New Year, New Me and a New Project
Never being one to set to New Year’s Goals – most fail anyway. I always strive to do something new – whether it is learning or an experience. This year I am going to tackle learning something new every week and document it. Task one to decide how I can document my learning.
There are many ways to document, whether journaling, blogging or creating a book. All have their strengths and weaknesses.
Journaling is great because you can do it can write it down and put down what you want. It also never has to be perfect because it probably won’t be shared with others. It is a great way to put thoughts on paper for later reference if needed. However, there is no accountability and if a day or week is missed then no big deal. This is trap I fall into when trying to journal – I miss something and since there isn’t a negative, I would regularly follow back into my normal routine missing the journaling.
Blogging is a way to put things down in a slightly more formal way. Everything will be out there for the world to see, so making sure there aren’t as many mistakes is more important. With blogging consistency is the key. This is where blogging will allow me to be consistent with goals the blogger gets to choose, what is the right number of posts. All of this is up to the individual and really depends on what their goals are.
Publishing a book is the final way I explored in documenting my learnings. Book publishing requires the documentation to be pretty perfect, however, there is an open end on the timeline. Unless self-publication is the final goal, the book may not be accepted by a publisher. For me, I would be excited for a bit, then just as with journaling I would stop.
For me I decided to learn to blog as the first of my learnings. What goes into blogging – a lot more than I originally thought.
For me my goal is to spend time everyday learning something and documenting it. I will use this to update weekly sharing while exploring. Here is what I have learned so far about creating a blog.
Although any search on how to start a blog makes it sound easy, it may not be as easy as I originally thought. There was a lot of work that went into creating the website, something I had a little experience with, but I had always started with someone’s design first. This took a few hours to get right, and the site was ready before I completely finished this first post, therefore I apologize to those who found the website before I was truly ready.
One of my biggest struggles is perfection. I want everything to be perfect, even though in reality I understand this is unreachable, so I am learning to accept things and go with the flow more – this is very difficult for me. I know going forward this will get easier, but please be patient with me while I am learning something new.
I will need to learn with the negativity, while I ask for respect and please provide me tips – I really want to learn more about writing and being creative – I am analytical thinker and this is really outside of my comfort zone. I will do my best to not let the negatively get to me. Fear is my biggest obstacle when starting something new – fear of failure, fear of being good enough, and fear of coming off as an idiot stop me from being who I am. Therefore here’s goodbye to the fear and taking that first step.
Finally my words of advice, if you are going to try to create a blog, be true to yourself. Do what makes you happy and give a try. I was able to get going and created this and if I can do this anyone can. The worst-case scenario you fail but you learned something new. If we failed and gave up, where would we be, take the failure as the learning experience it is and try again. Without all my failures, I would not be where I am today.