I remember when I first quit my job and ventured out as an entrepreneur. I hopped onto reddit, scoured Hacker News, did a bunch of Google searches, and what did I find? It seemed that everyone had their own blogs!

So of course, one of the first things I did after leaving my job was to start my own blog.

However, I found myself having a tough time keeping it up. At best, I’d blog about once a week. At worst, once every few months. I think the reason it was difficult to keep up was that I hadn’t come up with meaningful reasons to blog. Yes, I wrote a few relatively viral posts, met some people from it, and enjoyed it, but it wasn’t enough to keep up the habit.

About two weeks ago, I started the 100 post challenge as a kickstart to get blogging again. I knew there had to be something important about it, and wanted to blog more. After learning to make it a habit, I think I have started to realize the real benefits of blogging.. especially for an entrepreneur.

I believe that entrepreneurship is all about creating things of value and getting them out into the world.

Although the job of an entrepreneur is about creating, most entrepreneurs don’t create within the world on a regular basis. It takes time to develop and release products. You aren’t alway creating and shipping product every day. Plus, there are traps that can slow you down and/or prevent you from creating. It may be constant pivoting of product. It may be the desire for perfection.

This is where blogging comes in as a good practice. What else is blogging but creation?

Each day, I get to form a thought, organize it in my mind, dump it out onto my screen, make a few passes on it, and then get it out into the real world.

It goes from random thought to published creation in a day. Isn’t that awesome? How many other ways are there to ensure you are constantly creating stuff in the world?

The only question is that of value. Do random quickly-written posts have any value in the world? I would argue the answer is “yes”.

A blog post is an expression of yourself that you are sharing with the world. At some point, someone will stumble upon your post and connect with it in some way.

But a post can be much more than that. It can inspire other people to think different. It can inspire other blog posts that start a cascading effect of thought and inspiration. It can spark a thought that changes some corner of the world.

The exact value of a blog post isn’t always known, but surely there is some value in it. And this is OK, because this may be the nature of value. You don’t always know what someone out there may value. But you can create stuff and put it out there into the world.

Beyond that, each blog post you write is deliberate practice in mastering the craft of creating and shipping written thoughts. Those are pretty great things for any entrepreneur (or anyone else) to be mastering.

–

P.S. This is post number #16 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix, your daily mix of food for the soul. Request an invite now for free access to the private beta!