is.
I let my fingers flow over the keyboard and whatever comes out, comes out. If you have been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed that the themes often deal with deep philosophical thoughts on life and my very personal reflections. Not at all what I intended when I started and certainly not a blog about acoustics in wooden buildings. I have experienced increasing friction when posting my blog every week – not in the writing itself, but in the posting – as I drifted further and further away from the scope of Acouwood. I have thus come to the conclusion that I need to migrate this blog away from Acouwood. It does not belong here on our company website at all. Still, I am grateful for London Real pushing me into starting this blog and discovering how enjoyable it is to write. I would not have found out what my preferred blogging subjects are if I hadn’t kept pushing the blogs out. You just can’t fake these things. I want to keep my posts as authentic as I can and take you with me on my journey of discovery. I am learning a lot by writing. It is a valuable addition to my Vlogging on Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way of blogging, but I am convinced that authenticity is the key.
This will be the last post on the Acouwood site. However, I have registered the domain creativeacoustician.com and I will migrate this blog to this new address in the coming days. My next weekly blog post will go online there, on Saturday, as always. Acouwood should be about acoustics in wooden buildings and not about myself.