The Importance of Writing and Storytelling

I do not write on API Evangelist as much as I used to. I still write a lot, but posts tends to stay in my notebook or get published to the Postman blog. I miss writing every day. Writing is important for me. Not just to convey concepts to other people who read my writing, but to help me organize my thoughts. Writing makes me more coherent. Writing helps me practice what I want to say. Writing helps me find the signal for the noise, which in a digital world is everything. Writing is how I find my way out of the dark and into the light with any idea. Writing is how I make sense of what is going on around me in this seemingly endless pace of technological velocity we accept as part of our online world. Without writing it is easy for me stop being curious. Stop being thoughtful. Without writing I get stuck in a sort of Groundhog Day of digital blah blah blah, and organizing my thoughts into short memos, messages, and blog posts for others to read helps me reclaim what matters to me each day, but then also allows me to move forward into the future with more knowledge, wisdom, and experience that I can tap into whenever I need.

Each blog post here on API Evangelist represents something I have plucked out of the chaos of the day and added to my base of experiences and knowledge. I am not a list maker or task manager. I tend to let myself be dictated by my calendar, then by my inbox, and then probably Jira. Which I guess are all task managers, but they are rarely defined by me. Writing is how I reclaim my day. Writing is how I take everything that is thrown at me and find the things that matter. In this digital age we live in this is important. Writing is how we find the signal for the noise, and storytelling is how we combat noise with (hopefully) meaningful stories that will resonate with other human beings. If I want to assert control over my day and influence those around me, I need to be writing and polishing the stories I tell. Otherwise I may be able to cut through the noise and chaos occasionally, but mostly I’ll be disorganized and drowning in information, unable to shout above the noise of each day. Everything we do in our personal and professional lives depends on telling and hearing stories, and despite there being a plethora of digital channels to choose from when it comes to telling and listening to stories, being able to organize and ground your words in coherent writing will provide the basis for any channel you choose to operate on.

I am doing a lot of reading and writing this weekend. I am writing across all of my personal channels, which API Evangelist kind of exists across both my personal and professional world. As I was taking a moment to nourish myself on the weekend with some storytelling, I wanted tomato sure and acknowledge the importance of writing and storytelling here on the API Evangelist blog. Ideally, blogging here on the blog is like walking—a daily ritual. The more I write, the more I am able to write. The more I write, the more I am able to take complex ideas and distill them down into something that someone else will understand. The more I write here on the API Evangelist blog, the more I have a URL to share with someone when it comes to a specific thought I have in my head. API Evangelist represents the API side of my brain, where I store everything I have learned over the last twelve years. API Evangelist is a tangible reminder of how important writing and storytelling is for me. I have a career because of this blog. I am able to support my family because of this blog. I am able to make sense of the digital world because of the writing and storytelling I have done here on API Evangelist. I need to make more time to write here.

While I hope someone else reads this and adds a new post to their own very out of date blog, API Evangelist has been about me and my learning. A lack of posts here means that I am not adequately spending time on each idea and concept I encounter each day. I don’t expect a blog post to exist for everything that happens throughout each day, but I would like to see the most important concepts I wrestle with reflected here. Without representation I feel like I can keep spinning out on some of the same concepts that are key to the world of APIs moving forward. This post is just a reminder to myself that I need to keep the home page of API Evangelist open, and keep dumping my thoughts here. As I have done since 2010. I am better off for it. And I have heard from a few other people that they are also better off when I write. I bet if you go back through the posts here on the blog you’ll find one of these types of posts every year or two, reminding myself just how important writing and storytelling is, fighting off the overgrowth of noise that consumes me each day online.