In the spirit of the holiday season, I would like to show my gratitude and give thanks to some of the inspirations for this blog…
The Story of My Blog (Part 1)
Emo kid and
alleged blogger
One short year ago, I had little knowledge about, or interest in starting a blog. I thought blogs were just online diaries for emo kids, hoping to become popular in an ironic way. Whatever.
In the course of my work as an engineer in the biotech industry, I often search the web for information on software development. These searches eventually led me to the websites of Raymond Chen and Joel Spolsky. Their examples illustrated that blogs can actually contain useful and interesting content.
Reading Joel Spolsky’s forum on a slow afternoon, I found a link to an article on polyphasic sleep written by Steve Pavlina. Although I didn’t want to try such a wacky experiment myself, I was intrigued enough to stick around and browse some of his other articles.
It seems Steve and I have a lot in common. We are both left-handed entrepreneurs who started poorly in school, but turned around at the last possible moment. We are both trained in the art and science of software development. And we both have an interest in personal development and growth.
I wasn’t surprised much by the content of Steve’s website. His views on many topics were similar to my own, so my general response was not aha, but DUH. I was surprised, however, to learn that he got paid for writing these articles. I mean, doesn’t everyone with a few years of martial arts experience already know this stuff?
Then I realized: Most people don’t have any martial arts experience, and they don’t know why it is so valuable!
I will continue this story on a later date. In the meantime, why not tell us who or what inspired you to start blogging? You can share your story as a comment below, or even better, post it on your own blog and link back here.
Hi Chris
Nice blog you have here. Yeah when I first knew about blogging, the first impression was people’s mindless ramblings, complaints etc.
But I soon learnt there are real gems out there. So I combined my two passion: love and relationship and writing and gave birth to my blog – Love and Marriage . Dating & Relationships.
It was a fruitful journey, I’ve made many friends along the way, and dished out numerous advices and articles. I’m enjoying every minute of it. So I’m really grateful for having found this purpose in my life, and to be blessed with the ability to churn out sentences that reach out to people.
I’ve been an exercise hound – and martial arts dabbler – for years. As I got older I felt like I might want to get more serious about MA before more time passed me by. I started looking around and also fooling around with taiji. I found some real good blogs and started asking reasonably intelligent questions. Ace blogger Wujimon took an interest in me (we were both interested in Chen style) and even when I admitted no real training in taiji, he encouraged me to try blogging and “join the fun”. I did, and it’s been great. Now I want to get some actual TJQ training, to take that first step of the thousand mile journey.