Mild Successes

Each year, I mull around in my head about starting an online business.

This is mostly a reaction to the content that I read, which tend to be bloggers who (surprise, surprise) saw success when they started writing and their site got more and more popular. Advertising dollars followed, and Bam! - now they’re professional bloggers.

Like clockwork (and a billing cycle for this blogging service that renews in December), I’m reminded about this thing (the blog) that I pay for and don’t use.

This year, an article one of my all time favorite authors (Morgan Housel) wrote stuck out in my mind on Why Everyone Should Write. The article explains that the process of writing crystallizes your thoughts in ways that just keeping them in your head does not. It exposes the limits, biases, and emotions that you may not be able to see until you read them from “the audience’s” point of view.

I realized that I had a lot of these fuzzy ideas floating around in my head this past holiday break. Some visiting friends asked about my weight loss experience with Whole 30, and I struggled to explain what I had spent weeks and weeks researching (reading blogs and watching YouTube videos). I couldn’t clearly articulate the physiology behind why the process I follow works.

Not but the next day did U.S. News and World Report publish their “Best Diets Overall” list, which put Whole 30 and Keto diets at the very bottom. I reacted in the same way many 2016 voters did: I denied it and filed it under “fake news.”

But why did I do that? What were the things in Whole 30 that “the experts” thought were so bad? What is considered better? Did my personal experience match up? All of these ideas floated around in my head and I figured the blog may be the best place to shove them.

So here we go again - another attempt at writing. I hope to tackle how I view some of my favorite “mild successes” - personal finance, nutrition, psychology, and pretty soon parenthood (the success of which is yet to be determined).