Guy Reams (00:01.358)
This is Day 185, The Impact of Daily Writing, Part 2.
This will be the 200, 2287th article this morning I wrote in a row since January 8th, 2018. This is part two of my detail of how this daily writing exercise has benefited me in miraculous ways. Now, you know, writing, as I discussed yesterday, writing is therapeutic for me. It allows me to...
really focus on what I'm thinking and why I'm thinking it and kind of a meditative exercise. It also allows me to get the hardest thing done first in the morning and it allows me to chase paths without doing too much damage to my life. I have a tendency to start things all the time so by writing I'm able to start something and end it very quickly without a lot of damage.
So this great sense of accomplishment that comes with it has really benefited me significantly. So I came up with three more benefits of daily writing. So the next one, the number fourth one, is the idea of leaving something behind. So right around the thousandth article I wrote, I decided I'd better come up with a way to archive this blog, because what happens if it went down, or what happens if my Amazon server crashed? Right? So.
And by the way, it has. I have lost my web server a couple of times due to some stupidity on my part, but I've now gotten to the point where my backups are pretty thorough. So now what I do is I have a software that I bought that catalogs all my blogs into one giant PDF file that I can then download. And I've been putting this file now in a safe place.
Guy Reams (02:06.925)
It's become quite a big book. I mean, it takes an entire ream of paper now to print. But the idea is, I now have an archive of my thoughts and ideas and what's interesting to me. And this could potentially be passed down to future generations. At least I hope it will. 50, 60, 70, 100 years from now, people will be.
potentially able to have a copy of what I've written. Which gives me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Like, of all the things I'm doing in my life, nobody will remember. And 100 years from now, nobody will know a thing about what I was doing. Like my grandfather, I know his life pretty well because I was raised by my father who taught me what he did and also my grandfather himself taught me. Because I knew him.
And his wife, my grandmother, we've talked in great length about her and his life together.
But I don't really know what was going on in his life, like the day -to -day thoughts. Like I've got some surviving artifacts, things that he wrote down, schedules that he had kept. I've got some remnant, but it's only partial. His father before him, I have no idea. I've got some small amounts, but beyond that, nothing. And then his father before him,
I've got pictures of him and I've got one or two small stories, but I have nothing of his personal account. Now I do have some ancestors that kept journals and I've got three journals from ancestors and those are precious to me. But those journals are full of nonsense. Like today it cost me 22 cents to buy a gallon of, you know, to buy a gallon of gas or not that, gallon of gas is cheaper.
Guy Reams (04:08.077)
But anyway, it's a ledger of how much money they spent on what and or how much, you know, what their travel Chicago was like or what the weather was today. It's nothing really meaningful or impactful. Well, now that I'm writing every day, I'm writing down what the what's really going on in my head and in my life. So if if anybody ever stumbles upon my journal in 100 to 200 years from now.
They're going to get a lot more content, probably more than they ever wanted. And maybe they'll just think I was crazy, but at least I'm leaving something behind. So that gives me something. Because as you get older, you want to have this sense of purpose, I think. Number five, connections. Every once in a while, I mean, I do no SEO at all. I don't care. I never really worry about it. Growing an audience has not been my biggest desire.
So...
Every once in a while, a topic I write on is not written on very often. So what will happen is Google will pick it up. And because my blog's been around for a while and I'm producing so much content, Google does pick up my blog and it does show up in search results on certain keywords. So every once in a while, somebody will be searching on a topic and they will find an article that I wrote.
And they'll read it and it may not even have anything to do with their original search string, but they'll read it and then they will send me a note. And I've met some really interesting people. What's fascinating is, you know, there's somebody in Bangladesh right now having the same thoughts that I'm having. It just makes the world seem smaller and it makes us to seem more connected. Like we're all struggling with the same thing, irregardless of religion.
Guy Reams (06:03.757)
or culture or country, it doesn't matter. We're all going through the same struggles. And I think that's pretty fascinating to me. So I love it when I, every once in a while, I'll get somebody that'll reach out to me in that regard. So to me, that's motivation to keep writing. Finally, critical thinking. I don't think there's a single bigger thing that you can do to improve your ability to think critically and evaluate an opinion.
or process language than writing every day. I've gotten, I mean, my mental capacity to think through a problem has dramatically improved. I mean, in some cases that's a disadvantage because ignorance is bliss. I used to think that I was good at analyzing an idea. I used to think I was awesome, but now I know I never was. I just thought that I was. Now I understand more about,
what it means to be succinct and have clarity and to extrapolate a point. So, and I'm not really that good at it still, but I can definitely tell what it takes. And so, critical thinking, the ability to process, to stay sharp, I mean, this is something that's definitely a benefit to me. And as I get older, keeping my mind active and engaged and focused is definitely a value.
So this concludes my benefits of writing. I mean, maybe when I get to 20 ,000, so I planned it out. I know how old I will be when I get to 20 ,000 articles. And I'll be really old. So hopefully I'll still be able to type. Maybe I'll be dictating by then. Who knows, maybe AI will, I'll just be able to talk out loud and it'll turn it into an article for me. I don't know. And in fact, I'm working on that.
I'm working on that right now. I think I have a way where I can talk out loud and AI can convert my thoughts into a writing prose. That would be interesting to me. But honestly, the more I've done this, I've dabbled with AI, I've dabbled with grammar tools, and some of them have been very helpful.
Guy Reams (08:18.125)
But honestly, the more I do it, the more I've just narrowed down to just waking up in the morning, opening up Evernote or Notion and just cranking out an article. Really, that's what I do now. All these other tools just get in the way. Sometimes it's better just to freeform, right? And that's what I do. I just freeform, right? And then later, I'll run it through Grammarly or I'll run it through AI, just to check spelling or basic syntax.
And that's basically it now. So it's funny how I tried to come up with all these tools that would help me, but none of it was effective. The best thing I could do is just simply write. So we'll see what happens. We'll see how much I can keep this up. Anyway, I do recommend writing. I think you may not be able to do it every day, but writing is indeed very powerful. Thank you.