It’s Time to Get Back to Basics

It’s time to get back to basics.

This blog has been dominated by podcast-related posts for quite a few years now. I’ve done very little writing.

Now, please don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love doing the podcast — currently 400 episodes and counting — and I’m thrilled to make it even better in 2020. There are super exciting things planned. I’m incredibly lucky to work on something every week that gives me so much joy and fulfillment, and it won’t slow down.

But that’s not what got me here. 

This blog launched in 2006, before my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was published in 2007. The first version of the homepage was comically bad (here it is), but The 4-Hour Ugly Betty Blog did an honorable job. In the years that followed, we improved the design (here’s v2), and I wrote 500+ posts that helped enable everything else. Without the blog, there would be no angel investing career, no podcast, no documented hair loss, etc.

Equally important, those early years of regular writing helped me to think more clearly and to hone a craft I deeply revere. For me, to write is to become more human. To the extent that I’m sane, writing helped keep me in that lane.

But starting around 2013, I began saving my scribing for a big book every few years. 

That’s worked out on many levels, but without a regular writing practice, books eventually became terrifying. It was like committing to an Ironman every few years without doing any training in between. Even if you can muscle things on game day, and even if the outcome looks great from the outside, the lead-up and the internal experience are likely to be anxiety-ridden and unpleasant. 

All because I stopped blogging. 

Private journaling is a step in the right direction, but it’s not a replacement. I need to face the squirmy discomfort that comes both before and after publishing. So…

I’m getting back in the writing game, and I’m going to publish something on this blog at least once per week. And by making a highfalutin pronouncement here, I’m ensuring that I’ll get grief on the Internet if I don’t follow through. That’s helpful.

To further grease the wheels, allow me to set expectations extremely low.

I hope that some of the writing will be decent, but a lot of it will be worth taking behind the barn and shooting in the head. Some of it will be long (e.g., unpublished chapters from secret book projects), and some of it will be short (e.g., terrible haiku out of desperation). As long as I publish something — anything — once a week, it doesn’t matter. 

I love em dashes — too often you see them, so practice I must. 

Suffice to say, this old man wants to limber up and get back on the playing field.

Thanks for reading this far, friends. Much more to come…

Timbo

P.S. You might notice that this website has a brand-new look and feel! It’s only about 10 years overdue, but who’s counting? Please let me know in the comments if anything is broken or if you like/dislike anything in particular. Like me, it’s a work in progress, and I’d love your feedback.