Breath and Focus: Lessons from Failure

This is Second Iteration of the Blog

This is the second iteration of the blog. You may be wondering, where is the first iteration is, and to see pictures of it.

Well, I’ll tell you.

It is on my laptop hard drive, un-hosted, and never published. Reason for that is because when I was first making this blog, I was ambitious. I was going build the entire blog from scratch, each blog post in HTML, a custom CSS from scratch, and hosting the website on a solar powered server, because that is green and self-resilient, much different from being hosted on a server far away.

Ambitious for someone whose previous attempts at blogs ended up in failure. Someone who had no experience

You can probably guess what happened.

Why it failed?

Beyond the obvious answer of too much ambition and too little skill, I can easily summarize why I failed into two main ideas: momentum and focus.

When I mean momentum, I mean lack of momentum. Starting most projects, I have lofty goals and so much energy, I feel like I can take on this project easily if I stick to a schedule. Yet that does not last, as time goes on I start getting behind in progress, getting stuck in minor details, getting stuck in trying to figure out how to do various parts of the project which I have no skill in, and essentially progress slows down to a crawl.

Even with me making progress, I still lose energy and momentum by being bogged down in the specifics and not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually, I lose all attention for my goal, stop working on it, and the project dies with a whimper

However, this time the previous iteration of the project was not killed by lack of momentum.

It was killed by the lack of focus, an insidious killer of projects and idea for many people. Focusing on completing ten different tasks instead of two dilutes the energy and effort that I put into the project. Two parts of a project completed give me a much large momentum boost then ten parts of a project at fifteen percent.

This has been the case with my website development project. I was not focusing on just creating a blog for writing. I was creating a website from scratch. Working on front-end hard, creating the web-pages from scratch, writing blog posts in straight HTML, setting up a CSS style which I like, and creating a directory for the various pages. I was beginning to research how to run the back-end from home. I was going to write more than just three interwoven topics. To be frank, on all fronts I was doing well in making progress. However the feeling of progression was not there.

So it began again.

Progress started slowing down on various fronts. I started slowly down and stopping any progress overall. I was pissed that all my effort and progress was going to waste because I once again bit off more than I could chew.

So I did what I needed to do; I reevaluated the blog, honed my focus down to three interwoven topics. I started ripping out parts that weren’t necessary towards the one goal. That means no recommended books, no blogging about gardening, nor about others irrelevant topics to the core point of the blog: writing, world-building, science fiction, and fantasy.

I also dropped ideas of a home-server, and dropped building everything from scratch. Instead, I grabbed blog template that worked good enough for me, and I began writing about things that were part of the blog core bubble alongside salvaging work from the first iteration of the blog.

This has freed up my mind to focus on writing, made it enjoyable once again. It has also freed up energy to focus on outlining short stories and novel, to work on the concepts within the world I am making, creating the history of the peninsula, and even write about the writing process, such as programs and tools that I use.

Overall, me stripping out the unnecessary aspects of the project has made it much more enjoyable for me to work on this project.

What about the other parts?

I still want to do the other projects, such as solar powered website, and hosting the blog from my home. I can focus on these later, as I get more settled down, and actually have income coming in from a full-time job to pay for maintenance.

However I will not use these projects for this blog. It would use it for a separate blog, focused on a different core subject. This blog would be focused on collecting resources of adapting a resilient philosophy in a modern world which is built against that idea. The idea of running the blog myself, via solar power is appropriate for the topic of the blog and incorporates that philosophy into its production.

Conclusion

During the early creation and iteration of this blog before publishing it, I was too spread out and unfocused with the various parts at work. As I begin to flounder in my project, I decided to rebuild and refocus my production towards something that could be completed and finished with my current skill set and assets at my disposal (i.e. within my budget and an office to run a homemade server), instead of dicking around, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Many of those things chopped can be reused in a different blog with a different purpose for a different time, where I am at a different stage of my life.

In my ways, this is a lesson that deals with writing. To focus less on your epic stories that you want to tell, but instead to focus on stories you can tell with your skill set at the moment. Stephen King did not write the The Dark Tower epic first. Neither should I.