"I consider my entire movie career a complete failure," Alec Baldwin told Men's Journal in 2009. "The goal of moviemaking is to star ina film where your performance drives the film, and the film is either a soaring critical or commercial success, and I never had that."
I feel the same way about blogging. After reading some of these amazing, inspiring, life-promoting blogs, I feel I've become a better person. Here are a few:
- Zen Habits
- The Art of Non-Conformity
- Answering Oliver
- Fluent in 3 Months
- Zen Family Habits
- (And there are, of course, more, but I can't list them all here. Check those out if you haven't already.)
Everything we do in our lives--every project, commitment, or association--takes up a little bit of our attention. I see it this way: a small diversion (like this blog) which takes up 2% of my total attention isn't bad. But if I have several diversions like this (let's say a blog, my Twitter account, and eight more things), then those small percentages add up. Pretty soon, I'm spending way too much time on things that don't matter and won't make the world better. If I have 15 things that take up 2% of my attention, that's 30% of my total capacity that's being wasted on garbage. I'm only running at 70% potential.
I want to run at full potential. I want everything I do in my life to be as good as I can make it, and that means cutting out the things that whittle away from my full capacity.
And so, to exorcise myself from the projects in my life which distract from the things which could actually matter, I'm shutting down my blog. If you want to know how I'm doing, I'm on Facebook, Twitter (which I rarely update), and Google+. You can also call me, too.
The thing is, my blog never could have succeeded in a great way because it never had a focus. What was my goal with this blog? I never had one. What did I produce or achieve? Maybe some okay-at-best essays and stories. My most popular post by far was the picture of Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard's baby, which I stole from my friend Ken. Other than that, I've reached only a lkmited audience and, at best, provided mild diversion or entertainment. Nothing significant.
I'll still probably read friends' blogs every once and a while, but I won't be posting here anymore. Over the next few weeks, I'll be taking down all of my posts.
This is going to be a really good thing. I'm guessing a lot of you didn't read all of that (it's almost three-quarters of a page long? Ugh, too much!), and that's fine. Your blog posts probably aren't that interesting, either.
