Why “Write About What You Struggled With” Works

One of the harder parts of blogging is figuring out what you know that might actually help someone else. A practical approach: write about the technical problems you’ve personally hit and eventually solved. If something was hard for you, there’s a decent chance others are running into the same wall — and the specific things that helped you get past it are likely useful to them.

This isn’t the only way to blog, but it’s a reliable one. It also gives you a natural focus. “What I learned about Go” is too broad to be useful, but “how I finally debugged deadlocks in Go” is specific enough that other people dealing with the same issue will find it valuable.

It’s About the Lesson, Not the Pain

The goal is never to write a post that just says “I found this hard.” Nobody gets much out of that. Instead, once you’ve figured out a piece of the puzzle, you write about that concrete understanding. For example, a post about what references actually are in Rust came directly from struggling to wrap your head around them — not from wanting to complain about Rust’s difficulty.

The struggle acts as a signal. It tells you what’s genuinely non-obvious about a topic. If you never had trouble with something, you might not know which parts confuse people — or even that a confusing part exists.

Sometimes the Lesson Takes Years to Surface

In some cases, you can’t write about a problem until long after you’ve stopped having it. You might spend years being frustrated by something without being able to articulate what’s wrong. Once you finally work it out, the insight can be a good basis for a post — even if the original struggle is far in the past.

It’s worth noting that the lesson itself can keep evolving. You might find a new, clearer way to explain something years after you first solved it, often after a conversation that reframes the problem.

Write It Down Before You Forget What Was Hard

There’s a trap here: if you wait too long, you lose track of what specifically tripped you up. You might remember that a tool was confusing in 2011, but by now you have no idea why it was confusing. You can make broad claims about what the key concept is, but you can’t be sure that’s what would have helped you back then.

That loss of context makes it much harder to write a post that addresses the real point of friction for beginners.

Advanced Move: Write About Someone Else’s Struggle

If you don’t remember what was hard for you, you can find out what’s hard for someone else. The most direct way is to teach the topic. When you try to explain something you think you know well, you often discover that you don’t actually understand where newcomers get stuck.

A good example: writing an intro to SQL. The author was comfortable with SQL from heavy usage, but conversations with a beginner revealed that the order in which a query executes was a major blocker. That insight created a popular post and also clarified the author’s own mental model — in this case, explaining query order explicitly made window functions click better too.

It’s Okay If You Haven’t Figured It Out Yet

There will always be topics where you’ve struggled but still don’t have a clear lesson you can share. You might have moved on to other work and never gotten closure on those problems. That’s normal. Periodically revisiting old struggles to see if you can now articulate a takeaway is a good habit, but most of the time the answer will be no — and that’s fine.

Writing About Vulnerability Requires Some Tact

Publicly admitting you struggled with something can feel risky. A few strategies help keep it manageable:

  • Stick to technical problems. Admitting you didn’t understand how Linux groups work is low-stakes; nobody is born knowing that.
  • Stay vague about interpersonal or career issues. If a post stems from stress around promotions, the lesson (“track your accomplishments”) is more universal than the specifics of your situation.
  • Give yourself processing time. The bigger the struggle, the longer it takes to figure out what you learned from it in a way that’s shareable.
  • Don’t write about everything. Some things stay private, and that’s a valid choice.

You Can Practice Identifying Your Own Lessons

Getting from “I had a problem” to “I don’t have that problem anymore” is only two-thirds of the job. The hard part is the third step: articulating exactly what changed. It’s easy to learn things intuitively without ever naming them. But if you can’t say what you learned, you can’t deliberately apply it, and you certainly can’t teach it.

You can improve at this. Reflecting on a skill you’ve gotten better at — say, testing — and forcing yourself to write down the concrete principles you now follow is a useful exercise, even if you never publish it.

Conversations Help You Figure Out What You Know

It’s hard to notice your own acquired knowledge in isolation. Talking through a topic with a friend or coworker makes it much easier to see what you actually understand. They can also react to your explanations, tell you whether they resonate, and bring a different perspective that helps you refine your thinking.

Why Bother Writing It Down in Public?

Even if you never publish, keeping track of what you learned from hard problems helps you do better work. Writing it in public adds some extra benefits:

  • It helps other people facing the same confusing situation.
  • It forces you to verify your conclusions. The prospect of publishing makes you ask whether your lessons actually hold up.
  • It pushes you to research further. You often end up learning more while writing.
  • Reader reactions can teach you something new.
  • You create a searchable record of your own past insights.