Hah. so here it is, a month into my contract in Cambodia, and I'm not doing too well on the "let's start a blog about design / social development / my life" resolution.
I've got it in bits and pieces, I have thought scraps that are floating around across Evernote, Asana, and Squarespace blocks of text. But what's keeping me?
(other than the usual procrastination suspects, and personal inhibitions)
two things I want to touch on:
I looked over my notes. I had listed things like "reflect on 1st week" "what was the farm stay like?" "get on to that 1-month reflection!" -- wholly unhelpful, in the end. And I realized why -- time is a great marker of progress, in many ways. Time is a tool we use so we can from one person to another coordinate and collaborate.
Building a story means more than a slew of "and then..."'s. A story presents a reason to follow along, and at the end there is something to be learned. A story presents a take away.
A story in the case of this blog is key not because I'm trying to persuade anyone of my opinion, or intending to present ideas with a call to action for any semblance of an audience (at this time). In this case, the story is meant for me. As I look over my notes, I needed something else other than the date to help me make sense of it.
This is a classic case of failing to implement the very principles you live by and champion to others. I have to remind myself of this same practice when building presentations at work, and it was a wake-up call to realize my knee-jerk reaction is still to grab for that low hanging fruit of "and then..."'s. Which ironically end up not being the easy way out at all for me. For some it is an entirely sustainable model (in terms of volume produced).
I want to be able to look back over my posts and see how my thoughts on social innovation have grown, how I have honed my craft, and what I have learned from my new team. These are concepts that are way beyond my having spent -x- amount of hours doing -y-.
At the same time, I have to also let go of the idea of the "full thread" of this story I'm building here in Cambodia as I am writing it. I am constantly second guessing a statement I write because I haven't figured out the connection it has to previous thoughts, and implications it has on my work.
Instead, here's to writing shorter blurbs, to be fit together later.
