Building Your Story – Who’s Doing the Research if You Aren’t?

Who doesn’t want to have a Wikipedia article, a documentary about them or at least a story of their lives and the people they’ve impacted?

What makes writing this story so hard is the research that is required to tell it.  Why not compile it in real time?

The reality is that future “research” is happening around us every day all of our lives.  The once tedious task of documentation has not become as easy as leaving a voice memo or taking a picture from your phone.

The latest tools that we have available like Dropbox, Evernote, Twitter, our blogs and countless other technological advances give us the ability to gather our research real-time and look at the data later.  “What data?” you say?  Well, the truth is we don’t know if anything you’ve experienced is worth documenting or not, but it’s so easy, why not do it?

One of the most exciting things out there right now is the ability to blog without publishing it.  Seriously, for the faint of heart, you can start your blog, build content and someday in the future, blammo!  you can make it public.  This is especially valuable if you don’t feel your content is relevant, necessary, entertaining or informative (even though it probably is to somebody).

So even though I have a blog that is public that everyone sees, I have multiple blogs going on in the background that no one but me and a few people close to me have access to.

There are two schools of thought:

1. I am who I am, and the more content I develop, “good” or “bad,” is all “ME” so it’s okay.  If people like what I have to say, they’ll be cool with the fact that we don’t always agree on everything.
2. I don’t want to be ostracized, pigeonholed, seen as unprofessional, made fun of by my friends or to have anyone generally have anything negative to say or think about anything I write (or some derivation thereof).

At the very least,  rather than getting into a situation where in three to five years you look back and say wow, I wish I had been blogging and documenting my (insert hobby, passion, profession, etc) so I don’t have to go back and remember what my story is so I can start to tell it. . .

If you feel like you have an idea that matters to others, but you’re not confident enough to publish today, go ahead and get it out there.  At least get it time stamped and have it ready to publish and get going with it.

Oh, what the hell, why not just publish it?