Purpose.
It’s a word that echoes hope.
It’s amazing looking at what people have said about purpose. Quite a few of the Purpose Quotes from Brainy Quote are on the money.
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
Purpose is deliberately thought-through goal-directedness.
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
Even Homer has something to say about purpose.
Kill myself? Killing myself is the last thing I’d ever do. Now I have a purpose, a reason to live. I don’t care who I have to face, I don’t care who I have to fight, I will not rest until this street gets a stop sign!
Okay. So maybe the quotes were a little over the top, and are in regards to our purpose for living. But each project we undertake can have the same application. We need clarity of purpose.
A Blog begins with Purpose. Whether that purpose is to general babble about daily life, pointing out generic seinfeld humor towards each and every individual that you encounter; or whether you decide to write about your daily efforts to tame the rarely seen Drop Bear, it’s with a purpose that you come to this.
It’s possible to jump in without much direction and make a successful blog. This has no doubt happened throughout the long course of blogging history, and if that happens for you, kudos.
However, for most of us, our blog needs a purpose.
Take Dev Dawn for example. I started it without much purpose. I had a vague idea about global domination … but that was about it. Over the last few months though, the purpose has gradually coalesced into something more defined. It’s not finished yet, but it’s a lot clearer than when I started.
The purpose of Dev Dawn is to help people (myself included) become better Developers. Now this is pretty specific, but that’s okay. Narrow is good.
Which reminds me. Darren Rowse has written Ten Rules for Profitable Blog Startups, which is a Blog take on Evan William’s Ten Rules for Web Startups. Both of these are excellent reads, and they have so much experience and wisdom in this field.
So back to Dev Dawn. Although I started without much purpose, this wasn’t a bad thing. What is important is that you quickly adapt and take hold of the information and wisdom that you have at your fingertips, waiting to be surfed. I’m not talking about reading tutorials on how to start a blog (like this one, ha ha). If you don’t already have a purpose, then look around at what else is going on. There are so many cool blogs to read and discover. You can be the Enterprise, soaring into the Final Frontier, or something like that.
Anyway, finding a purpose can be as simple as looking at a review site, and thinking, I could focus on reviewing the stories about Drop Bears. Well … you get the idea.
So, my first step in understanding how to blog, how to create and develop a blog, is Purpose. This is where we begin.