Getting out and doing...
Category: Self-Improvement
Published: 12/05/2008 05:50 a.m.
I just got done reading this huge post on Steve Pavlina's blog. It took me a good half hour, but it was worth the time. He talks about calibration and the work it takes to develop skills in any area. Through all of the analysis, the major point is pretty well summarized at the bottom. "Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?" Seems like a pretty easy answer to me, but as most things are, this is easier typed than done.
I have a couple of success stories about going from a newbie to a semi-pro. The first is with video games. Last year, when I lived with Stephen, we would play a lot of video games online. Mostly Halo 3 and CoD4. These are first-person shooters that you can play online, and we would take turns playing. He would play for a couple of rounds, then I would. And consistently, Stephen would shoot better and score higher than I ever would. My brother Trent could also best me at these types of games, and Guitar Hero as well. At first I looked at this as a natural talent type of thing. My friends had more natural talent for moving a controller stick than I did, and better timing, so they were better "Video Game Athletes" than I was. That's fine. I could live with that. But that wasn't true at all. They had more experience, and had learned more. And eventually, I would too.
After I moved up to NYC, I got my own XBOX and I would play CoD4 for a few hours every week. And to my surprise, I got better. I became more accurate, I learned the weapons better, and I found better ways around the maps. I became more instinctual, and found myself regularly in the Top 3 spots at the end of a game. What took a while to realize was that playing video games was not about natural talent. It was just like anything else that some people excel at and others don't. It was about experience and practice. Both things that I acquired. Now that CoD5 is out, I am having to re-learn the maps and the weapons, and it is another slow but necessary task in the effort to be a top player.
In the real world these same theories apply. It can be very discouraging to fail over and over and over. In many cases it is hard to find the motivation to keep going. It is easy to keep with a video game, because even if you are losing, the game itself is fun to play. But in tasks like starting a business, the act of doing is much more dependent on the outcome. People start businesses to make money. And usually at the beginning, especially if this is their first business, they don't make much money. It is hard. For lots of people that begin blogging, it is hard to continue.
I have had several blogs over the years. I found that it was more fun to design and start a new blog than it was to write interesting and unique posts. But after a few years and over a hundred posts, I am finding it much easier. When I started, blogging was a task. I would try to use online tools and technology to make creating a post as painless and fast as possible. That is probably why many of my early posts look more like tweets then blog posts. Or I would resort to being disciplined about posting, and try to block off a certain 20 minutes a day and dedicate that to posting. These strategies worked for a bit, but eventually failed.
While I would not kid myself in saying that I am a successful blogger, I am definitely finding my voice, and calibrating my skills. Instead of trying to imitate other highly sucessful blogs, I am talking about what I want. And usually, that is all of the ideas that float around in my head all day. I really wish I could go back 5 years and start blogging the way I do now. I could have hundreds of interesting posts instead of tens. But that is the cost of doing something new. It takes time.
But now, I am starting to feel the payoff. While my readership is essentially the same as it was 2 years ago, the quality is going up. This is much more important. If I would have been exposed to a large audience years ago, I would have lost most of them. Now, if something like that were to happen, I have a much better chance of keeping their attention. In Steve's post, he talks about writing timeless posts, and not five-minute distraction posts on today's new thing. To me, twitter is perfect for that. A quick "What's going on today" type of thing. What I write here is more about ideas and styles and methods that aren't about the here and now. And the way I eventually came to writing these types of posts did not come from reading tips or how-tos. It came from doing.
What used to be a chore is now a passion. Before, I would force myself to sit down and write and talk about something. Now, I have to keep a log of ideas for posts. I am actually using the draft feature. I get an idea and the first thing I want to do is talk about it. And the best place I have found to talk is write here. But my method and reasons should not be yours.
I am not trying to influence people to write like I do or talk about what I talk about. I want people to find their own way, their own voice. Of the many blogs I read, very few have the same voice or style. Tavi talks about fashion through the eyes of a 12-year-old. Meg talks about her family and her stresses. Seth uses short burst to communicate his ideas on marketing. And Jason finds cool stuff on the web. All are different, and all have a unique voice. Some are in the early stages of calibrating, and others are well-known. But even the well-known ones were beginners at some point.
I wish I had better examples than blogging and video games to show how this works, but I really don't yet. My hope is to learn more about the process of developing new skills, and not being afraid of the early stages. It took getting shot in games over and over for me to be able to be the shooter. It took forcing myself to write crap before I was able to develop ideas all day long. One of my most seen posts, the one about Whataburger, was not just successful because it was a rant. It was popular because I had something I wanted to talk about. I needed to tell people my story, my injustice. That's what made it popular. It was a good story and was better able to find an audience than most of the other things I wrote because it wasn't forced. At the time I just attributed it's success to the fact that it was a rant, and I didn't want to be a ranter. But now I am learning that the take-away from that post is that when a story is worth listening to, people will listen to it. And share it with others.
So, get out and do. Instead of not being afraid to fail, go ahead and expect failure. Fail so that you will have something to look at and learn from. In engineering, we would do stress tests all of the time on materials. If they hadn't broken or failed, we wouldn't have learned much. The failures gave us insight. Let your failures do the same. I am going to try to get back into videos again and am expecting some failure. Maybe my Ultimatebuds review will be a video. (UPDATE: Here is my video review.)
(on a side note, are these getting too long? I am having trouble trimming them. I am writing like I would talk, and then doing a bit or organizing and transitioning, but that's about it. Any feedback from everyone is appreciated/needed for these to get better.)