Over the last couple of months, we’ve been getting ready to shift A3 from private beta to public release. Part of that process has been figuring out a marketing plan, potentially including creating some blog-esque content. Which, inevitably, has made me think of this largely-ignored personal blog in turn.

Across my two decades of posting here, a handful of recurrent themes have emerged. One is, I’m apparently great at totally forgetting, and then coming up with again, ‘new’ ideas and discoveries. Enough so that, on more than one occasion, I’ve thought of something clever, Googled it to see what anyone else had written on the topic, and discovered that the first search result was actually an extended post from me, on this very site, written a few years prior.

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that, while I was puzzling through ways I might get back to writing here more regularly, I started thinking that I would be most likely to do so by making this blog a repository for all the random stuff that didn’t fit into a more professional, structured, authority-building, niche-targeted approach to content creation—a collection of random storytelling, catalogued misadventures, and loose musings—only to discover that I had also decided the exact same thing about 18 months (and, embarrassingly, only six or seven posts) back.

At least it’s nice to know I’m consistent?

Anyway, one other thing I’ve learned, which I’m also sure I’ve written about repeatedly here before, is how much productivity and creativity and forward progress in life is sort of like surfing. It feels like, if you want to get going, you should just start paddling as hard as you can. But if you’re doing that on flat water, you’re not going to have much luck. Instead, you have to wait for a wave of clarity and inspiration to come, to pick you up, to give you a boost of momentum. And then you start paddling. The two together—momentum plus effort—are the only way you can actually get up and surf.

As someone who always wants to be in control of the situation, that’s a hard equation to accept. Because, if you can’t summon the waves, you just have to learn to watch, and wait, and be grateful when they arrive.

I suppose I end up repeating things on this site because it takes a few passes for even the most clear and important and obvious lessons to sink in. Which is also, I think, one of the reasons I blog in the first place: the hope of memorializing those big lessons outside the confines of my feeble brain. Sort of a memo to myself.

And though that obviously hasn’t worked great, that also shouldn’t be surprising, given my ability to forget notes I’ve left to myself in even far more permanent and visible ways. In fact, my prior self was clearly so taken by the importance of patience and acceptance and surfing the waves of life as they unfold that I got a reminder of it (“amor fati,” Nietzche’s admonition to love your fate) literally tattooed on the inside of my left forearm.

So, it seems, I’m a bit of a slow learner. But, as I said, at least I’m consistent.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