Why do you do what you do?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who also writes a blog. The topic of conversation centered on maintaining a blog and how one can feel guilty by not “feeding” it with new material on a regular basis. I faced this issue myself as I have not been updating this blog as frequently lately and I can appreciate how one can feel pressured to “deliver.” In looking at the timing and pacing of entries across the different blogs online, the rate of postings can appear sporadic. Many are started and end up abandoned. Maintaining a blog requires a certain amount of time and effort. As blogs are not something necessarily “required,” the question beckons “why does one do it?” especially if additional pressure and work are involved in preparing entries on a regular basis? Why create more stress in your life? This is an interesting point for me to be pondering right now as I’ve been invited to speak at a Blog Conference in China (http://www.cnbloggercon.org/).

I suppose that there are many reasons why people start a blog vs. just keeping a diary or a journal. Some write to keep their friends up-dated about one’s life like my office-mate Cedrick (http://adventures-of-cedrick.blogspot.com/), some keep a blog for promotion like my other colleague Nury who is a professional writer that also uses his blog to increase awareness of the books that he writes (http://mrjam.typepad.com/), and then there are others use a blog for the main purpose of communicating ideas (I suppose my blog would fall into that category). Blogs can also become a main source of income (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/). Whether for fame, fortune, or purpose, a case can be made that there is some desired outcome resulting from maintaining a blog.

Regardless of the motivations and intentions for starting a blog, the question at hand is “When does maintaining a blog become more of a chore (or responsibility) than a joy?” Empirically, doing something out of joy and passion feels very different from doing something out of responsibility and duty. How does something that start out joyful or from passion end up becoming a chore, duty, or responsibility? Steve Jobs has a great line from the equally great commencement speech he gave at Stanford (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html) in which he looks in the mirror every day and asks “if this were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” as a measure of whether he needs to change something in his life.

They say that for most endeavors, its about the journey rather than the goal. Cultivating an internal sensitivity to (and awareness of) the changes in attitude, from one of joy and passion to one of duty and responsibility, facilitates learning about one’s conditioning (emotional attachment to beliefs or results). Without such awareness one can easily fall into despair and even act from destructive emotions. This isn't to mean that you should force yourself to always be in joy and passion. Be authentic. But also be aware of what's going on inside.

Although they tend to forget it, most people if asked would agree that it is better to be alive than to be dead (despite also acknowledging that everyone will eventually die someday). They tend to take being alive foregranted in the same way that fish take water foregranted. The mind can easily make other things seem more important and urgent. But feeling this deeply, “it’s good to be alive right now,” a sense of gratitude emerges. By grounding action in/from an awareness of feeling at every moment, purpose and action can take on a different quality as it becomes shaped by reality. Things happen almost by themselves.