Your allusions to stories and truth prompted me to dig out my copy of Dan McAdams’ book, “The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self”. As he puts it, “In order to live well, with unity and purpose, we compose a heroic narrative of the self that illustrates essential truths ourselves.”

This conversation also prompted me to pluck a book that was down a few layers in my stack and start reading it last night: “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, by Daniel Pink. I only got through the introduction, but suspect this will shed more light on my own motivation for blogging. He emphasizes three essential elements to motivation:

*Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery: the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

I already posted a few notes about a book talk – well, a book-centered conversation – with Dan I recently attended, but suspect reading his book will warrant an a whole new post when I’m done … er, but I’ll do that over on my own blog, rather than a[nother] really long comment here.

Thanks again for being willing to delve further into the blogging motivation issue!

As far as your comment “where my voice might be good enough to let me sit at the big kid’s table and join the conversation” goes, I can tell you (from my experience at least) that you are already sitting at the big kid’s table – Just speak up your mind kid . Seriously, your blog is one of the best I have seen in terms of being stimulating and impactful. I am of the notion that when it comes to blogging, it is the quality that matters and not the quantity. I have seen folks create blogs every other day with a couple of paras – it might work for some but I really don’t think of that as blogging as much as an extended version of tweeting. Anyway – you have done an excellent job so far.

And just for fun, here is some play on words. I thought the word “RIVET” captures some of the things you talk about in your conversation about ‘riveting’ blogs .

Relevance of the topic to your audience
Interesting subject
Visually appealing
Emerging content
Thought provocative

so yeah… i’m struggling with this daily. i’m hyper-aware of my thoughts too, so it’s an endless cycle of questioning myself and trying to identify my own motivations. sometimes i feel that i’m doing this because i want people to have a reaction like ‘i never thought of it that way,’ for the sole purpose of encouraging thinking that is DIFFERENT, whether good/bad right/wrong.

other times, i wonder if i’ve built myself into a Skinner Box – I’m like the rat in the experiment who knows if they press the lever, they’ll get a food pellet. And every post, every comment, every retweet…pellet, pellet, pellet. Do I want the pellet, or do I just have a need to keep pushing the damn lever? I mean, all of this behavior becomes very conditioned.

does knowing it’s conditioned make the action less worthy? or is it just another way to understand the context of human nature?

there’s something kind of fascinating about putting yourself out there like this. it’s like a……. fractalization of identity, of the self. people are reading or commenting on your blog, or following you on Twitter and retweeting you or sending you messages, or commenting on your Facebook or LinkedIn updates, and you don’t have to even be there. But they’re interacting with your ideas, your thoughts, YOU. i mean…. in a sense, we’ve achieved a kind of immortality. a blog is not a book, but it’s a stamp, it’s a legacy that says ‘i was here.’

it’s interesting too because in the past, you had to be “somebody” to share your voice. or like the saying goes, that history is written by the victors. now we’re all historians, providing our own perspectives and narratives about the “Truth” of our realities. i don’t think there really is a truth, there are just stories. and that’s usually where my thoughts go, and i make peace with whatever the motivations are to blog. ultimately, it doesn’t matter. we’re telling each other stories about ourselves and the past, making meaning of today’s stories, and collectively creating stories of what tomorrow could or should look like. it’s what we’ve always done.

i want people to read my posts and comment and engage, not because i think i am better or smarter or right, but actually just the opposite – i’m curious and fragile and a social creature, and i want to belong to a tribe, where my voice might be good enough to let me sit at the big kid’s table and join the conversation.

i think it’s probably one of the strongest of human desires – to feel that your are being heard and understood.

Your motivations for blogging align very closely with my own. I particularly like your articulation of seeking understanding through the articulation process required by writing [in public]. Connecting the dots is also a motivator for me: sometimes I feel compelled to write a post when I encounter series of potentially related things (that I feel just need to be connected). I remember being inspired by danah boyd’s blog title and tagline (as well as her posts, of course) – “apophenia :: making connections where none previously existed” – and like you (and danah), I like to make connections in the posts themselves and through the comments and conversations that sometimes ensue.

One of the issues I wrestle with, though, is how much of my motivation is internal / intrinsic, and how much is external / extrinsic. I started out blogging with the intention of using it as a public platform through which to seek greater understanding for myself. If others benefit from reading, I’m happy for them, but that’s just icing on the cake. However, after a few posts brought a large number of comments (well, for me, “large” is more than a half dozen), I found myself more aware of an audience … and wanting more of an audience.

After reading Don Miguel Ruiz’ Four Agreements (and blogging about two of them), I understand how a desire to “hook” the attention of others is a natural – probably evolutionary – part of human development. But I continue to struggle with what almost seems like an addiction to attention … and find myself vacillating back and forth between whether / how much I care about whether anyone reads – or comments on (or tweets about) – anything I write … and how much I should or want to care. My most recent blog post is unintentionally offering me an opportunity to reflect on these issues, as it probably has – and I expect will continue to have – the lowest ratio of number of comments or tweets to words in the post of anything I’ve written … actually, maybe it’s not completely unintentional, given the topic I wrote about (questioning motivations behind tweeting and retweeting).

In any case, my motivation for going into all of this here is your assertion above that “I find out right away if a post “works” or not based on the traffic, comments and retweets onTwitter.” So it sounds to me like you have both intrinsic motivations and yet an awareness of – and an evaluation metric for – the extrinsic properties. I’m wondering if you grapple with the intrinsic / extrinsic motivation issue, and are willing to share how your understanding of these potentially conflicting motivations is evolving through your practice of blogging.