Have the Courage to be imperfect ?

It was my 50^th blog and time was ticking away. I had promised myself that I will do it before 31^st Dec 2017. After all you must earn credibility with yourself first. I decided to sit through and started writing. I finished in an hour and showed it to my wife for quality check. The publish button was pressed 3 hours before midnight. I was on top of my world.

I had created my blog site on 14th April 2016, but I had not posted anything until 12^th Dec 2016 (thanks to Ian for making me break free from the fear of writing). That is when I realized the importance of a coach. My coach has helped me to gain clarity and find that direction.

To post regularly, I decided to keep a schedule of hunting (blogging) every week.  That was the turning point. I used to write journals in the past but to make my writing public I had to break free again from that fear of facing the world.

My daughter’s favourite song these days is “let it go” from the movie Frozen.

Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don’t care
what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on.
The cold never bothered me anyway

It’s funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all

It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through

The change of mindset was the next hack.

Last week on a call with my friend, I was asked this question “why do you blog?” During the first week of the new year I had the opportunity to chat with Ian. In that session he suggested that I share the hacks which I have figured out during this blogging journey

To me blogging is about consumption, introspection and connection. 

The ideas for the blog come from my day to day experiences. When I meet people, when I see something and of course when I go through something, I consume those experiences and record it from my point of view. “What gets recorded gets rewarded.”  

Once I get that experience, the next step I did was to introspect on the event and the outcomes and how that experience changed my outlook.

The last step is to make the connection between the two and create a “product” (blog). Connecting those dots was made possible by the books I had read and the podcasts and YouTube videos that I hear regularly.

After I posted my 50^th blog, a feeling of a sense of accomplishment lingered for a couple of days. The next day we were in the queue in a restaurant looking for a place. Suddenly I noticed one of our TILT friend. He mentioned “Hey, I saw your video which you posted on FB in the same outfit,” it felt nice to hear it in public. I immediately got my wife and got her introduced to his wife.

One day as I was alighting the bus, I noticed an FB friend (we have hardly spoken except in airport lounges), just better than a Hey – Bye friend. Initially I was not sure whether he would recognise me, but I decided to made eye contact. The first words of his mouth were “I saw your video” and we had a small chat around the tactics and the passion around the whole idea of blogging and vlogging.

A blog is the result of engagement and action.  From Blog 1 to Blog 50 I had the opportunity to engage with a lot of people and I am indebted to those conversations that have really changed me as a person. The final frontier to cross is putting out a blog every week and expecting it to be a hit. Not all my blogs had a significant impact. There were some hits and then there were some with a base hit of views (min 50). Understanding this is very important as you can get demotivated. The only thing I used to get motivated was “Once I put out that blog and I go and cross that milestone on the calendar I got a sense of accomplishment.” Isn’t that what we all want? A feeling of a sense of achievement and a neurochemical rush. “The game we are playing is not smash hits, base hits or no hits. It is about brain chemistry” in the words of Tom Bileyu.