When you’re starting a company, the hardest part is often deciding what the company won’t do. The possibilities are initially endless, yet a small company (and, really, a large company, too) can only do so many things well.

It’s a bit like going to a restaurant – you can eat anything on the menu, but you can’t eat everything on the menu, at least without getting sick.

Blogging follows suit. Good blogs tend to focus in on one topic, or just a handful. Yet this one, over the past eight years, has wandered haphazardly from one topic to the next.

So, finally, and long, long overdue, I’ve been giving some thought to what this blog should be about. Based on the emails that roll in, it seems there are four areas about which people are particularly happy to read:
– Personal adventures and misadventures
– Productivity and entrepreneurship
– Food, dining and nutrition
– Technology for non-technologists

Those four, I think, cover about 90% of the best read entries in self-aggrandizement’s past.

So, as an experiment, rather than simply randomly blogging up whatever strikes my fancy, I’ll be trying to cycle through those four topics. That way, whichever one you’re coming to find, you’ll regularly get a dose of new, relevant content.

And, hopefully, with a snarkily egotistic perspective as the thematic link across all four, you’ll want to give each and every post a careful read, no matter which of the categories you like most.

After all, self-aggrandizement is already ‘doubtless one of the best sites on the internet’. If I do say so myself.

Several days ago, I wrote a short blog post entitled ‘Dear People of Williamsburg’.

At the time, I was exceedingly drunk.

Nonetheless, it has since come to my attention, via email notification by roughly forty readers, that I incorrectly used ‘to’ instead of ‘too’ in that post.

And, relatedly, it has come to my attention, also by roughly forty readers’ emails, that I am an idiot.

Do I need to post on the weekends for this crazy daily blogging habit project, or do I get a reprieve?

So if blogging is a habit, and I haven’t blogged regularly for god knows how long mainly because I’ve lost the habit, then perhaps the way to start again is to just post something every day no matter what even if it sucks for thirty days. (Which is, I believe, is how long it’s commonly thought to take habits to crystalize.)

Let’s find out.

Some days you’re the dog; other days, you’re the hydrant.

Which is to say, while updating MovableType, the software that runs this blog, I somehow managed to blow the brains out of both self-aggrandizement.com and CrossFit NYC’s highly trafficked blog.

Fortunately, I back up the actual entry content for both. But not the design or code, which I’ve spent much of today rebuilding from scratch.

So, in short, if you see anything strange on either site, please let me know.

My brain is shot to hell, and though I’ve spent the past thirty minutes trying to piece together a blog entry – something to do with emptying your inbox, and with diagnosing what causes work backlogs – I have nothing to show for it, aside from seven or eight abortive, fractional starts, collections of partial paragraphs and half-finished run-on sentences.

I’ll spare you those, but as I’m having a hard day, I at least wanted to point out I sure did try, in the hopes of earning some partial credit.

As Anne Lamott observed, the best cure for writer’s block is a shitty first draft. Convince yourself you don’t have to write something good – just that you have to write something – and it becomes far easier to get words flowing.

Which makes sense in the world of novels, where authors iterate months or years between first draft and final product. But not in blogs, where the time from idea to post sometimes spans just minutes.

In other words, good blogging requires good first drafts. Which puts the pressure back on a blogger with writer’s block. And as the length of time from one post to the next mounts, that pressure worsens. Drop posting frequency from near-daily to at-best-monthly (as I have of late), and each entry need be Pulitzer-worthy to justify itself.

Yet experience dictates that I blog best as habit – post regularly, day in and day out, and intermittently, excellence emerges.

So, for the balance of this year, it’s consistency over quality. In other words, I’ll be doing my best to accept shitty first drafts. And I hope you will, too.

Hey, remember when I had a blog?

Me too.

And, now regretting my overuse of the formulation of that last post, other people whom this site has suggested ‘look out’:

Harvey Weinstein.
Picasso.
Bob Villa.
Santa Claus.
Movie people.
Playgirl.
Anyone who pisses me off.