Maintaining Your Blogging Passion

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One of the things we talked about at the conference on Friday was about blogging from your personal passion. Passion and interest are the fuel that will keep you going when the luster of the “new thing” that blogging is when you get started wears off.

One of the participants asked a valid question as we were talking about sustaining business blogging activity and addressing how much time is involved in successfully blogging in support of your business.

He wondered if he’d be able to maintain that over the long haul. My initial response was that as a business owner did he have trouble being passionate about going to work? If so, blogging was probably not for him.

One of the beauties of business blogging is that it can be a natural off-shoot of the passion business folks have already for their work. If you don’t have any passion for what you do in your business, then blogging probably isn’t a good fit for your business model.

I was talking with my dad last night who is considering starting a personal blog. He said, “Blogging because it’s the next new thing is not a good enough reason to get started.” Dad gets the need for passion.

Most of us spend more time working than we do with our families. The vast majority of business owners have a tremendous amount of knowledge about their business (at least they should!) Couple that knowledge of what they do gives them a unique perspective to speak about their business.

And the familiarity that comes from all the time we spend at work gives us a comfort level talking about what we do.

Ideally all that will blend together into a passion cocktail that can spill out into the blog posts and keep propelling our blogs forward.

Do you have challenges with motivation when it comes to your blogging?

If so why do you think that is?

And what are some things we can do to keep ourselves motivated and moving forward?

Life Lessons From 2006

Ben Yoskovitz has a group writing project under way over at the Instigator Blog asking the question, “What did you learn this year?”

Whew! Talk about a big question!

I mean I learned lots of things this year.

Some of them were relatively insignificant yet very practical. For example I learned that you shouldn’t put stop leak into the overflow reservoir of your 2001 Buick Century instead of into the radiator because it will gunk up the plastic reservoir tank, cause the sensor to turn on the “low coolant” light steady, and cost approximately $360 to get someone who actually knows about cars to fix. Oh, and it won’t stop the leak that way either.

Other lessons had a little bigger impact. Read more

Work Where Your Passion Is

I’ve been doing quite a bit of introspection these days. It’s not that I’m narcissistic or anything. I just keep hearing folks say over and over again that you will be most successful career wise if you work where your passion is.

The part that I’m struggling with is the whole part about where my passion really lies. That may sound pretty dumb to most of you. But the truth is I am good at a bunch of different things. I enjoy a variety of stuff. And I tend to get passionate about things for relatively short bursts of time before I move onto the next thing.

I think my whole struggle drives my wife a bit nuts.

I can imagine her thinking, “Here we go again,” whenever I get on the topic. I mean just last night we had another one of those “I don’t know what I want be when I grow up” conversations. Oh, and I’m nearly 40. Sheesh!

The good news is there are some folks who are offering up some practical ideas and techniques to get through a barrier like mine. I thought I’d share a couple links that I’ve found that help me out since I’m struggling here. Who knows? Maybe some of you are struggling with this too.

So here are the links: Read more