Dumb Medicine

To quote one of my favorite bloggers, “I’m trying to get signal not noise.” I missed that point in my very first article. In which I challenged myself to write an article every other day. You see the thing is, I don’t particularly think what I’ve written has been great. It hasn’t been bad, but it hasn’t been great. Great is what I’m shooting for.

Following Glen’s lead, I will be posting articles a little more slowly from now on. It has been nice seeing you guys check in on my posts. Keep it up. But guess what? You don’t have to check back so often. Just click Grab our RSS feed button in the upper right hand corner, and you won’t even have to check back.

Signal not noise

In case you haven’t researched into making radios (I have), the difference between signal and noise is the fact that signal has purpose, is sharing a message, and is valuable. On the other hand, noise has no purpose, shares no message, and is not valuable. In fact, the only thing noise is good at doing is being a back drop to signal.

How does this apply to the field of personal development and blogging in general? Extending my analogy, noise is the typical riff-raff you will find on the web. Crappy articles are a dime a dozen. They don’t hit home, they don’t give a strong message, and they’re mostly not valuable. However, every once in a while you stumble upon an article that really changes your perspective of something. It reveals something to you which you hadn’t known before. Writing articles to fill a personal quota won’t generate those articles.

My goal

My goal is not to create a popular website. Sometimes I get caught up in trying to increase the popularity of my website, but if I keep myself focused I won’t. Trying to build a popular website is the exact opposite way things should be done. You can’t set out to make something popular. It doesn’t work that way.

My goal is to create something valuable. Something that is truly unique and sets itself apart from the background noise. The scary part is I have no idea how I will do that. It feels like there is a mountain ahead of me that I’ve got to climb, but I’ll be damned if I don’t do it.

My plan

I will write every other day as I had planned, but I will not publish always. I’m going to write more detailed articles about things that interest me in personal development, and will hopefully interest you. Take this article for instance. The lesson you should learn is that in everything you do, create something valuable. Nothing else matters. However, keep in mind that the definition of valuable is very lax. What is valuable to me is not valuable to the next person. Keep that in mind.

Enjoy reading!

-DM