Write more crappy blog posts

If you hold off hitting publish until a great idea comes along, your writing probably wont be ready to capture it.

Why it matters: Every now and then you'll have a thought. One you think is novel enough to be worth sharing. If you are at all compelled to write online, you might be tempted to blog about it. Having an idea you can't quite articulate can be incredibly frustrating. Much like everything else we do, the answer is more practice.

• Writing can be tough. There's usually no better way to realise how poorly formed your ideas are than to try and write them down.
• Most of us likely write a lot in our day to day, email, texting, all sorts of communication is text. Despite this, getting a brand new idea into words can be tough.
• It's easy to put off publishing smaller, simpler ideas out of worry that they're not big enough to matter. I am personally guilty of this one.

How to start: In the end it comes down to the most annoying kind of advice. Just do the work. To get yourself into a spot that you're ready when big ideas come along you need to practice.

• Writing down and publishing little ideas is the most direct way to practice. The more you do it, as long as you're deliberate, the better you'll get.
• Writing but not hitting publish isn't enough. Most people put a higher bar of quality on something that's being made public. Even if nobody will ever read it.
• That doesn't mean hours of painstaking editing. It's a blog after all, not a novel.
• One thing I have found handy in this regard is keeping a list of "Things I could write about". I pop new ideas on there when they come up and then I sit down and write.

In fact, this very post came from one of those ideas. Somebody once said people blog about things they wish someone else had told them. This is probably true here.

The end goal: It's important to remember that these posts are not meant to be wonderful. The goal here is to do the reps. Be ready for when the big ideas arrive.

• You probably will get better at writing out little ideas. If you pay attention to what you're writing, you'll spot areas where you can improve.
• You'll also get faster at getting ideas out of your head and into words. Some of those words might get culled in an edit but it's a lot easier to do that when they're solid.

Plus in the end, who knows, some of those little ideas might be great big ideas for someone else.