Unifying My Blogs

Posted by: peter on: April 22, 2012

• In: operations | theory
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I’ve finally reached the breaking point. Up until now, I’ve been maintaining three separate blogs addressing three different subject matter: “business”, health, and socio-politics. Aside from the suboptimal process of maintaining three separate blogs, this approach has suffered also for reasons of substance.

For example, some topics upon which I blog don’t seem to arise out of these three categories. For example topics about sports, personality theory, etc.

A bigger problem, however, is that some topics span some or all or even more than just these three categories. For these topics, to which blog do I post the ideas?

My previous post on Simon Sinek’s wonderful “Start With Why” book illustrates this challenge. The topic is clearly business-related. But the Enneagram slant in the analysis has almost always found its way into my health writings, not business.

The next topic I’m going to blog about truly highlights this problem. This morning, I was getting onto 280 at Alpine Road in Silicon Valley after an early morning Dish hike with business colleagues.

I was speaking to my wife on my mobile phone. But at the junction of 280 and Alpine Road, there is a mobile dead zone. So we hung up and I promised to call back once I was on 280 and out of the dead zone.

In the 30 seconds of dead time, I experienced an epiphany.

This was the same sort of emotional/intellectual epiphany that has struck me on numerous occasions over these past 10-15 years. I’ve blogged about these transformative personal events using my health blog for that. Because, at the root, these events are about mental health.

But this time, the epiphany had to do with something that is currently going on in my business. That is, the circumstances giving rise to this emotional epiphany are about business pure and simple, having almost nothing to do with my personal life centering around my wife and child.

So where to blog such a post?

This was my conundrum this morning. And when I asked the question, the answer seemed obvious: my business blog.

So that’s where I am today. All of my blogging, for the foreseeable future, will be done on Jack’s Ruminations. Whether the topic arises from business, socio-politics, sports, health, science — it doesn’t matter. Jack’s Ruminations is now my sole blogging microphone.

For certain, some of the topics that will now appear on this blog may seem to stray from business. But it will be a useful exercise, IMHO, to ask myself for every post: What are some business angles on this topic? Here’s another filter pass my wife would like to see implemented: Is this topic palatable to your business clientele?

The other reason uni-blogging strikes me as a useful approach is my fundamental belief that everything is everything else, just with different wrapping. And discussing a topic, approaching it from different disciplines, often has the side benefit of clarity (not to mention probable Truth).