In the podcast, Maria Popova on Being Interesting, Creating More Time in a Day and How to Start a Successful Blog, Maria Popova answers questions on how to be successful in writing a blog and sometimes in life. She gives her full opinion and is very helpful. Maria Popova answers questions on becoming who you want to be, how to choose what to read, what book she has read the most, what should be a priority, and gives advice to beginners on writing a blog. A lot of what she said in her podcast was powerful to me. Maria Popova claims, “But if the travel and preparation and logistics eat up 20 hours of your time so that your writing suffers, so that you will ultimately not be proud of the result, then maybe it’s not worth it.” Basically, if you do something and it takes time out of your day and you aren’t even happy with the result, don’t do it. Do something you are proud of. This quote was very meaningful to me because sometimes I do things to get recognition or extra credit which is good, but sometimes, I’m not proud of the result or I feel like I didn’t even need to do it in the first place which means it took time out of my day for basically nothing. However, this wasn’t the most powerful quote to me.
The most meaningful thing Maria Popova stated in her podcast was “Write to please yourself.” I found this powerful because when I have to write something for class, I put in all of my effort which is a good thing. However, I’m not doing what Maria Popova said. I don’t write to please myself, I write to please my teacher. She even mentioned this in her podcast. She noted that usually younger people write to please teachers or publishers. This I what I do when I have to write an essay. I give it my all but I don’t write it to please me, I write what I think would please the teacher. This isn’t a bad thing because you will mostly get a good grade out of it and learn more from it which is what I strive for but, it could be a bad thing when writing a blog which is basically what she is saying. Since what I’m writing is going on a blog, I’m going to listen to Maria Popova and make sure it pleases me most of all and also hope that it pleases my teacher. Whenever I write essays, I will still want to please the teacher with what I’m writing, but I will try to remember “Write to please yourself” while I’m writing it.