The Discipline Of Practice

I’m writing this blog now mainly to practice my writing skills, which as readers of this blog will know need a lot of work.  Each day as I sit down to write my daily post I struggle to decide what to write and worry whether any of it has any utility.  To comfort myself on the utility issue, I’ve decided to primarily write for myself for now, provided the blog has utility for me then it’s a success.  Over time if it has utility to others that will be a plus.

I try to remember that ‘practice makes perfect’.  I remember Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that it takes 10,000 hours to develop expertise, in blog post terms that’s perhaps 30 years of practice, so I have a long road ahead of me, fortunately others dispute that it takes that long.

As a reader of many blogs I’m frequently humbled when I compare them to my own, but I’m also encouraged, maybe they stumbled along in the early days too.  With this thought in mind I was pleased to come across this post by Harold Jarche, where he mentions the same issue:

I must say that my posts in the early years were not very good. These past few weeks I have been compiling, updating, and editing my best articles. The earliest post in that selection is from 2007. It took me three years to write a blog post that would stand the test of time.

It only took Harold three years!