It’s been two weeks since New Years Eve and I’m still trying to figure out how to write the very first blog post of 2017. On one hand it should be grand, something spectacular to set you, the reader, up for what’s to come later this year. On the other, with no grand subjects in mind, I’d like to write something, anything, to keep this blog going.
So here’s to ABP. Always Be Posting!
ABP is something I heard on Casey Neistat’s vlog some time ago. It means that to maintain your viewership, interest in your blog, and most importantly, consistency of your posts, you must always be posting.
I haven’t been that good at ABP. Zero posts for the month of December kind of proves my point. I’m gonna change that. Using self motivation and Trello, I’m gonna aim for a post a week. That’s not that much. 52 posts if I keep it up. 51 actually, since I’m already a week behind. Or more, if I post more frequently. This brings me to my next point.
Focus and consistency. My wife, and worse, even my boss, pointed out to one general flaw of mine: losing focus and maintaining consistency. My wife often smirks at some ideas that I shoot up as she knows that most likely it won’t come to fruition. “Honey, I know you mean well, but face it, it would require the kind of self discipline you’re not used to”. GRRRR! That was in regards to weight loss. My boss had a similar comment about some of my ideas and projects at work: “you lift off like a rocket, but somehow never manage to enter orbit”.
So in 2017 my resolution isn’t to pass planned certification exams, advance in my career, or lose weight. My resolution is to keep focus and maintain consistency. If I can get those two in order, I believe this will be a great year indeed!
The photo below is from a New Years Eve party Ania and I went to to celebrate the arrival of 2017. We welcomed the new year with my cousin Krzysiek and his wife Kasia.
The Polish Magician 
It’s difficult to ABP when there’s not a lot happening in your life! Whilst I was out of work, struggling to find a job, and getting kicked back by potential employers for no good reason (and sometimes quite bad ones), I could have something to blog about. But now that I’ve landed a job, and I’ve done a few weeks of going backwards and forwards to it, and the job itself isn’t spectacular, the problem is this: what to blog about?
I completely understand what you mean. Looking back at my posts from previous years I wrote more about travels as I did more traveling, wrote more about things that really stood out during the transfer from a life in Los Angeles to a life in Poland, and had an overall more upbeat writing style as I was exciting about starting a blog. Now I have settled into my job and don’t travel nearly as much, life in Poland has become the norm and the disparity between now and then has become blurred somewhat, and my blog is seven years old now putting it somewhere on the ‘maturity’ lifecycle level if I had to use my work lingo:
Development->Introduction->Growth/Maturity/Decline->Withdrawal
I could even argue for the ‘growth’ lifecycle as I can clearly see that when I post often I get quite a lot of traffic. I just have to write to get it.
And like you, I ask myself the same question: what to blog about? I don’t mean to write just for writings sake, but writing itself does help. Meaning that to me it’s a little therapeutic, clears my head, I put my thoughts down on paper sort of speak and have a clearer vision of what’s ahead. My challenge is to find topics that I hope will be not only writeable, but also interesting enough for you to read.