Today marks the tenth anniversary of when I first established an account on WordPress and began blogging.

It’s been 10 years of blogging already. Gosh.

Here are some intriguing statistics ever since I started blogging on this platform in 2013:

• 3754 blog articles posted [an average of 1 blog post per day]
• 260,097 visitors to the blog;
• 353,726 blog page views.
• It is interesting that some of the articles I didn’t give any thought to ended up being the most popular.[Sawubona: More than just a Zulu greeting; Nana korobi, ya oki, and The Story of the Naked Truth and the Best-Dressed Lie]

It began as a diatribe blog post in response to the awful events that occurred in Marikana 10 years ago. And ever since that day, ideas, feelings, intense emotions, frustrations, and thoughts have been pouring through me onto the blog.

I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons, and I still learn new things every day as a result of writing.

Putting thoughts down in writing has helped me organise them, improve my critical thinking, increase my vocabulary, and clarify my ideas.

Since my mind often works in overdrive, I often get up early to write, and I often end up writing two or three blog posts in advance.

One thing I have observed is that the more I write, the more ideas I have.

I’m not inspired to write, I write to inspire myself. When I write first thing in the morning, it gives me the inspiration I need to embrace the day.

It’s easy to come to the conclusion that someone’s generous or inspired and so they do the work. But it’s more likely that doing the work makes you generous or inspired.

First, we commit to showing up every day and doing our best work. Then, energy, inspiration, and ideas follow.

Writing is a crucial life skill.

When you are feeling down and you write, you release the heavy emotions to words and you remain lighter afterwards.

When you are feeling excited and you write, you meditate and marinate on your feelings.

I would want to thank the people who have privately shared their thoughts with me in response to the “graffiti” on my blog wall :), I initially started writing just for myself but later realised that others could find it useful.

This blog is the result of my interactions with the incredible individuals in my immediate environment, books I have read, entrepreneurs I have met, etc.

People who have impacted the majority of the concepts posted in this blog should be given 90% of the credit for this blog’s success. They know themselves. 🙂

I started writing here because I thought I’d learn how to write better and think better. And, while I hope I’ve gotten better at that, I am certain that this process has taught me how to live. And, I couldn’t be more grateful.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

These past ten years have been nothing short of extraordinary, I can’t wait to continue blogging for the next decade.

Sawubona, you matter.