Lessons Learned from 30 Days of Blogging

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last month, I decided to blog every day. As I explained earlier:

For whatever reason, I’ve found writing hard to do the past few years, and this year has been the hardest. I’ve also been disinclined to think out loud, even though I’ve had a lot I’ve wanted to say and share, both personally and professionally.

Mid-way through the experiment, I reported:

What it’s been doing is helping unlock whatever has been inside of me. I’ve been precious about sharing what I’ve been thinking, not wanting to say them unless I can say them well and feeling paralyzed as a result. I’ve also found it overwhelming at times to try to blog. I guess things are crazy in the world right now, and it’s not only affecting my mental health, it’s hard for me to make sense of it all.

Blogging as a practice has reminded me not to be too precious. The less I try to say, the less overwhelming I feel. The more frequently I share, the less I have to worry about saying it all in one piece, which makes it much easier to write. Plus, even though I don’t think I’ve shown it yet, I’m starting to remember what it feels like to write well. I’m rounding into shape again, which always feels good.

…

The biggest surprise has been that sharing regularly has helped me re-engage with my broader community. I didn’t think anyone really followed this blog anymore, and because I’m rarely on social media anymore, the algorithms seem to have decided I’m not worthy of most people’s feeds. Still, some people are paying attention to what I’m saying, and getting to hear from them has been a treat and is also motivating me to write more.

After having finished the experiment, I’m not sure I have anything different to report, other than to say that I don’t think I had any breakthroughs after 30 days, and I want to keep exercising this muscle. I thought seriously about extending my project through the end of the year, but I opted against it for a few reasons. Even though it wasn’t particularly stressful, it wasn’t stress-free either, and I don’t need the added pressure this month. It also tires out muscles that I’m using for work right now. I can focus on developing these muscles more when work settles down.

In the meantime, I think the exercise still is helping me share more than I was before. This is my third blog post in December. I think a good pace for me is to be blogging about once a week, especially when those posts are more or less organic.

Maybe the most interesting thing for me was seeing what I chose to blog about. This wasn’t just a writing exercise, it was a sharing exercise. I aggregated all of the tags from those 30 days of blog posts and ran them through WordClouds.com to see if I could detect any patterns.

Not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about COVID-19 and the elections. It was nice to see that I wrote quite a bit about collaboration. This wasn’t my goal, but I admit I was curious to see how often I felt compelled to write about “work stuff” — the original purpose of this blog — especially when I had so many other things on my mind. I loved that I wrote about a lot about making — food and art and photography and stories in general.

Finally, I was curious about the people and places I wrote about. Here were people I knew whom I mentioned in various posts (not including my partner and sister, whom I mentioned often and didn’t bother tagging):

I loved seeing this list. My interactions with others play such a huge role in what I think about and how I feel, and I love being able to share this space with the people in my life.

People I mentioned whom I don’t know:

Places I mentioned:

  • Africa
    • Nigeria
  • Alaska
  • California
    • Bay Area
      • Colma
      • Oakland
        • Joaquin Miller Park
        • Mountain View Cemetery
      • San Francisco
        • Fort Point
        • Golden Gate Bridge
    • Los Angeles
      • Forest Lawn
  • Cincinnati
  • Santa Fe
    • Ghost Ranch

Hummingbird at Rest

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A few years ago, my friend and long-time checkin partner, Kate, told me about seeing a hummingbird resting on a branch overhead, and how surprised she was, since she associated hummingbirds with, well, humming — constantly flitting about, with their wings moving blurringly fast. I was struck by this observation, because I had never seen a hummingbird resting before, and I suppose I had foolishly assumed that they simply never stopped going, going, going.

It turns out that the opposite is true. Hummingbirds spend the majority of their time sitting, because flying consumes an enormous amount of energy.

My partner has Mexican bush sage in her backyard, which is essentially nature’s hummingbird feeder. They absolutely love them. Whenever possible, I sit in her backyard, just waiting and watching. It never takes long for a hummingbird to swing by, moving from flower to flower before flying off.

This morning, I stepped out as the clouds moved ominously overhead, hoping to take in a few breaths outdoors before the rain came down. I watched a hummingbird swoop in, quickly moving from flower to flower, sucking on the nectar. Then it moved to a nearby tree and perched on a branch overhead. I watched it in wonder as it sat… and sat… and sat.

