Introduction – To be the master you must be willing to be the fool

Hello everyone,

It is a good quote to remember when starting a new venture or learning a new skill, you have to be willing to be the fool, otherwise you’d probably never start anything new. You have to be okay with being the one who doesn’t know, the one who makes a significant number of mistakes, if you are going to have any success at being competent or mastering this new avenue in your life. This can be quite difficult as no one likes being an idiot, I know I don’t! Fear and pride can be good barriers to achieving this mindset. Just think about how many things you have not started because you didn’t think you’d be good enough or would never “git gud” (get good in gaming language) or the imagined negativity from others for looking like a fool?

As someone who has had some success in a couple of areas in life, I do struggle with being reverted back to the novice. It takes a certain amount of courage to approach a fresh endeavour and not be dispirited by poor results or turned away by fear, especially if you have high expectations of your ability. Delayed gratification is also an important concept here. I need to realise that the rewards for my efforts have a high likelihood of not being immediate (particularly in creative industries), and there is also a potential for them to not come at all, but I need to give myself a chance to succeed and not give up before I’ve even started and create artificial roadblocks.

I started this blog with these thoughts in mind, about giving myself a place (and a low risk place at that) to start my new career and go through the process of learning and cultivating my writing (thank you for joining me, gold star for you!). I have come from an academic background and it is chalk and cheese with writing styles. Making the switch from writing formally to conversationally has involved reversing ingrained patterns of my writing, so now I can use more deliciously descriptive and emotive words and not fight my instinctual prose-like structure and storytelling.

I will keep these posts engaging, thought-provoking and/or informative, but more importantly, enjoyable and beneficial to read. Time is our most valuable resource and writing and reading is a reciprocal relationship that needs to be respected and maintained properly. I also find humour to be an underrated and underused learning tool, and it can be great for broaching complex, taboo or more sensitive topics. Humour is great for lowering our defences, making us more receptive to new information, and I’ll try to incorporate funny anecdotal stories or my own experiences in communicating some of my points.

I have written in the “About” section the topics I am going to cover, but for the sake of convenience I will include them again here; Travel, Psychology, Philosophy, Mythology, Motoring, Basketball and Video Gaming, plus any ad hoc things along the way. I will post every Friday and they will range between 500 – 1,000 words as to not occupy too much of your time.

As I wrap up my first post, I’d just like to thank you for being here on the start of my journey down the road of writing. Where this will end is anybody’s guess, but I believe this will be an eternal excursion in authentic self-expression and exploration of the mind encompassing an empathy to make the lives of others that little more joyous.

So, have sympathy on this poor “fool” as I try to craft some mastery out of this skill called writing.