Lessons I Learned

It’s been a while since I’ve really “blogged”. I’ve written “articles” or worked on “papers” – but increasingly over the years since I started this blog, I’ve gotten bogged down in the trap of making the “perfect” the enemy of the “good”.

When I was living in Cambodia and working at PEPY we had a monthly newsletter, and I’d often write articles in there about the lessons I was learning. Increasingly, our newsletters got more “professional” and the lessons I was learning more tangential from the target of our work – in other words, it stopped seeming appropriate to have an article from me questioning some aspect of development work next to an article about our development projects, so I needed to find another place to write.

When I started this blog, I’d have an idea for something I wanted to capture or think about through writing, and I’d sit down, write, and click submit. Much to my spell-checking mother’s chagrin, I’d rarely even re-read them before posting my thoughts (though to be honest, I can’t complain, as it’s lovely that my lovely mother was even reading the darn thing… let alone sending back grammar edits!!)

When more people outside of my immediate family started reading the blog, I started to at least spell-check a bit (sometimes!), and slowly I’d start running articles by people. My husband would say something like “It’s good, but the middle section could use more work and I don’t understand your point here…” and I’d agree, it did need more work… but I didn’t have the time or motivation right then to make it work, so I’d shelf the piece, my interest in it would fade, and I’d move on to learning the next lesson with a 98% done, not-so-great-but-not-horrible blog post sitting in the “To write” folder on my computer. They are named things like:

• International developreneurship (Coming soon to an emerging market near you! No need for an explanation here)
• The Tapas Generation (about this generation that wants to try lots of things in our lives and careers and might never get to the “main course”)
• Executioner wanted (about the bajillion ideas that I and others have that are waiting around for someone to execute)
• Why does your child want to be a ‘social entrepreneur’
• Etc.

There are the beginnings of posts about the meeting timer app my friends and I made, a half-completed website where people can “free their ideas”, an intro to the gratitude journal we published, and so many other nearly done by just not quite there projects.

I just checked the folder, and it now has more than 20 blog posts in it, all waiting in blog post purgatory, hoping for an online home some day. And they might get it! Some friends and I have a “monthly resolution club” and this month my resolution is to post four blog posts – to get over myself, to not worry about making anything perfect, to get back to the fun and flow of writing and sending and not really caring what people think about it, and getting some of my train-of-thought pieces out into the world…. So here I go.

It’s 17 days into the month so I better get cracking:
Monthly resolution ¼ complete.
Freeing myself of the chains of blogging-editing-perfectionism: In process.
Posting without obsessive editing: DONE!