How This Blog Came To Be

Mural inside the Hilton Netherland Hotel in Cincinnati,
where the idea for this blog was conceived.



For years, I’d tossed around the idea of starting a blog. Don’t most writers? The idea was intriguing, but what would I write about? Maybe restaurant reviews, since I’d done that for the newspaper. Or book reviews, because I’d done that, too. I thought maybe I could just post a bunch of essays, since I like to write those and then the topic of my blog wouldn’t be so confining. But at the back of mind was that little niggle of doubt: What set my words apart from the other restaurant reviewers, book reviewers, essayists, and bloggers already out there? Who would read my blog anyway?

Stifled by fear and doubt, I did nothing.

Then, just after my birthday at the end of August, I was fortunate enough to attend a week-long conference that included a number of inspirational speakers. One of those was Jonathan Harris, an entrepreneur/artist who specializes in combining computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling. His presentation was absolutely fascinating. His latest project (at the time) was something he’d just started doing on his birthday, which was the day before mine. He’d decided to post a picture a day on his website, beginning with his 30^th birthday. Sometimes he’d write about the pictures; often he just wrote a caption. I subscribed to his project of beautiful pictures and thought: that’s what I could do, too.

A few days later in the conference, Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen spoke.  His words cemented my decision to start a blog. He conveyed the startling realization that, “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”

He encouraged people to be creative and express their ideas publicly and often. He encouraged people to let go of the idea that other people would steal their ideas, and that you had to hold them secret and keep them close to your heart to make them valuable. Not so. He said that by sharing ideas freely, more ideas were generated and that collaboration could turn smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Or at least, that’s what I heard him say.

It went along with the idea to forget about failure; to quit worrying about whether an idea was polished and perfect. I took that to heart and waited for the conference to end. I was going to do it. I was going to start a blog.

I knew exactly what I wanted to write my first blog post about. I wanted to write about two of the other speakers I’d heard on the first day of the conference.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the picture I wanted to put with it, so I didn’t post it until weeks later. (That post is here: http://juliewetz-dailysnapshot.blogspot.com/2010/10/posture-of-exploration.html )

That was okay. I had plenty of other pictures and posts to write. But first I had to figure out how to mechanically create a blog, and then I had to start looking through my pictures. Because unlike Jonathan Harris, I was not going to confine myself to posting a current picture a day. I didn’t want to take the same journalistic approach, but rather, wanted to find pictures that inspired me to write something about them.

And so this blog was born. In November, I suddenly got my daily post from Jonathan Harris. He thanked his subscribers for their interest, but decided to discontinue his project. I was stunned and wondered what that prophesied for me, since my blog had been inspired by his. Then I shrugged. It didn’t mean anything except that Jonathan was onto a new project.  I am still thoroughly enjoying mine.