Hello, everyone!
Finally, after 8 long months, I have posted a follow up on my first blog post. To give you a background, the situation during that time back in April was: the pandemic was just getting started, we were in a lock down here in Manila and we started working from home. Given that situation, I saw it as an opportunity for me to pursue several things that I wanted to do for a very long time. One of the many things that I wanted to pursue is to share my knowledge(in web development) and my personal thoughts through writing blog posts(with the possibility of being a content creator 😂).
However, as the title of this post indicates, I procrastinated.
After I published my first blog post, I told myself: Yes! This is it! I have successfully published my first blog post. I will surely be posting my next blog post within the next few days. I woke up the next day and I started listing content ideas that I wanted to write about on this website. Lo and behold, after 8 long months until today, I wasn’t able to post anything new on this website. I spent the past 8 months deciding what to post, when to post and dealing with a mental tug of war that involves a lot of emotions in my mind that’s telling me to go post something and telling me not to.
Now, you may be wondering: how did I end up writing this post that you are reading right now? As I was studying last Thursday about BabelJS1, I was writing notes in my Notion notebook about the things that learned and express it in my own words. Suddenly, something popped in my mind about a blog post that I read in the past which talks about learning in public. That blog post is one of the many resources that inspired me to start this blog. I was reminded that there were many things that I learned in the past about web development which I struggled to understand (because English is not my native language) and I wished that when I googled a certain topic or concept, there were explanations about those things that could be simpler and easier to understand.
Because I remembered why I started this website, I got a surge of insipiration and excitement to work on this website again. However, this time, I asked myself: why I didn’t follow through even if I was so inspired during the day I deployed this website last April? After spending some time thinking about it and going through what happened over the past 8 months, I learned that even if you are inspired, that feeling can easily fade away if you don’t take action immediately and constantly. I believe that’s what happened to me. As I got caught into a series of planning and deciding which next topic should I write about after my first blog post, my mind got tired of analysis paralysis and various scary thoughts out of nowhere entered in my mind. To share to you, some of those thoughts were:
- I was scared to write because I am not a good writer and I felt the need to become a good one before writing my next blog post.
- I was scared because I am not an authority about the topic that I will be writing about.
- I was afraid about being a subject of ridicule because I was totally wrong with what I will write in the future.
After realizing what happened to me all along, I was able to process these scare thoughts that I had because of procrastinating on this website. I learned that having the right perspective greatly matters in every thing that you do, whether it is a simple day today task or a big project that you are about to work on. Knowing this, the next action item that I had to do was to have a change of perspective towards the things that scared me before.
- From being scared to write because I feel that I am not good at writing, I will change my perspective to “I write because I just want to get started putting out content on this website. As I go along, I will strive to be a better writer (to make my posts more bearable to read 😂) and I will gladly accept any corrections that people will point out in the posts that I will publish. ”
- From being scared to write because I feel that I am not an authority on the subject matter that I will be writing about, I will change my perspective to “even if I am not an authority on the subject matter that I will be writing about, I might be able to offer a unique explanation or perspective that might be helpful to some who will stumble across my future posts.”
- From being scared to write because I am scared to be a subject of ridicule because I was totally wrong with what I will write about in the future, I will change my perspective to “I will let go of my pride and accept that I cannot please everyone no matter what I write. I will write because as I go in this journey as I strive to get better in what I do, I wanted to share to the world what I learned in every single step that I took and I hope that it will be something that will inspire and positively impact the readers of my posts in the future.”
As I end, I am very happy to express these thoughts that I had since that light bulb moment last Thursday and I know this excitement that I am feeling right now is temporary. The real battle is what comes next. I hope that I don’t fall into the same trap that set me back for 8 months after I publish this post. The reality is: Only time will tell how I have responded to everything that I just talked about in this post. At this time however, I believe that this website is now a clear commitment device to remind myself to pursue writing consistently, inspired by knowing that I can be of service to someone in this world, no matter where they are.
I hope may this post serve as an encouragement to everyone who is going through the same struggles as I do.
With that said, this is my public declaration that I will commit posting on this website, every Monday, 6pm PHT.
Thank you and have a blessed day!🙏🏻
Footnotes:
1 BabelJS is a tool used by developers to either transform your ES2015+ code which is only compatible with the latest browsers into a code that is compatible with old browsers or provide a polyfill: A code that will override or extend your browser’s Javascript engine way to support a new syntax that is only supported on new browsers.