The Anchovy Project

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A few weeks ago, I discovered (via The Marshall Store) local pickled herrings. I’m not a huge fan of pickled herrings, but I was surprised to learn that they catch them here in the Bay Area, as I had never seen them in the markets or on a menu. I was telling this to my friend, Kate, my go-to person for all things related to oceans, and we got to talking about why we don’t eat more local fish, especially those lower on the food chain. She pointed me to State Bird Provisions’ Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski’s brilliant Anchovy Project:

They were planning on opening Anchovy Bar in San Francisco before COVID-19 shut everything down. I hope this pandemic doesn’t kill the project. We need more places like this.

Updated COVID-19 Numbers (March 20, 2020) and Thoughts

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Update: A new iteration is now available:

My morning ritual for the past week has been to update my COVID-19 spreadsheet and ponder my chart. Here’s the latest:

On the one hand, if you compare it to last week’s chart, it’s not a happy result for those of us in the U.S. (Italy’s curve might be flattening. We’ll see next week.) On the other hand, remember that this is a lagging indicator. This past week’s line was essentially pre-determined by what happened the previous week. Earlier this week, the Bay Area instituted shelter-in-place. Shortly thereafter, California made it state-wide, and New York and Illinois followed suit after that. We’ll see if this has any noticeable impact next week.

I made one slight tweak to the graph (adding labels to the axes; thanks to Kate Wing for the gentle scolding). I’d like to change the gridlines on the x-axis to every seven days, but can’t do that in Google Sheets. Not a huge deal. I’d also like to experiment with a log 2 graph (versus log 10) on the y-axis to more easily show how many days it takes for new cases to double, but again, can’t do that from Google Sheets. Again, not a big deal. I’d also like to do a region-by-region analysis, as suggested by many others and made possible by David Janes’ data, but haven’t gotten around to that yet.

I started doing all of this as an exercise in self-care. I wanted to understand what was happening, and I found what I was reading to be not just largely unhelpful, but actually debilitating. This has helped a lot. There is something very calming about looking up numbers, plugging them into a spreadsheet, and pondering the results, even if the results aren’t very good. (Come to think of it, this also played a huge role in helping me achieve better work-life balance, so it might be a pattern.) I haven’t been able to avoid the media as much as I hoped, but it’s helped me make sense of what I’m seeing and ignore articles and missives that are generally unhelpful or worse. It’s also validating when folks who understand this stuff far better than me are coming to similar conclusions.

I’ve loved seeing friends and others play with the data as well. One of the best websites I’ve seen is Covid Act Now, which shows state-by-state projections based on hospital capacity and what we understand about different interventions. They’ve also shared their model openly, and they’re posting the right disclaimers. (Good rule of thumb: Be skeptical of anyone who claims certainty about their conclusions unless they’re an epidemiologist, and even then, take everything with a grain of salt.)

I’m also inspired by everyone working on the front lines — from health care workers to domestic workers — and to those who are doing their part to support those who are. (Hat tip to Jon Stahl for sharing the amazing work that Carl Coryell-Martin instigated, for example.) Stay safe everyone, stay at home if you can, and be well.

A Little Inspiration from a Friend (and Humans of New York)

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

For the past five years, I’ve had a weekly checkin with my friend, Kate Wing. It has been one of the most valuable professional practices I’ve ever done. It’s equal parts peer learning and coaching, but it feels like I’m just chatting with my friend regularly (which is exactly what we’re doing)!

Yesterday was one of those days when I just needed to vent. I’ve been frustrated with my perceived lack of impact and my ongoing failures, which have been wearing on me. Kate mostly listened. Later in the evening, she forwarded this Humans of New York Story via Instagram:

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“When I was younger, I had dreams of discovering something big. I’m a historian. I specialize in the end of the Roman Empire. And I always wanted to uncover something flashy and exciting that would fascinate people. I don’t mean that I’d actually dig something out of the ground. I’m more of a bookworm. I imagined myself in a reading room of the National Library, stumbling across something that others had overlooked. But it never happened. I’m 54 now. I’m slowing down a bit. And looking back– I don’t think I was ever a pioneer in anything I did. I grew to realize that knowledge is a community, and my role would be to add a tiny grain of rice to the pile. But that was still exciting for me. Learning new things was the biggest passion of my life. It was only frustrating when I tried to share that knowledge. I had to accept that my passion isn’t universal, and in the end my work might only benefit a few people. But that’s OK. A few months ago I received a call from a teacher in Italy. She told me that she’d read all my works. And that she agreed with my interpretations. And that she planned to incorporate them into her own work. It was a wonderful feeling to know that my books weren’t just gathering dust in a library somewhere. And that even if I didn’t blaze a path, I helped widen it for others” (Madrid, Spain)

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I’m very thankful to have friends and colleagues like Kate who share little bits of wisdom like this when I most need them.