It’s been so long that my last Blog Update was about The Champions League Twenty20 Cricket tournament. But not the one being played right now in India. The one from last year. In the blogosphere that type of silence is deadly.
For almost ten years I avoided blogging because I didn’t want to end up like the 99% of bloggers writing for no particular audience but themselves and while doing that for a couple of weeks then just stop and never update. So when I finally started my own blog I wanted it to have a specific focus. I decided to write the stories Behind the Numbers. My inspirations were blogs like The Big Picture, and The Economist’s Game Theory blog. That’s how I wanted my blog to be. Because I didn’t have a job at the time I had lots of time to write. In short I tried creating a job for myself by blogging.
There are lots of stories about bloggers who turned there blogs and passion in to daytime jobs. My favorite, all-time hero Bill Simmons did just this. After graduating college he worked for a newspaper for a couple of years covering high school football. Since that didn’t get him where he wanted, he quit his job, worked as a bartender and started blogging. His prose and style earned him many readers and he was “discovered” by the now defunct ESPN Page2. Today he holds a senior position within that company and is the godfather of sportsjournalism 2.0 in the US through the Grantland website.
I tried to do the same without the same conviction. I mean, I love writing, but after being one of many freelance journalists who suffered at the hands of the financial crisis I recreated myself in finance (if you can’t beat them, join them). Today I work for Wells Fargo, I’m a CFA Level II Candidate and I’m on my way to a great career in finance. But along the way of getting more efficient something was lost.
And it wasn’t until I read Lauren Foster’s CFA Blog this week that I was able to describe what I was losing. The blog Weekend Reads for Advisers: Investing, Poker, and Retirement talks about following your curiosity towards subjects that not necessarily are related to your job. In fact, she explains my challenge, better than anything I could’ve written:
Curiosity underpins success because it begets relentless questioning. Adam Bryant of the New York Times captured it well in the column “Distilling the Wisdom of C.E.O.’s.”
“Why ‘passionate curiosity’?” he asks. ”There are plenty of people who are passionate, but many of their passions are focused on just one area. There are a lot of curious people in the world, but they can also be wallflowers. But ‘passionate curiosity’ — a phrase used by Nell Minow, the co-founder of the Corporate Library — better captures the infectious sense of fascination that some people have with everything around them.”
And as Jason notes in his recent post, “Advice on How to Become a Research Analyst” curiosity is an important trait. After all, by reading across a wide array of topics and publications, we create, what he calls, “a mosaic of knowledge.”
So, without further ado, this is the resurrection of my blog. Behind the Numbers Ver 2.0 has less numbers, more stories, more hip-hop quotes, more stories about passion and play and of course, there'll still be lots of cricket, but most of all, a lot more hip-hop quotes. In fact, here’s one from LL Cool J.
“Don’t Call it a Comeback”
