Where Do I Get My Writing Ideas?

About a year ago I set out to start a Youtube channel. One of the challenges I faced then was conjuring up ideas to present on the channel. At first it seemed fairly simple but the more I started thinking about it, the more challenging it became and very soon I felt like I had no more ideas to address.

Well, that’s not quite true. I had ideas but they weren’t fully formed and often didn’t fit into what I perceived to be my ’niche’. You see, I started out wanting to write about my experiences in retirement, but I realized a few months in that I didn’t do anything that seemed worthy of sharing.

Finding Your Purpose in Life

What is your purpose in life? Do you know? If not, why not? Oh? You haven’t found it yet. I see.

Fueled by books and YouTube videos and seminars and other such influences many people have come to believe that to be happy in life they must find their purpose. They believe, as these influences tell them, that we each have some innate purpose. That we were placed on Earth to fulfill that purpose. We are then told we need to first seek to find that purpose, then to align your work and lives with that purpose. And, they all purport to tell you how to find that purpose. To all of this I say “BULLSHIT!”.

So, I began reading Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, creator of Nesslabs.com and was intrigued by the idea of setting short-term goals with very specific actions and deadlines. Her original experiment was to write 100 articles in 100 working days. In the book she also discussed Andrew Kallaway’s 100 Days of Code challenge in which he publicly committed to coding for at least one hour a day for 100 days. The whole concept of making that kind of public commitment, together with clearly defined actions.

The Power of Curiosity

I have always been a curious person. I’m the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even as a very small child I was curious. My mother used to tell the story of the time when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old and came in crying because my eyes were filled with sand. I had apparently held a toy over my head and looked up as the sand fell out because I wanted to see what it looked like from that angle.

Blogging with Jekyll

Over the past nearly 10 years I’ve tried numerous times to maintain a blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don’t really care whether anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write.

The problem is that, while I don’t care so much if I’m read, I do want to be able to keep my files and refer back to them from time to time – something of a journal (which is what the blog was originally conceived to be). That means that I need the writing in form that is easily saved and retrieved. Another concern has been that I be able to write from essentially any computer, any where. I started, as most folks do, on Blogger, then moved to Wordpress, each time abandoning my work and the platform, as I moved to another. That’s not what I intended. Making the process more difficult is that the writing is stored in a database. This makes retrieval of the raw data difficult, particularly if you’ve forgotten the password, or the database is corrupt, etc. And, to be honest, those platforms are simply more complex than my needs. What I needed was a simple, easy to use platform that allowed me to maintain a file of my work.