The public launch of A3 is picking up steam, and with it (as previously promised) I’ve been posting more on both LinkedIn and Twitter, writing about evidence-backed approaches to fitness and health that work in the context of already over-packed professional lives.

Initially, I had planned to also write about that stuff here, in longer-form posts. And, intermittently, I still might. But, honestly, that mostly just feels redundant. So, instead, I’m leaning back towards writing about the inane and varied stories and musings that fill the rest of my brain and life.

As I puzzle through how best to approach this blog—and, really, how to approach pretty much everything else— I can’t help but think of Samuel Butler’s (two centuries old, but apt as ever) observation: “life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” Per usual, lots still to figure out. Though, if nothing else, I’m still oddly glad to be recording that learning process here, on this now rather ridiculously long-standing site.

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)_/¯

When I posted six months back to say I was powering down this blog, and moving on to some fresh, new format, it seemed like absolutely the right idea. But, to be honest, during that intervening time, no fresh, new format ideas have really sprung to mind. What has, instead, are inspirations for posts—stories and insights and funny tidbits and crazy theories.

In that prior post about winding things down, I tried to share a broader point: these days, I’m working on living as my most authentic self, and trying to be patient in a way that I haven’t always in the past. But an equally big lesson I’ve learned over the years is that the perfect is often the enemy of the good. So, frequently, you just need jump in with your best attempt, getting down to work even if that means looking dumb and making mistakes and figuring things out along the way.

All of which is to say, I guess: I’m back, blogging again with this site more or less exactly the way it was before. In my own words from twenty years ago, when I similarly rebooted this blog despite my prior intentions: sorry mom, but it’s cheaper than therapy.

I booted up the current version of this site nearly 20 years back, and since then have racked up more than 2,500 posts. But, of late, I’ve been having a harder and harder time getting myself to write here. Yesterday, I finally realized why: I think this blog has pretty much run it’s course. More to the point, I no longer feel like it reflects who I am, the myriad and important and sometimes painful ways I’ve screwed up and learned and grown over those two decades. In short, this blog just isn’t who I want to be in the world right now.

So I’m working on something new. But I’m also working on it slowly. Because one of those things I’ve learned is that life moves at its own pace. And one of the reasons I’ve made messes in the past is that I’ve been impatient, that I’ve wanted to find resolutions or to make progress right now, rather than waiting and watching and being and letting things unfold in the way and on the timeline they’re meant to.

I think a lot these days about the classic Borscht Belt joke: an old bull and a young bull stand on top of a hill, looking down at the herd of cows in the valley below.

The young bull says, “I’m going to run down the hill and fuck one of those cows.”

The old bull replies, “I’m going to walk down the hill, and I’m going to fuck all of them.”

Which is perhaps both a strange and exactly right place to wrap things up. So, I’ll simply close by saying: a new iteration of joshuanewman.com is coming. Possibly soon, or possibly not. But, at least, when it’s ready, when the time is right.

In the timeless advice of Stephen Covey, it’s best to begin with the end in mind. Yet, sometimes, that end isn’t exactly clear. And, therefore, the plan for getting there isn’t particularly clear, either. As I mentioned in a prior post, that’s essentially my friend Cal Newport’s explanation of procrastination: when our brain doesn’t believe our approach is going to get us where we want, it’s tough to start on the next step.

For larger-scale projects, I’ve increasingly become zen to that reality. The first piece of some big initiative will sit on my to-do list, untouched for weeks or even months. But, during that time, the whole thing is still sort of bubbling in my subconscious. Eventually, enough direction and clarity will percolate up that I’ll suddenly know what the endpoint looks like. And I’ll instantly overcome the built inertia of procrastination, feel compelled to drop everything else and get right to work on the long-delayed first task.

In the case of this blog, however, that hasn’t seemed to work. For months, I’ve felt completely unsure of what this site is even about. (As Jess said to me, when I mentioned as much a couple of weeks back: “people still have blogs?”) I’ve waited and percolated and brain-back-burned. And, thus far, it hasn’t really helped.

