---
title: "The Most Important Stories … Aren’t the Ones I’m Writing"
date: 2011-06-25
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2011/06/25/the-most-important-stories-arent-the-ones-im-writing/
---
# The Most Important Stories … Aren’t the Ones I’m Writing
To increase hits, I said we need to send these articles to all users via a newsletter. Email is the only way to reach a lot of people. People aren't subscribing to RSS anymore. On my own blog, I can't seem to go beyond 3,500 subscribers on my site. I feel I've hit the ceiling. Probably because RSS subscriptions just end up being a bunch of random noise after a while.

My colleague said, yeah*, and blogging is dead.*

This caught me a little by surprise, since he knows I'm a blogger. Why do you think so? I asked.

He quickly distinguished between professional blogs and personal blogs, and said he was referring to personal blogs. Very few personal bloggers can command large audiences, he said. Dooce is one of them. We couldn't think of many more.

I didn't think much of this conversation until later in the evening, talking with my kids. For some reason I started telling my six-year-old some stories about different experiences I've had in life. Then we started talking about the past, and how her older sister was eight months old when 9/11 happened (we were in New York). I told her the story of how I got my job in Egypt, after waiting two and a half months after the interview. I told her the story of drug dealers shooting into our house in Florida, and why we came to Utah. I told her the story of how I miraculously fixed the lawnmower last week, and how I unscrewed an impossible drain. She looked at me with both curiosity and seriousness. She hadn't heard many of these stories before.

And then it hit me. I haven't written the most important stories of my life. This blog, this professional blog, only tells one kind of story. It tells the story of my professional life, of my thoughts surrounding my career and all the issues involved in it.

As long as you have the same career, you share some commonality with me and may find the content relevant. But there's a certain sadness about this blog and all professional blogs, as they distract from the time we might spend telling stories that matter more in our lives.