The Retro

What I've learned over this process and the outcome

The Retro

What a rollercoaster this has been. I had the initial idea of A Month Learning in February of 2021. It is now March of 2022. The messed up thing is I actually built the blog in a month. It took me a year to collect my thoughts and actually write things down. Which leads me to my first takeaway.

Writing is hard

I currently work in media—previously in the agency world—and have worked with a lot of journalists and writers. Much respect to those who do this for a living, it is a complicated beast to try and nail down what your tone is (or company's tone), how to write about something that's compelling, and really just to write in general. I do a lot of freeform creative writing, but structured writing about a topic is tough. I have been a long time maker of things and really haven't documented much, other than my MTA tracker and a cool post it note project I worked on with a talented team of folks. Which brings me to my second takeaway...

Write as you go

I wrote the welcome post, intro post, and week one post last year. When I did the rest, I had a really hard time backtracking to my initial thoughts and digging up my notes about how I structured things.

This process likely would have been 1000% easier if I did it in the manner it was supposed to happen—spend time doing a little bit, write, spend more time doing a little bit more, write more. Now that I've made it this far, that will definitely be my process moving forward. As far as what I learned about building something and learning something new...

Just start

I think a lot. I bet a lot of us do. The problem with only thinking about stuff is that you trick your brain into feeling like you actually accomplished something. So after you do all that hard work of thinking and feel accomplished, you treat yourself to four hours of scrolling through Instagram and binge watch a series on Netflix.

Throughout the last year, I really have had the privileged opportunity to just do things. This was one of those things. I've spent so much of my life carefully thinking about how things could be, I think I'm ready to finally take all those thoughts and put them to work.

I have a lot to learn. I'm still figuring out my writing voice. Life is going to get in the way and interrupt what I think I should be achieving.

And that, my friends, is the spirit of A Month Learning. Whatever you do, wherever you are and whatever your circumstances, just keep learning.