Don't Punish Learning, Reward Learning as a Principle

100 Days of Daily Blogging

I'm revising my goal of posting a blog article every single day for 2021. Ten more posts until 100. Well, nine after this one. Then I'm switching gears to once a week with the option to do more as works and feels right.

A principle

I take a lot of notes and I journal too. Journal about making things, looking for stuff that works for me and when I'm working with others. Once in a while I land on an idea that really sticks. One of those stick-with-me-things is a principle I work with. Don't punish learning. Saying it in the positive works to but misses a little of the reason for the principle: reward learning. How about connecting the two to cover a wide set of circumstance.

Don't punish learning, reward learning.

We've all likely worked in situations where learning was unwelcome. Sounds odd to say. If you haven't had that experience, nice work. UX and related skills are full of applied learning. Yet that learning isn't always well met with what we or others were hoping to hear. To ignore learning, to cast it in a negative light, to avoid, impede, always cast mistrust at folks who work to include what they learn into making and collaborating. Any of those are forms of punishing learning.

So I've learned enough in this 91 days so far of daily blogging that if I don't make use of what I'm learning I won't be honoring this principle.

What I've learned so far

Creative challenges are a great source of learning for me. And finding something worth learning in just about any situation is something I try to do.

Facing creative hangups about writing

• I can do the mechanics of all this. Write a thing, make a banner image, post it all in a day. Every step I face inner critique. Dealing with that every day, I've adapted how I hear that inner critique.
• I can overcome the habit of starting multiple articles and stopping to then shift to a non-fear-inducing topic.
  • This is the single biggest most huge thing.
  • I didn't know if I'd overcome this in a year. It took about 70ish daily posts to feel confident that I can pick a topic and that will be my article.
• Also big: I can write in my own voice more rapidly with whatever topic I pick. This is something I've worked on for a long time. At some point I decided to write enough like I have conversations.
• I'm not as fast as I was hoping to get to but I am faster. I can write about 500 to 700 words I'm comfortable with publishing in about 20 to 30 minutes.

There's an audience interested in my writing

• People do like the variety of things I wish to write about. I see this in the site stats, comments, messages, and emails.
• It's worth making and sharing something frequently on a platform that's my own. People who visit the site via bookmark and/or subscribe to the RSS feed get these posts with no platform bubble filter.
• I can take my work here and share it on other platforms so this becomes my studio and those places are appearances.

Got a lot of practice with two helpful tools

• Typora is solid markdown editor that works well on Mac and Windows.
• Canva is useful even though I have other tools like Affinity Designer and Clip Studio Paint among others. Canva is so focused and fast to use with my preset fonts and colors I use it for most of my post lead images/banners/figure images in posts.

And other personal life context

During this first few months of the year Kate was going through chemotherapy, then a cancer related surgery. Six months of chemotherapy is seriously tough. I didn't receive the treatment but it's super tough to watch your partner go through that. Then in early February and early March we recieved to giantly positive news and thresholds to get past in cancer treatment. Kate is now cancer-free.

This daily challenge was an outlet for me to practice and believe in my own agency. It is not a prescription for you or anyone else. For me, having a place of positive energy to reach into, practice, fight through feeling bad where because of my own agency and choice I was able to make something I care about for a community I care about in ways that was leveling me up creatively. No doubt to me this daily blog was a kind of standing against cancer.

Making use of what I've learned so far

I'll be continuing to create articles, podcasts, workshops, and games. This writing experience of what will be 100 days in a row of blogging taught me to work with my own creative fears/demons differently than before.

To really make use of it though I need to do some longer writing sessions. Not all of those sessions will be immediately public. I trust I got this and won't fall into self defeating habits of constantly moving the goals and criteria, other kinds of topic fears where I do a lot of work then shelve it worried what other UX practitioners would think.

I've learned that frequent blogging helps me but feel daily is too frequent. It is holding back other work by being daily. My plan now is to publish every week one post minimum, likely two. Far more frequent than other years I've blogged. About as frequent as I used to publish my webcomic Art Geek Zoo.

Are you rewarding learning?

I do wish for everyone to be able to reward learning, not punish it. If you've learned from what you do, hopefully you can make use of what you've learned in what you do next.