“how can you possibly be qualified to write about this stuff?”

Spot on ! Thanks for indicating Mann I'll check it out.
Blogs have their limits indeed.

Hope we can discuss this further down the road.
Cheers.

Dear Sam,

Please count me as one of your new readers ;-)

I've been coming a few times through your links on zenhabits reddit always to find interesting posts, ideas and principles in tune with what I try to follow (such as the above). So that's great and I'll be looking forward to see how it develops !

Please indulge me in sharing a thought that occurred to me recently though, relatively to self-dev/personal growth blogs : it's how every one or two days they publish on a new subject deconstruct, analyze and give advice. So for an "unenlightened" mind in search of perspective this is certainly very interesting and educative, but over a longer period of time it feels like your beliefs systems and habits get smashed to pieces and you end up feeling like the blank sheet of paper on which they tell you make all those lists, and it gets worse if you follow multiple blogs... It's bit caricatural I admit, but please bear with me.

As an individual gets more aware of these subjects, it triggers quite important personal questioning, of values, of objectives, desires, hopes, etc. In other words he starts questioning his life and exploring what he wants to do with it. Now this can be quite a destabilizing experience even if the intentions are good, it's almost - or is - psychology. Yet the blogs that got that person on the track of improving his life keep posting the same kind of 500 words posts which just don't go deep enough anymore to answer the real personal questions they triggered, and the 30 days habit trials or other lists or visualizations of one's future are just methods and not the intellectual or spiritual guidance that in my opinion is needed.

I'm writing this on the moment... getting a bit deep. Yes it's the point I feel I'm at right now.

I have tools, blueprints, methods, dos and don'ts, etc. But I got into some personal questioning that would require me trying out a series of therapists or whichever type of personal guide before I get the good guidance, simply because these ways of thinking are just not the traditional moaning they were trained to deal with (seen Good Will Hunting ? :-). The only answer to this I see right now is that I am now my own guide, my own judge - quite scary but also very empowering. I can still learn specific skills and ways of thinking from various experts in their respective fields, but none of them will encompass what I am as a whole.

The initial thought which got me to writing this is that beyond planting seeds and giving general directions for self-improvement, the majority of blogs don't provide the long term reference a true and deep journey of self-improvement requires on a personal level, there's hardly a continuity between two articles a month apart whereas this kind of journey takes years.

How do you resolve this sort of paradox is probably my question. Thanks for "listening" is all I should say right now, although I'd love to read your point of view on this.

Best regards,
Axel.

Axel,

Thanks for the insightful comment!

I'm not sure I follow everything of what you're saying, but let me take a quick stab at it. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that blogs like this one do a good job of getting you to think about how you are living your life/your desires/goals etc. However, once you read these blogs for any amount of time, the advice they give seems to be very surface-level and cursory, right?

I completely agree, and I'm the author of one of those blogs! In my opinion, the role I'm trying to fill is getting people to begin looking at their lives a little differently. I can't do anything other than serve as a reminder or secondary voice to people who may not be aware of any other way to live. I used to read and follow many different blogs while reading every article word for word. Now, I just quickly scan most of the articles that end up in my RSS reader, because almost everything has already been written before. In fact, that's my biggest worry with this blog...I want to try to write unique pieces, but I'm not really sure it's possible.

Basically, it sounds like you are at the same point I am. "Lifehack" blogs really don't do too much for you any more. I'm not sure what comes next. I do know that it isn't anything that I can accomplish by reading blogs. If you've ever seen any of Merlin Mann's later talks about creative work, I think he's on the right track. It's all about doing. Whatever it is that reading these blogs has made you aware of regarding your own life, now you have to start taking action.

I hope this was at all relevant to what you said. In the end, my advice to you is cut back on the blog reading (including mine!) and whatever it is that you want to do/become, start doing it. Over and over and over again.

Good luck!