Yet Another First Blog Post

I must confess, I’ve written too many “first” blog posts. I had every intention of bringing those “firsts” out of a mere draft status and into a proud published state. Oh how grand it would be! The public proofs of my efforts. A pipeline for prospective work. A place to polish my professional and interpersonal skills. The potential prosperity and popularity that could arise from the proclamation of my ponderings. To finally have a real honest to goodness blog! Perhaps even my mother would read it, heart swelling with tenderness as she shares, for a moment, in my journey beyond the nest.

Despite my grand intentions my first drafts remain just that, drafts. As I sit here in my office-of-sorts, feeling rather reflective, pondering what it will take for me to finally publish, I cannot shake one of my more recent life lessons from my head:

Mastery through repetition.

Oddly enough, this pattern is something I am intimately familiar with. From my early days through my bachelors degree, I regularly practiced athletics and completed homework assignments. Soccer, baseball, basketball, and Lacrosse. Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle School, High School, and College. Sixteen some odd years of regular repetition. Yet, the weight of the lesson never really sank in until earlier this year.

I started to see a commonality amongst successful people whose work casually intersected my life. They were good at what they did because they started doing a thing, and then did that thing over and over and over again. Whether it is Casey Neistat and the many movies he makes, or Ramit Sethi and the copious emails he crafts the one thing that connects them all is… repetition, repetition, repetition. Years of it.

This repetition is not a passive repetition either. It is a reflective repetition. Success is not gained by doing the wrong thing over and over again. Do the thing. Consider if the thing can be done better. If so, do that better thing. It’s this reflective element that never truly hit home until recently. In fact, I suspect that it will won’t fully set in until I complete a few years of reflective repetition myself.

To bring these thoughts full circle, allow me to set my personal stage a bit. I recently left the confines of salaried employment and struck out upon my own ship, a pirate on the proverbial seas of opportunity. I am self-employed and hope to keep it that way. I want to be successful. I want to be better.

So how does success connect with yet another blog on an internet already saturated with them? I need repetition. More than that… I need reflective repetition. Writing publicly affords reflective repetition because I find the nature of writing itself an enabler of reflective thinking. As I cast various stories out into the world I am forced to consider my successes and failures, and how I might do better going forward.

And… deep breath… I cannot attain repetitions without a beginning. My friend Stevo once imparted this wisdom upon me, we have perfectly developed palates and vastly underdeveloped skills. So bear with me as I work on developing my skills. A thing done, even imperfectly, is infinitely better than the thing not yet created. So this is the beginning, as imperfect as it may be. Enough “first” blog posts. Let’s do this.

…

Now onto being a pirate.