It’s always been self-evident to me, but let me try to spell it out. A blog is the intersection of conversations and book-publishing. Why should have conversations, and why should we publish books?

It allows for the accelerated exchange of ideas. A blogpost has a potentially limitless audience throughout space-time. Something you write can touch and move people long after you’re dead. It can inspire and provoke and be referenced and riffed. And it’s essentially free to publish.

If you have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on Facebook, or on Hacker News, or on Quora, and you don’t translate the fruit of those discussions into a blog that is accessible by search, you’re missing out on hundreds of thousands of hits, potential connections, intelligent input, exchange. And those of us who blog benefit disproportionately from your inaction. (But I’d much rather live in a world where EVERYBODY blogged, because that would mean a richer cross-fertilization of ideas. My % slice of the pie might be smaller, but it would be a bigger slice becaus the pie would’ve expanded so much. And it would taste so much better, too.)

And the audience typically self-selects, so if you write about what you care about, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who care about the same things. Sometimes people will disagree with you, which is great because it forces you to clarify yourself, to make your thinking more precise. You’ll notice flaws and weaknesses in yourself that you didn’t realize before. It’s accelerated learning. You’ll grow and improve. The brain is a muscle, and a blog is a gymnasium for the mind. After a while you’ll start noticing that you’re sharper and quicker than people.

You’ll learn to think and write better. You’ll develop a public record of your thoughts and writing, and you can psychoanalyze yourself over time. I can look back right now at blogposts from 2010 to see what my thinking was like 4 years ago. I can study it for bad logic, flaws, etc. I can improve myself.

If you find yourself repeating yourself in different conversations, you can just write a blogpost about it and share the link with everybody. That saves time. I’m writing this blogpost after having a conversation with a friend who asked “Why should we blog?”. I’m answering this question in a blogpost, so now I can send it to everybody.

There’s very limited downside (you do something once, it lasts forever) and nearly unlimited upside- your writing will go to places you can’t go yourself. My blog got me invited to see the Prime Minister, it allowed me to respond to kids going through the same problems I did when I was younger, it got me employed by awesome employers.

I’m sure I repeated myself a little bit, and I may have left some of it out, but in essence the benefit is tremendous and accelerated mind expansion. Your mind gets to collide with itself, it gets to collide with other minds, it gets to have its signals amplified, shared, remixed, etc.

It’s like asking a musician, why record your performances? Why play other people’s songs? Why collaborate with other musicians? In all cases, the answer is- because music is beautiful, and the more you play it, the more you immerse yourself in it, the more you share, the more you listen, the better you get at it, and the more joy you bring to yourself and to others. And imagine if all of that was essentially free, and it was what you could be doing with little pockets of spare time (like when you’re on public transportation, for instance.)

Over time, it compounds into a hideous advantage. And it’s free, so I think it’s ridiculous when smart people don’t blog. You mean you tell people the same thing, in conversation, over and over again? When you could essentially publish stuff for free? C’mon guys, we’re living in the future. More blogs, please. More thinking, more thoughts, faster. Let’s go.