Last updated on April 1st, 2021 at 10:10 am
Friends, Romans, really loyal readers, how’s it going??
I wanted to write on this a few days ago, but other things took precedence. Now, on my way to an ultimate frisbee game and immediately following some time spent on homework for the pre-marital classes, I’m getting into my groove. (Please note that I didn’t FINISH before the ultimate game, but I’m glad I didn’t since I had a lot more to write!) NJ asked me a little while ago a few questions about how I blog—the method to the madness, if you will. I’ve put them at the bottom of this post, because I’ll get to them in just a moment. With a month of this year’s blog under my belt so far, I’ve learned a bit more about myself:
- The level of commitment I’m willing to put toward a cause if it means something to me
- The importance of sticking to a theme
- How to improve the image we convey of ourselves and how important this is
Writing the 2K11 24/7 has been a great experience so far and I’d like to tell you some more about how it’s been so far and how I’m improving from writing all of these posts!
And now (because I know you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting), the questions!
How do I go about improving my blog writing?
As with just about anything, one will improve as they practice something. With my blog, I find that as time passes I have more to contribute to my blog in a meaningful manner. I started with an idea, it’s evolved into more of a daily mantra of thoughts I’d like to put out there to help others through their lives. While it’s been dealing with things that are a lot more general to begin with, I’m hoping that by the end of the year, we’ll have some real success stories of how lives have changed in the quest for self-improvement. Definitely a grand statement, but nobody’s life is perfect—if I can make someone’s life better by even the slightest amount, I’m a happy man.
I write more toward a specific point in my posts these days rather than trying to come up with content, picking ideas from out of the air. I start typing, and let the words come to me. I find things are way more coherent and enjoyable that way!
What I’ve learned from writing a post a day:
I’ve learned humility, attentiveness and commitment.
Humility: I’ve gotten a lot of good response from friends and family on the posts I’ve been putting together. It’s awesome, because it ranges from people who I talk to more or less on a daily basis to people who I know but see only occasionally.
What’s even better is that I know the blog is directly affecting people’s lives. I got my buddy George writing again, my buddy Dave thinking about his life, and a lot of dialogue going on with people from all walks on life. I look forward to seeing what else may be in store for the rest of the year as I keep writing these posts 😊
Attentiveness: Now, because all sorts of people are reading the blog, I learned how to get my points and views across in my posts, but in a way that doesn’t make me seem like a total jackass or unprofessional. I might not get all the typos and spelling errors in my posts 100% of the time (I type pretty fast—don’t think there’ll be a blog for THAT, guys), but I try my best to make sure that my post make sense. That they look like something that people can refer back to, feeling like they can actually learn something from the post. I don’t want to represent myself with inferior material, because that would be a disservice to both myself and you, my readers. The day you see a poorly-written blog post, and I mean atrocious, I want you to drop me a line, because it likely means that I’ve been hacked!
Commitment: And, obviously, I’ve learned a lot about commitment. You can’t be saying that you’re going to write a blog a day and not deliver—that’s something I learned well with the 2010 20K. The moment you slip and let a day slide for writing a post, you’re on a slippery slope to going days, weeks and even months without a post. If you say you’re going to do something, you better do it! And this doesn’t apply to blogging alone—carry that thought with you in life. Here’s an important point of this post: ALWAYS DELIVER ON WHAT YOU SAY YOU’RE GOING TO DELIVER ON. You’re only going to look like a chump otherwise, and you don’t want that!
How I’ve improved post by post:
In the beginning, all I had was a cool name for the blog—The 2K11 24/7. I knew I wanted it to be about doing something all the time, every day. Something more about lifestyle in general than a single task or goal to strive for. When I came across the focus of self-improvement, it was a bit of an epiphany, giving me something that I felt I could write about reasonably through ’til the end of the year.
With increased focus, I’ve been able to write on a multitude of topics I’d rarely touched before and plan to cover many more before the year’s end. I hope you’ll choose to stick around, because there’s a lot of issues out there, and if I’m not covering them, I hope to get some guest posters who will!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I got thrown around pretty badly in the ultimate game I just played (i.e. a hit from mid-air landed me in a double reverse somersault; I caught a disc right before it landed by landing on my side; and other such antics), so I think I’ll go indulge in far tamer activities for the night.
Later, my fellow oxygen-breathers!
37/365
