Maintaining a website does a few important things for my life right now:

  • It’s a way for me to write down my down my thoughts and keep a log of what I’m doing and thinking about.
  • Accountability. Writing down snapshots of my life helps me track how I’m spending my time, which is especially important in grad school, where time is fluid and life is very open-ended. Given my goal of starting a company in cleantech, it’s important to track my progress (or lack of progress) and see if I’m actually working towards this goal.
  • Writing helps with clear thinking
  • Output over input. Software engineers write code, data scientists write bad code (ha, joking, but I used to be a data scientist so I feel like I can say this), but for an aspiring founder who’s in grad school, what’s my unit of output on a day to day level? The closest I can get is my skills, thoughts, and ideas. Writing is the best proxy for these.

I’m hoping to make this a regular habit and a place to brain dump with low friction. Along the way, it’ll be important to make sure I can avoid writing to sound smart. If I’m sitting here with writer’s block, then I’m not doing it right!