Inspiration and Blogging - Don’t Make This Mistake

Mike McDerment - December 20/2006

I made a mistake - let me explain.

We like to be sure to post at least one new entry to our blog every day. Often it takes over an hour to get a post up. Last week I shot Levi an email, here’s what it said:

I need you to write a blog post. Please help me - I’m too busy today.

Here are the constraints. Make it about SAAS and have it live in 20 minutes.

That should keep it manageable. Feel free to shift the topic if you want to, just thought that the suggestion might help.

Levi, who has written classics such as, “Snakes on a Plane for Dummies” and “Is PayPal Dropping the Ball?“, read my email, took 20 minutes and wrote this post. I have to say that it was not up to his usual standard, and it was my fault. You have to be inspired to write a post …or at least a post you release publicly. I forced this one.

In running FreshBooks, we rarely make decisions like the one I made in this case. The ability to avoid forced decisions is something that makes small businesses and freelancers special - if it doesn’t feel right, you just don’t do it…you listen to your gut. Usually, the bigger an organization gets, the more “forced decisions” and “forced actions” you can expect, and the outcome can be lame and vacuous. Bo Burlington describes this phenomenon as “losing your mojo” in his book Small Giants.

Take it from us - you can’t force inspiration.

Dec 20/06
11:50 am

Skype user says:

I thought it was more than a decent blog entry, especially if he completed it in only 20 minutes. I’m curious about why you feel that it’s so necessary to maintain an active blog. Most of the blog entries here are interesting but do you think they’re vital to your business?

Dec 20/06
12:02 pm

Mike McDerment says:

Skype - it was definitely decent…everything Levi does is excellent if you ask me, that post just felt uninspired to me compared to his other posts and he agrees.

WRT “why you [do you] feel that it’s so necessary to maintain an active blog. Most of the blog entries here are interesting but do you think they’re vital to your business?”

I think the belief that we should blog everyday is why we do it. It keeps us in touch with people like yourself and makes us stop to think about what’s going on. I don’t think it’s “vital”, but I do think it is one of the intangibles in the way we run our business and it’s important to us. Levi wrote a rather inspired post about intangibles yesterday. Beyond that, I’m not sure why we blog, and I’m alright with that…

Dec 20/06
2:29 pm

Voip user says:

I see. I thought maybe there was another business related reason aside from staying connected to customers & potential customers.

Judging by your email, you just seemed a bit stressed because you had too much on your plate. That happens to everyone but your point about how inspiration can’t be forced is a good one.

btw, i changed my nickname here because I don’t want to appear to be a shill for Skype.