I've been thinking about this for the last couple of days. In the last five or six months, I've written about a hundred and sixty blog posts, just me writing about my ideas, opinions, or something that I read that inspired me to write about it. Strangely enough, I only wrote about fourteen posts in the six months before that. The only thing that I changed was I started writing for me and stopped sharing anything. It gave me a new sense of freedom from writing good shit. I literally wrote about anything that happened to come across my mind. It was fucking awesome. In the process, I was able to answer a simple question: "Is there value in doing something if no one ever sees it?" The answer is a resounding yes.
Getting better at articulating your own thoughts
It's the first obvious one I noticed. As soon as I started writing my thoughts in their raw form, I was able to get ideas out of my head and onto the screen. When I read them back, sometimes they were complete garbage, but now I knew. Over the next few weeks, I started making slight improvements in how I expressed myself. Nothing major, but at least I can make sense of my own thoughts. A lot of it is still garbage, but I can recognize it now.
The freedom is contagious
I wrote some outrageous things over the last six months, and knowing that no one cared was a lot of fun. I have no comment sections or analytics on the site. I'm not writing this for anyone but myself, a place where I truly don't care what you think. I'll be honest, since setting up Zapier yesterday to share what I write, I've been having the urge to format stuff differently. I guess at some point it was bound to happen. It's my litmus test to see how well the habits formed over the last six months have set in.
The beauty of it is that if it hinders me too much, I just turn off the Zapier thingy. Sharing it is only a bonus; the prize for me is still the act of sitting down for about an hour a day to sift through some of my ideas.
Letting go of all expectations
It's quite the freeing practice to do things for its own sake. Whether I want to build my own browser, read this on the terminal, or write a linter/compiler for the second time, the answer is a resounding YES. I've come to understand myself a lot better over the last couple of years, and I enjoy the journey way more than the destination. Hence, I keep moving the goal post at every opportunity.