What business do I have writing advice articles?
That’s what I’ve been asking myself the past few months. Hell, I don’t even know how I landed in this niche.
It all started with writing tips, and the next thing I knew, I’m telling people to keep journals and wake up early as if I were the next Ali Abdaal.
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So Jeanne’s post inspired me to write this. Particularly the bit about how she squeezed in some running time into her day. I’ve followed her for a while now, and it’s interesting to see how she’s grown into running this past year or so.
If you’ve been following my blog, you might’ve also noticed that I work out every day, thanks to me repeating that fact like a broken record. The reason? Because I’ve found a groove that works for me.
How I go about it is as thus: I put out 70% effort (or less). If, when I think about my problems, and I still feel the dread, I add another set. I keep doing this until the problem seems to mellow out. That’s it.
I don’t care if weightlifting builds more muscle than running. I don’t care if high-intensity exercise benefits my heart more than a mild jog. I just do it for the feels.
And most importantly, it’s what I would actually do.
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So I’ve kept this blog for nine years now, but it’s only in the past three that I started taking it seriously. And by serious I mean no sporadic posts, always networking on WordPress, and acting as if I know what I’m doing.
Thing is, I’ve never earned a dime from my blog, and I can’t use it to sell anything even if I wanted to.
But just because I didn’t gain monetary rewards doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from ‘going pro’ when it comes to blogging. So what can a domain name and a paid WordPress account get you? Let me count you the ways.
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I never cooked anything beyond instant noodles till I was about 30 years old. I did try at a younger age, but I managed to mix up cooking oil and lemon cordial. Don’t ask me how. All I remember was the confusion I got when the ‘oil’ turned sticky.
Later on in life, I gave cooking another shot, opting for fried rice this time. Again, I managed to screw that up by getting everything to stick to the pan. A non-stick pan.
Since then, I gave the kitchen a wide berth, thinking that cooking was reserved only for the select few who’d been blessed with the magic knowledge of spice and fire. The people who could effortlessly turn a slab of chicken meat into cordon bleu.
Then the pandemic happened.
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We always hear about how important it is to learn from our failures. Or, more importantly, how we should always see failure as a pathway to self-improvement.
But failure here often conjures images of that time you froze up on stage, or when you’d sat for an exam only to realise you’d accidentally left a page blank.
Thing is, catastrophic failure isn’t the only time you learn in life. Your day-to-day snafus work great for growth too. And you don’t need to suffer death by humiliation as part of the process. Doesn’t that sound like a better deal? You bet it does.
So how do you do it? By celebrating your tiny failures.
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