Slightly greater than 0%

Note: While I am not a statistician, this article was heavily influenced by Thomas Becker who is. It has been awhile since I've updated my website regularly. In retrospect, I regret this. 15 years after logging onto the internet, I still believe in the democratization of information that it once promised. Before it was almost impossible to distribute content with any scale, and the media was firmly controlled by the few. If you think the media controls opinion now, remember what it was like before the net.

These days to gain any recognition or influence as a content producer (musician, writer, film maker, etc.), you first have to find it on the net.

The reason I regret not writing more is I, personally, have started to take the internet for granted. I'm not a statistician by any means, but when you work with numbers day in and day out they start to effect how you view the world. Life involves a high level of chance, and you can only control some of the variables. If you want to achieve your goals you should do everything possible to increase your chances of success, because often the chance for success is already very low.

I'm a software engineer. I'm not a writer. I don't ever to expect to be a writer. But I am fortunate to have a forum to speak my opinion, which might influence the larger consciousness. My chances of having a significant influence are very minimal, and I wouldn't expect more than that. There aren't many people who care that a Japanese company they've never heard of is manufacturing in the US for reexport to Japan. I suspect many would find it inane in the same way I find football statistics inane. But maybe an economics grad student will Google 'U.S. manufacturing' read my post on the topic, and find that this is an odd phenomenon, which leads to more research, which then leads to an article in the Economist. The chances of that happening are very low, but if I hadn't written it, the chance of having any influence would be exactly 0%. I know this with certainty, and that's why I regret not writing more. At the same time I don't want to go overboard and spend all of my time writing, because my return on that time would be very low.

I'm fair writer who makes many grammar mistakes and typos, and there are great writers with perfect grammar and a sharp wit. But if those writers never make their material publicly known, then the chances that I will be recognized for something I wrote will be greater even though I am a worse writer by any measure. So with these last couple key strokes I'm increasing my chances to slightly greater than 0%, which is far better than I could have done 15 years ago, and I'm grateful for that.