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December 24, 2020
There are several reasons I am writing this post.
I have been thinking about the kind of content I want to have uploaded in my blog. When I first started my blog I was a little bit confused on the type of content I wanted to upload. I had a clear vision of a blog bloated of tech posts and projects, which I will share with you, nevertheless there are tons of other topics I felt could be interesting to share.
By that time, my friend Pedro coincidentally also started his own blog - please checkout his awesome blog - and had been going through the same dilema. That is how he came across the book How to Take Smart Notes and shared some of the knowledge with me. It is an interesting little book that talks about the importance of the every day note taking.
The fundamental idea is that when attempting to start writing, a blog post, a book or whatever it is you are writing, you will never face a blank page ever again. By taking interconnected notes daily, you will have at your disposal countless notes so that when you face a blank page again you will just have to fill it in with all the content you already have. I like the concept and it turns the writing experience completely upside down.
Another great advantage about writing down and note taking is simply, you don't have to memorize so much. You are liberated from having to retain all that information and are able to simply go back to your notes whenever you want to remember it.
I liked these ideas so much I adopted some of it's knowledge to my blog and hopefully it will create a better reading experience. Two key concepts I adopted, which have made a huge difference from the first version of my blog to my current one, as for today, is the addition of tags plus the relationship between posts. Now I can write about a certain topic, let's say javascript, and if I talk about subtopics, for example functional programming in JS, I can actually relate all posts on functional programming in JS between them, simply by adding the related posts in the list as shown in the picture.
This way, when reading a series of posts you don't have to search for them, you'll find them at the top of the post. I still have to try this out and experiment with it, as I might need to refine the system to make it even better. Nonetheless, as per today, I am satisfied and I can stressless write about any topic with the relief that even if I bloat my blog with posts, I will be able to filter the content and find what I want.
My friend Jordan Peterson. My latest and greatest educator. He has very well explained in many youtube videos how writing makes you a better thinker. Watch them, I wish I had done so sooner. And it makes a lot of sense. Organising your ideas so that you can express them in a coherent way may not be an easy task, especially the more abstract the idea you're trying to express or write down. That, by itself, is definitely a great goal, but it also made me think about how crucial it is to write in our every day life. It can make a huge difference when writing an email to your manager, writing down documentation, or simply texting your friends and family.
Point 2 is so important to me I'll expand on it. I simply want to be able to write down my thoughts clearly and cohesively into paper - or bytes.
It seems like an easy exercise, but if you don't practise it often, or haven't at all, you might even find it stressing - that is why you should take notes as mentioned before. On the other hand, successfully writing down whatever it is that is messing with your head can be a huge stress reliever. It will feel like letting go. It will put your worries into perspective and make you realise if indeed it was so important to worry about, or if you even had a solution for it, which if you don't, why worry - of course health, economical... problems aside.
But you don't necessarily have to write about problems. You can write about your passions too! Crazy thoughts and specially wild and complicated theories you may have. Repeat this exercise over and over and you'll become an awesome communicator.
After all, that's what we are here for, to communicate with ourselves and with others.
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I need to lose some weight