I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.
Tony Robbins
If Tony Robbins is right – this month I’ve laid some massive foundations for the future.
The January Blog Challenge was going well – for a while. And then it all went pear-shaped. I don’t know why, when or even how. It just happened.
We’re halfway through the month but I am nowhere near halfway through the number of blogs I should have posted. A quarter, maybe?
It all happened when I decided to be super-creative and write a blog about one of my favourite places – Murwillumbah. Oh don’t worry, you haven’t missed it – it didn’t actually get to the Published stage. It’s still sitting in my Drafts folder.
I slaved over that blog day and night. It had fantastic photos, facts and most of my SEO ducks even lined up. But the blog was a failure.
I missed the deadline!
And the next one!
By the time I’d missed two deadlines, panic crept up from somewhere in my writing-feet and threatened to strangle me at any minute.
But that blog remained well-and-truly stuck. It was flat, contrived and downright boring. Even I found it hard to read – and I wrote it!
The frustration that Robbins spoke about weighed heavily on me – kind of like dancing in cement shoes.
And still my unfinished Murwillumbah blog just stared blankly back at me. Stark, unimaginative, and totally unresponsive. There wasn’t a spark of life in it.
Oddly enough, the motive behind writing about Murwillumbah should have provided me with immunity against failure.
Write about something you’re passionate about – they say….
Murwillumbah is where I live. I am passionate about it.
That blog failure stopped me in my tracks…
The urge to abandon it grew in intensity. But the hours of work I’d put into it stopped me from hitting the Delete key.
I was caught in a Limbo between flushing two days work down the drain and the thought of starting again. Should I try once more to resurrect the dead blog, or simply count my blessings and move onto a new one?
Both ideas won – sort of. For two days I found a million things to do that had nothing to do with writing.
But the long-fingers of the Blog Challenge found their way into my conscience. Guilt and the fear of losing the war and not just the battle made me fire up the iPad and start again. But the pain of my abandoned post about Murwillumbah lingered.
One night, more deadlines, and three-hundred words later, another draft sits idly in the Draft Folder. In all my cleverness I decided to write a blog about how I had found my niche by not finding my niche. But that didn’t work any better than not finding my niche in the first place.
But at least now I know what the problem is. Yes, I was passionate about the topic, but my style of writing changed. I had moved away from the conversational tone I usually use and was trying to write something (seriously) factual.
It just didn’t work
So here I am, writing a brand new blog about nothing in particular, in my usual casual manner.
Have I learned from failure?
You bet I have!
And the lessons learned will form the basis of another blog, in another time.