Recently, however, I’ve started to think that I’ve been looking at it all wrong. These days, blogs and social media presence and whatever else are all done with an aim towards branding and positioning and owning a space and establishing expertise. But, back when this site was really cooking, I wasn’t actively doing any of those things. In fact, back then, this site wasn’t really about anything at all. Which, kind of, was the point.

So, in short, I’ve decided to turn back time. I’ll be shooting for at-least-weekly posting, but with an assortment of random stories poorly told, tortuous misadventures elliptically relayed, and half-baked musings loosely fleshed out. I’m beginning with no end in mind, aside from just getting back to writing regularly. And, for now at least, that seems good enough.

[Addendum: as was pointed out to me by a few people, if it was good enough for Seinfeld, perhaps a site about nothing isn’t a terrible place to (re-)start.]

I’ve been slow to post these last few days, due to some technical issues here; the WordPress back-end stopped loading the ‘new post’ page, leaving me unable to add entries from a web browser. Fortunately, the mobile app still worked, though I was sorely limited by my old man thumb-typing skills. And, this afternoon, I managed to temporarily fix the web version, by rolling back from WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor to the older Classic editor instead.

Still, it’s a clear sign that this whole site is in need of a reboot. The WordPress install is crufty with two decades of my poorly-coded tweaks, and the front-end design is even worse – increasingly dated, an HTML/CSS validation disaster, and unresponsive enough to be semi-unusable on mobile devices.

At the same time, as I’ve previously discussed, I’m currently doing my best to ruthlessly cull my daily to-do list, so I can focus in on the small number of projects and goals and habits that matter to me most. And while that does include aiming to post here something close to daily, it certainly doesn’t include rebuilding this entire site from scratch. Having done it several times before in the past, I know how deep that rabbit hole goes, and I just can’t justify the days (or, plausibly, weeks) of work it would require.

So, for the moment, I’m just hobbling ahead with the site as is, and hoping it continues to at least sort of work. Fingers crossed.

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting Twitter thread on the half-life of content on the internet – how long it takes something to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement:

• Twitter: 20 mins
• Facebook: 5 hrs
• Instagram: 20 hrs
• LinkedIn: 24 hrs
• YouTube: 20 days
• Pinterest: 4 mos
• Blog post: 2 yrs

I am, admittedly, a bit of a dinosaur. While I’m just slightly too old to be a Millennial, I’ve been online for thirty years, dating all the way back to when that meant dialing in to BBS’s at a walloping 2400 bits per second and risking the wrath of my parents for tying up the phone line. Similarly, I’ve been blogging for 23 years (!!!), 18 of which right here on this site.

So, while I was an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, my posting on all three (and a slew of others along the way – MySpace, Friendster, Path, we hardly knew ye) has been spotty at best.

As a content consumer, I actually truly love Twitter; it’s a firehose of interesting links and takes and ideas from people I think are particularly smart. (Even if the signal-to-noise ratio sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.)

But, as a content creator, I just have trouble with the ephemeral nature of that site and the others. Perhaps, as the philosopher Ernest Becker would have it, that’s because my writing is simply a subconscious raging against my own mortality, a drive to deny my eventual death by struggling to create a legacy (even if just of words) that persists beyond me. More prosaically, perhaps it’s a consequence of my painfully slow writing speed, and the disappointment of my posts disappearing in even less time than it took for me to draft them in the first place. Or, perhaps, it’s because I’m far too long-winded to cram my thoughts into the saner word counts that most social media sites’ designs encourage.

Still, whatever the reason, and even after some relatively long hiatuses, I inevitably find myself winding my way back here, to longer-form blog posting. Sure, a lot of my posts are garbage. But it’s nice to think they’re at least garbage that people can find, and slog their way through, years – or, apparently, decades – down the line.

Despite my consistent 2020 start, it appears I couldn’t quite wrangle posts here the last few days. The culprit: a ton of writing and editing I’ve been doing on other projects.

Apparently, I only have some fixed number of words in me each day. Once I hit that hard limit, my brain is cooked.

Sadly, I still have a bunch of other writing left to do, so I’m only popping in briefly, sparing this hundred or so words to try and keep the new/old blogging habit alive. Now back to the salt mines!