100th Milestone- Part 1 - The Journey Begins

This is the 100th post in this blog. Therefore I decided to share my experience in blogging; how it started, how it progressed, the learning from this venture and how I hope it will proceed. I decided to post this as I got a feedback from many of my friends that they would like to attempt this and they are curious about how a lazy guy like me got around to doing it.

I had been nurturing for a while a dream of developing an ability to write some sensible stuff that others would find interesting and/or meaningful and eventually be acknowledged as a writer. But, I could never get around to sit down and write though there have been times when I felt that the ideas that flitted across my mind were worth sharing. I felt too lazy and gave excuses to myself why I could not find the time.

Any writer, beginner or an authority, would need an avenue to express his creation and share the same. In the good old days we were limited in this opportunity and only a few could find the avenue either in book publishing or in placing articles in any publications. It was practically impossible for an individual to share his written expressions to a wider audience without this support.

The World Wide Web and particularly the social media like blog have changed all this. This has given an ability to all of us to publish at practically no cost. So a couple of year’s back I decided that I would setup a blog. But I still would not get started. I convinced myself that this was because of my busy schedule. I had to find a way to ensure that this doesn’t end up being an abortive enthusiasm for a project that that I would not sustain. To put pressure on myself, I announced to the whole world (my friends, relatives, colleagues, acquaintances et al) that I would post at least one article every week. The fact that there were enough friends who used to loudly wonder (maybe to tease me) when I delayed a few days made sure that I lived up to my commitment.

The next challenge was to come up with an idea every week on which I could pen 500 to 700 words and put it out there for everybody to see; especially since many of my friends who read my blog were brilliant people who mostly gave an honest feedback on how they felt. This has also exposed me to the different tastes of different people. When a particular posting was liked very much by some people, others had a different opinion. Among all the feedback I get, the one that still scares me is the feedback from Dr. Indira Rajaraman, my teacher from my IIM days. She is still a teacher and gives her feedback within 24 hours after I post and would comment on content, style and even spelling. I feel proud whenever she has no correction to point out.

I got some caveats from my friends when I started this blog. (i) It will bare to the world my thinking and make me predictable. (ii) On account of the kind of work I do, I may offend somebody with what I write. (iii) If to avoid being controversial I don’t share my experience the stuff I write may get to be quite mundane. Therefore I decided on some ground rules.

(i) I will not write anything about the work I am doing. If there are any lessons from my experience that are worth sharing, I will remove the incident and people, distil the lesson and share in a layered format that will help the readers to understand the learning in their life's context. In many such attempts that I made on layered writing, I got feedback from variety of people on how they found it very relevant in their context

(ii) I will acknowledge contributions and ideas from others including the stuff I read. I won’t stoop to plagiarism.

(iii) I will try to be honest in what I write and I will avoid reference to a person except if he is public figure and there is something worth sharing about him.

To be continued....

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – Lao Tzu