Blog Your Own Adventure
Hugh MacLeod's new book, Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear, is a gem that shows how blogging has utterly changed the world for those of us that have embraced it. From the book:
Having a blog, a voice, having my own media, utterly changed my life. [...] This gave me the freedom I spent most of my adult life searching for, the same freedom I think we're ALL searching for, in one way or the other.
I echo his sentiment. Before I started blogging, I was just another guy with way too much stuff do trying to figure out how I was going to get it all done and thrive at the same time. Though the people around me had the same basic problem, it wasn't a topic they embraced and got excited about, and, though what I would share with them was appreciated, it was awkward. They hadn't quite opted into it.
So I started blogging about it and everything changed. There were people out there trying to untie the same know I was and who were actually wanting to talk about it. There were other people writing about it, too, so I could learn from them. I wasn't an isolated, random guy any more - I was part of an ever-building conversation with changemakers.
I was heathily pushed into coaching, which, before I started doing it, was nowhere in my life plan. I was a doctoral candidate in Philosophy and a military logistics officer; neither of those career tracks have coaching as a stepping stone or terminal point. But I loved it and now can't see my life without it in one form or the other.
Blogging has connected me with amazing people that I never would've met otherwise, not because they were out of my reach, but because they simply didn't exist in my world. Most of my friends and associates are people I've met online first and then developed relationships with. My online friends are different from offline friends along many dimensions, but the important one for this conversation is that I actually know them better than many of the people I've known offline for years because people reveal more of what they're excited about and who they want to be online.
Think about it: when's the last time you met someone offline who was committed and excited about making a dent in the universe? Who you couldn't get to shut up about something other than their kids and pets or the people around them who were doing epic shit?
Blogging has the potential to make heroes of all of us, in our own way. It sets the stage for us all to have a Martin Luther or Rosa Parks moment where we see the world different and decide to take a stand to make the world start moving the way we see it. It's a strange, chaotic, and disruptive world now that we all have our own publishing press.
And I love it.
To riff on a point Hugh made in the book, we're in the midst of a revolution without all the violence. We're still in the early stages of it, but one of the things we've already seen is the rebirth of entrepreneurship.
I'll be writing more about freedom soon, but what's important about all this is that blogging gives us the freedom of self-actualization, not just the freedom from interference. Before we all had a publishing press, our ability to craft a new environment for ourselves was quite limited. No more.
Need a new social environment? Create one. Need different career opportunities? Start publicly sharing your body of work. Want to sink into being your weirdo self? Do your thing.
The days of choosing your own adventure from a list of pre-written ones are over. We live in a time in which we can all blog our own adventures, with no one telling us we can't.
That, my friend, is freedom. How are you using it?
Check out the Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear website to learn more and see where you can grab a copy.