All Things Considered – Now It’s Time to Focus

The new year is here and I’ve been doing some quiet reflection on the past year and things I’d like to change, both in my habits and my person. Recently, I’ve been struggling with the challenge of how I want to maintain this blog and how I would like to represent myself (it’s not the first time). In the name of impact, I’ve put myself and my thoughts out there in the blogosphere, trying to contribute to the marketplace of ideas and build my own reputation so that I can provide more voice to the issues I consider important. But I find this particular strategy to be particular taxing; for those who know me really well, I’m somewhat of a private person – the quiet, reserved type who likes to do research in the comforts of my apartment; the kind of person who likes to be the quiet one at the dinner table as opposed to the one leading the conversation; the type of individual who doesn’t believe one’s resume or connections should matter in determining whether or not one’s voice should be listened to.

Initially, this blog was meant to be more of a personal blog, though in reality I knew this blog would be an unusual hybrid of personal-private thoughts. And in hindsight, what I really wanted to do was create a safe public space for me to publish my thoughts, intended for the people that I knew would be interested in having conversations with me on my blog, but also available to anyone interested in seeing what those conversations look like. But as I started getting more attention from members of the public, the blog started to slowly evolve, where my thoughts and my posts were being prepared for public consumption, instead of being prepared for private consumption where the public could be a free rider.

The past few weeks have been particularly intense – my car got broken into (pictures and thoughts to come), I moved to the Lower Pac Heights with some friends, and my job at Blueprint is starting to occupy more of my brain space and time. I’ve added a couple of more blogs to my blogroll since the last update (Mergers & Inquisitions, The Big Picture, Economist’s View), but it’s been a challenge for me to keep up with my blogroll as regularly as I used to and stay focused and motivated at work.

With an existential blogging crisis on the one hand and feelings of being overwhelmed in the other, I’ve decided that my new year’s resolution will be to make a greater commitment to focus on impact, both in my life and in my blogging. As much as I enjoy reading other people’s blogs and connecting with them online, there are too many posts that I have strong views on, making it impossible for me to comment on every post that I feel strongly about or to blog about every discussion that could be expanded into a multi-paragraph post. And since I’m at a critical crossroad in my life, trying to decide what I want to do with my life (should I be an entrepreneur? a philanthropy pundit? a securities lawyer? a professor?) and how I should get there (should I be switching careers? learning valuation models? writing papers?) it’s time to do some Theory of Change and SROI analysis on my own life.