Chasing Profound Thoughts

I suffer from perfectionism.  It’s a demon I wrestle with on a daily basis, especially when it comes to my writing.  It doesn’t help that many experts on blogging will tell you that if you aren’t saying something meaningful and worthwhile, then you shouldn’t even bother writing a post at all.

So mix a healthy dose of perfectionism with the scared witless fear that I’m not saying something meaningful to people and you know what you get?

Nothing.  Nada.  A blank page.  The muse has left the building and taken with her any hope of crafting a coherent piece of writing for the day.

This kind of zero sum thinking is going to lock up your wheels for days if you let it.  Let’s backtrack a bit and see if we can shake this thing loose.

Meaningful information doesn’t have to solve life's mysteries

We need a healthy dose a little bit of perspective.  The idea for your post likely won’t be telling people how to shift the space time continuum or bring about world peace (and if yours does, please drop me an email because I’d love to read that!). 

The average blogger just had an idea that sparked the desire to write it down and share it with other people.  Therefore, we can go ahead and lower the bar a little.

Meaningful is a word that can get all muddled up with false pretence when all it really means is your reader should be able to take bits of information away that they didn’t know or hadn’t thought of before.  That’s it.  In a nutshell, your info gets their brains jazzed. 

So how are some ways can we can be “meaningful”?

Dig up obscure facts: With time passing by as quickly as it does, I usually don’t remember what I ate for breakfast, much less what the United States paid for the territory included in the Louisiana purchase.  ($15M if you were curious)  Obscure facts make great dinner party conversation, so make me sound smart please.

Give me action steps: Information is great, but practical ways to actually apply that information is even better.  Being able to teach others is a gift, and if you can share with me 10 ways to give my dog at home grooming treatments without losing my mind (and make her look fabulous to boot) and without spending hundreds of dollars, you had me at Hello.

Share resources: If your ideas pique my curiosity, then I want to know more.  So where do I go?  I could Google, but it would make it so much easier if you would tell me where you went for that information.  So then the next time I want to find out where the best horror writing contests are, your site will be the first place I check.

I think there are far too many people out there trying to be profound.  Preaching rhetoric is boring.  When I’m poking around online, I want facts, I want action, and I want to know where to find more to make my life easier and better.  It's that simple. 

So if you can do any of those for me, you’ve provided a meaningful experience.  You may even have shared information that will change my life.

And just like that, you’ve given me something profound.

(photo credit by Diganta Talukdar)



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