Table of Contents
Introduction
Well, it finally happened!
“What finally happened?”
To that I respond with this blog. I finally managed to garner the effort to put together a simple website where I can put my thoughts together and share with the world.
Of course, I never take the easy route. I opted in to build my own website instead of using a website similar to Hashnode or Substack.
This blog would’ve been up much earlier if I chose to go with a service. However, I usually find myself at odds with subscription services, the companies operating these services and the direction the internet is currently heading in.
The Journey
I find myself at odds with convenience a lot. I find convenience abstracts the process of learning and getting familiar with technology and difficult subjects. This is nothing new, I have been like this for as long as I can remember.
Before learning to deal with it, I always leaned into it but would ultimately find it getting in the way of the end goal rather than helping me get there.
I decided that this time it would be different.
Instead of leaning into the idea of convenience, I would find the simplest way to learn how to build a blog, using technology that gave me control over the environment and would still help me learn.
I use the word control intentionally here, in a world full of chaos, I find myself unable to control a lot of my environment and leaning into whatever may happen. It wasn’t until I started writing this blog post that I found that the best word to use, so I thought I should touch on it.
I love sharing knowledge. Over the past 20 years, I’ve consumed a lot on the internet. I’ve played games, watched videos, long and short form, and read blog posts, but I never added to the internet. Not intentionally at least.
I wanted to create. I consume too much. I must admit, consuming a lot helped me create. I sat with ideas for a long time before actioning on them. It feels like I am late, but it’s better than never.
I remember one day looking at the past at the age of 29 and beating myself up for never learning how to play the drums. Then, I can’t really recall why, I shifted my gaze from 29 years in the past to 30 years in the future and I asked myself “At the age of 59, do I want to say I am a person with 0 years of drumming experience or 30 years of drumming experience”?
That’s when I realized I had my whole life ahead of me to develop the skills I want and to live the way I want. I can’t reclaim the days that have past but I sure as hell can make the most of the days to come.
I can’t tell if that was me finally putting my fully developed frontal lobe to use or if it was happenstance, but that moment changed something in me.
I also came to the realization, I wasn’t really guaranteed 30 years into the future. But even if I had 10, I wanted to live those 10 years the way I wanted to, not the way I had to. Life isn’t guaranteed so I had to seize the opportunities I have and I had to learn how to do it.
It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect. It Just Has To be.
I was never the type of person to film myself in front of a camera and just speak into it. I’m camera shy. I tried my hand at Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube but found it too tedious. Recently, I started reading and writing with more intention.
Writing clicked with me a bit more. It was difficult at first. I can’t deny that. It was a skill I had to develop. Like any skill, it’s always frustrating and difficult at first, but after a while things got easier.
I think I first learned this skillset in 2016, when I first started working out. It sucked. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was sore all the time. Many years later though, I find myself thankful that I learned how to stick through it because that opened up many doors for me. From there I learned to code, I started a business, I learned to play the drums and the oud and I started a blog!
Writing is also asynchronous, it feels like have a conversation with someone on at your own pace. To me, writing is the act of sharing your thoughts on a medium, and one day in the future, someone picks up your work and is on the receiving end of it all.
Writing is also less pressure than making a video, at least for me. I gravitate towards it more. It might be because of my introverted nature that I hate appearing in front of a camera and having phone calls. Though developing those skills have been necessary in my career development. When I am alone, I’d wrather write.
I get better at the skills I want to develop every time I get back to them. There is no specific structure that I follow, but I have notes written in paper journals on what I did that day. I realized that I didn’t need it to be perfect. I was carving out my own path and learning from different people on the internet.
Consuming other people’s content, they were telling me my content didn’t have to be perfect. That perfection was the enemy of progress. To be honest, that meant nothing to me. I don’t know if it will mean anything to you. Because while I understood the statement, I didn’t truly get it until I stopped to assess my own progress.
In the name of perfection, I did not produce a single thing. I am writing this blog post with no direction and two hands on a keyboard. The post was not planned. I just wanted to do it, so I’m getting it done. By the time I get to my next blog post, I will have developed more of my skills to write a better one. Whatever that may look like. Be it more structured, or with better grammar and spelling. Maybe I’ll just get to the point quicker.
It’s a process, and from my experience, processes are everchanging.
So, I decided to build this blog with a template from Astro and a free template by Charca to help jumpstart the process of writing. I am a Software Developer by trade so hosting it was something I already had set up on a website I previously built and I just pointed it to this blog site.
I decided to launch this website with elements still present from the template, and key components missing. But I needed to get this out there. Getting the blog out there was the first major hurdle. The rest can be knocked out one step at a time. After all, no one will visit my blog because it is perfect, they’ll visit it because of the content or they learned something from it. The next step is finding a way to have people continually come back and build connection.
I will give credit whenever credit is due, because we don’t typically learn or build alone. Everything we do, someone else had a hand in it. Whether or not we decide to admit to that is a different story.
Conclusion
Accepting help is not a bad thing. I used to be a purist and think I could do everything on my own, but boy was I wrong. This blog will evolve with time, as will I. I may have started from a free template, but I guarantee you that as time goes on, it will hardly look recognizable. Some elements will remain the same, but as I develop, so will the things I create.
I have no set schedule on what I will write, or when. I have plans to link my previous work to this website, build out an emailing list and adding more content to this website. I’ll continue to write about the journey so that one day someone may also benefit from it. I have many plans, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by it all, but I’ll take it one step at a time.
Until next time!
Final thought while editing: I am coming to learn that reading and editing your first draft is a much more difficult task than people give it credit for.
