Blog Exercises: If You Don’t Make Mistakes, You’ll Never Learn

I’ve long believed that if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t learning.

That philosophy is part of what these blog exercises are about. I want you to stumble. I want you to destroy your site. I want you to make a mess of everything because that is how you learn.

How did I learn what I know about blogging? I destroyed all preconceived notions and blasted my way into it. True, I was blogging before blogging was a word, but when it became a word, the word became one of rules, regulations, and guidelines. Policies. Structure. You could be lousy at blogging, or great. There were ratings and systems in place on how to do it right. How do I know? Because I broke many of those systems to test them, unconsciously and consciously in defiance.

In order to learn how blogging worked, I broke it.

Same applied to WordPress. I didn’t become a WordPress expert, guru, diva, queen, and all the other labels put upon me by installing WordPress and blogging. I ripped it apart. I tore it into pieces. I grew with it, beat it back like a weed, and fertilized it with all the crap I could put through it. I deserved of those labels because I broke WordPress – often – and lived to tell the tale.

Did you do that with your own specialty?

It took me months to learn how to make ancient lace by tatting – Lorelle VanFossen.

If you are a knitter, how many times did it take to get it right? To finally knit that washcloth without dropped stitches and your purls becoming knits on the wrong side?

If you are a sales person, how many times did it take to try to make a sale before you found your rhythm? How many styles and methods did you try before you got in the groove and now handle the cold call and pitch without missing a beat?

If you are a woodworker, how many fingers do you have left and how long did it take you to figure out how to get the lathe working right and how to get tongue-in-grove to really mean tongue-in-grove?

If you are a coder, how many mistakes did you make with code before it ran like clockwork? How many hours have you poured into microscopic inspection to find the missing semi-colon or quote mark that screwed everything up?

We all torture ourselves through the process of learning. By making those mistakes, by failing, we learn how to do it better, righter, stronger, and faster.

Today’s blog exercises is to write a blog post or article series on how you went from novice to expert.

No matter what you do, you must have started somewhere. Share the path of your journey to accomplishment, no matter how much of an expert you are at this point.

For some, the journey was short, a few days, weeks, or months. For others, their journey began decades ago and they’ve gone through ups and downs in the industry as well as their life, moving away and returning back to their skill.

If you are at the beginning of your journey, share the story of what led you to this moment, what you learned, the mistakes you’ve made, and what it took to get you this far, and what will keep you going further.

In July you were to blog your mistakes, sharing the personal side of loss and how you’ve stumbled in your life as a way to humanize yourself to your readers, a great way to build connections and community.

In this exercise, show your readers what it took to get here, the good, bad, and ugly, the triumphs, and the defeats.

This type of behind-the-scenes story is always a bonus for the reader. It gives us a chance to see where you came from, how you got here, and what they may learn from your experiences.

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

---

Subscribe Via Feedburner Subscribe by Email

Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.