Capital F For Failure!

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!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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.

Sorry to rush off – but I’ve got a whole lot of blogging to do to catch up!
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4 responses to “Capital F For Failure!”

  1. Elisa Avatar

    Yesterday, I wrote about teaching my son how to drive. A longtime reader said to me… “didn’t you write a post like that about your daughter?” I said yeah – I’m all about writing 31 posts these days so I can say I did it. And it’s a different kid, different experience. Right? Totally!

    Hang in there. Like the Billy Joel song says, Murwillumbah waits for you… or is that Vienna?

    1. Maureen Avatar

      I love your logic, Elisa. 31 days – 31 posts. There might be some furious-writing over the next few days to get back on track, but I will get there. And as for Murwillumbah? It sits in waiting for another day when the magic might just happen all by itself. Sometimes I think you can push too hard on a blog-post, and it doesn’t work. And I love the days when the words come spilling out of your head and onto the screen – and it works. Oh, and I will now go back and read your account of teaching your son how to drive. I taught my daughter and will never forget the experience. I still have the ‘back-seat driver’s licence’ she had made for me when it was all over. And rightly so – she was a natural at driving, from the very first lesson. Not that I actually gave her credit for it at the time… 🙂

  2. hafong Avatar

    I wouldn’t call it failure, Maureen. You still have the drafts. Your readers might not find them flat. Sometimes it depends where they’re coming from. I get great responses to the ones I least expected would. Publishing every post written keeps my momentum up. So whatever I get written. Of course I try to do my best. Write and publish on.

    Lily

    1. Maureen Avatar

      Thank you, Lily. Perhaps it’s just that I’m not used to reading my own, more serious writing. I will persevere and publish it one day because my town is spectacularly beautiful and I would love to share it with the world. 🙂