Giving advice often benefits the giver as much as the receiver. That helps the case for daily blogging; in the process of looking for ideas, you may often feel like you’re giving advice. 

Sometimes you could be writing an unsolicited comment that was too heavy for a forum post, or stringing a bunch together. These are well-suited for a blog post; directly giving an unsolicited comment could be seen as discourteous.

You may even be writing something more like a diary—and then changing all the first-person “I” into “You.” (Like I did just now!)

Another benefit is that you may actually listen to yourself and notice some more of your own blindspots, and start to make changes. 

One of my good friends is a professional basketball coach, who I’ve urged to write more often. I experience a strong, intuitive, feeling that documenting his journey publicly will take his career to the next level. He’s clearly got the skillsets and experiences, it’s just a matter of scaling trust and relationships.

In my perspective, people also loved sports. There’s a strong demand for media that’s behind the scenes, and he’s perfectly positioned to deliver.

I have another friend who wished his partner would bet bigger into her side business, which was gaining momentum and positive market signals. I wished he took his own advice—to start up a side business, to offer it to people, and to see it gain its own momentum.

Looking back now, these were two, “Physician, heal thyself,” moments. I realized all of this was advice I needed to hear myself:

• I gave the advice, I should be trying to see how to apply it to my own work and not pushing it onto someone else.
• I should also be taking my own advice I was giving to my friend the pro basketball coach; write more often, every day if I could. 

Nothing was stopping me, except the story I told myself about the work. 

I didn’t appreciate how much people also loved creativity, art, marketing, and writing. While these topics aren’t as popular as basketball and the NBA, they’re definitely still an important part of a lot of people’s lives. 

So I did. 

One last perk to taking your own advice is you can be your own case study. Whenever you give the advice again, it will resonate much more because you’ve already applied it to yourself and seen some positive results.

More recently, I came across a couple of other pieces of advice—from Rachel Jepsen (who just launched an exciting newsletter), as well as the notion of publish don’t send—and realized I was sitting on a lot of unpublished work. I spent a few weeks putting it all together, and I’m really excited to release it. 

More soon!