I have been busied out getting up to speed on several new business projects lately, and it has been many months since my last post. Truth be told, I’ve been struggling with what I suspect is a wide ranging problem in these early social media days — I’ll call it “blogger’s remorse”, similar to the concept of “buyer’s remorse” that for many people accompanies that string of “must have” purchases… “what was I thinking…?”
In my case, the internal voices sound something like: “What is the point of my blog? Is this just a vanity project? Do I really have anything to say, and why would anybody want to read my musings anyway? Oh why did I ever start this blog in the first place…?”.
Like I suspect many other bloggers do, over the past months I’ve been making notes and highlighting articles that I thought would make good blog posts, and they have been collecting in a pile for a while now. I suspect I have enough ideas in this growing pile to write at least 50 blog entries, but still nothing flowed out of my fingers. Writer’s block? Loss of purpose? Lack of time? Pick any reason you want — they are seem to me like nothing more than just convenient excuses.
So today I came across an article that has actually shaken me out of my pity place, made me laugh out loud, and inspired me to tap out this message. I’m not really sure myself why I’m writing about this, what my “value add” is here, or whether any of that really actually matters in the 24/7 blogging world, and frankly — maybe I’m overthinking things.
Here is my inspiration: — a 900 word classified ad for a used snow-blower. I love that it breaks every ad writing convention, it is in-your-face, it is unforgiving in it’s clarity, tone, and purpose, and it makes the reader laugh. (If you want a little more context, here is a news article about the classified ad)
For a basic consumer focused ad, it is not just unconventional, but completely contrarian. And maybe that’s what I connected with when I stumbled across it. Thank you, Weh-Ming, for inspiring me, and breaking through my many excuses.
Lesson learned? Quit over-thinking things. Just write what grabs you. Blogger’s remorse be damned.
