Write to Your Past Self
I'm trying to start a semi-regular blogging habit. Coming up with ideas certainly isn't easy, but it also isn't my bottleneck. I have several topics I'd like to write posts about. The hard part is writing something I'd be happy to post.
For example, I'm currently reading Elephant in the Brain, and had an interesting thought I wanted to write about. I wrote a lot, but it devolved into an incoherent mess. Why? I bit off more than I could chew. There was too much nuance to my idea. I discovered this through the writing process, so it wasn't a complete loss (I learned something), but I certainly felt discouraged after I fell short of actually publishing.
Even writing this post, right now, there are several things I'd like to mention. But weaving them all into a coherent post would take a large amount of effort, so I'm choosing to omit them.
Going forward, I'm going to write about things that seem obvious or unoriginal to me. Funny enough, this is probably the easiest way to provide value to others. I certainly would have appreciated reading this post earlier today.
I think that, as long as what you write would have been useful to yourself at some point in the past, it's a good idea. Think about yourself from two years ago. I imagine you'd leap at the opportunity to talk to your past self—how naive you were!
This is the main heuristic I'm going to use going forward, even if what it produces seems mundane to me.