What I Learned
Writing the blog reminded me of some fundamental life lessons and imparted some new insights:
Just Do It!
After spending hours writing the first blog post, I thought, this is a really dumb idea – why am I doing this? I am not a strong writer and I am definitely not qualified to write about human psychology!
Throughout this process, I’ve been in my head at times, saying that I can’t post something because it’s not “good enough.” Most of us will never meet our internal assessment of “good enough” because we are our harshest critic. If we let this voice control us, we will never make progress on what we need to and want to make progress on.
If we put our “prototyping hat” on, we can see that we should get out of our heads and give it a go because most situations are low stakes and will help us learn about ourselves.
I found that making a public commitment and giving myself a deadline helped me “just do it.” I set an arbitrary deadline and publicly committed to post every Sunday night – my fear of not meeting deadlines superseded my fear that my post wasn’t good enough, leading me to post.
I can’t say that my writing has improved over the past 3 months, but my fear of writing has certainly decreased. I am now eager to write slide decks at work vs before, I would procrastinate because I didn’t think I could do it. And this change all started with one step – publishing my first post.
Just Roll with It
Like most everything else in my life, when I started the blog, I had a plan for what to write about in almost all the posts. For the first few weeks, all posts had a similar format – I would tell a story about my life, introduce a framework, and then talk about how the framework could apply to my readers. I was hesitant to share the post about my Nana because it didn’t follow this format and the focus was more on her, not human psychology. However, it ended up being my favorite post and the one that I got the most positive feedback on. In addition, I deviated from my planned topics based on what people were interested in and life circumstances, like watching the marathon.
As someone who loves planning, I have come to realize that while planning can have its benefits, it can also prevent us from trying something new; the more ingrained we become in our path, the greater the fear is of trying something different. Again, by putting our “prototyping hat” on, we can see that deviating from our plan and testing out a new process can teach us something about ourselves and even ultimately improve our outcome.
Writing is a great way to learn and assess your beliefs
During the early posts, I would read a book each week and then write a blog post on it, which left little time for me to fully process the content, so the posts mimicked the books very closely. The blogs were like book reports, reporting out on what I had read. Nonetheless, compressing a book from 150 pages or more to 2-3 pages of writing was a challenging task and helped me assess what was important for the reader to know and how to communicate it succinctly.
As the weeks progressed, I started creating more distance between the content I was reading and what I was writing, which helped me find my voice and write something that truly reflected my values. We read so many things and sometimes it’s hard to remember or evaluate how we feel about a certain topic. Writing helped me internalize the human psychology concepts and find areas in my life where these concepts are applicable that I hadn’t considered before.
Motivation Wanes
No matter how much you want to do something, your motivation will wane throughout the process. At the beginning of the blogging process, I was super motivated and would spend half of my weekend working on the post. After Bali, my motivation waned and I put less effort into the posts for a few weeks. However, as the finish line was nearing, I wanted the last few posts to be impactful and put more effort in. I’ve found this similar motivation pattern on many of my work projects - where I trudge through the middle, even though I want the target outcome. In order to achieve your goals and minimize the impact of waning motivation, I find it helpful to set deadlines and pat myself on the back for the small wins I’ve achieved, such as looking at the blog posts I’ve already written and the feedback I received.
People are supportive when you try something new
I was truly shocked by how much support I received from you all throughout the process. The support ranged from reading the blog post to e-mailing me feedback to offering to proofread and structure my blog posts. Having a community to support you makes everything easier and I can’t express how grateful I am for you all!
Many times when we think about trying something new, we think that people will think less of us or not support us, but these thoughts are in our mind. You’ll be amazed at how many people want to support you!