Throwing Stuff at the Wall

Of late, if you are following my endeavors, you may have noticed that I am trying to pump out the content as fast as I can. This new website, 2 or 3 blogs a week, a podcast (and a writing vlog that I will start kicking out episodes very soon), and hopefully next year I will get accepted to speak at a few conferences. I also want to figure out how I can get more search engine traffic to my site. Getting mentioned by other sites is not going to sustain me forever.

What are you trying to prove?

You may wonder “what are you trying to prove” or more simply, “why are you doing this?” To be quite fair, it is an amalgam of things from my experiences old and new. And part of it is a full on shoulder shrug.

In the past few years, I had a bunch of ideas that have been percolating, and so part of it is that I just wanted to try them. I wanted to do an opinion based podcast. I wanted to give our very practical writing tips (and I will eventually start doing live shows if anyone is keen.) I wanted to write more of my own, SQL code related blogs. I also want to write a keynote style presentation about the value of data quality.

I wrote last week about being at the same company for 24 years (and 20 of that continuously, and as much growth as I have been afforded, a lot of my professional skill growth comes from sitting at my writing device and writing about new things. Things I may or may not use in my day job, but you never know.

As I have transitioned out of a public facing job, I immediately felt the hole in my professional life that blogging and speaking had filled for years. It Is this hole that really equates to learning as much as I can, just for the purpose of learning.

Am I really ready?

One of my problems has always been that I am an idea person. I have (often) great ideas that are impractical. Some I have done, but most of the time they just sit and fester and I say “what if I had just tried it?” And I have seen so many people say something to the note of:

You will never be as ready as you want to be before you start something. If you attempt to be perfectly ready, you are never going to get started and you are definitely going to fail.

Of course they say it in a more catchy way, but my brain really wants to be correct more than it wants to be succinct. I had these podcast ideas around forever, and so I decided to just go for it. If no one listens, then it will die on the vine. Or I will follow the very first writing tip I tell everyone. You are your most important audience member. In this case you refers to me!

So I am going to keep throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if it sticks. And in this case it will depend as much on if it sticks for me, or for an audience out there. Either way, I am going to do the ones that bring me joy.

What is this stuff sticking to the wall?

A quick tangent on the idiom I based this post on.

The idiom of stuff sticking to the wall to see if it sticks is a very weird one. Who wants stuff to stick to the wall? Why isn’t it “Throw stuff at the wall and see what doesn’t stick?” I mean that really ought to be how they test paint, right? Who wants a wall covered in muck?

Still, the idiom has stuck around this far, so we might as well use it, at least for the horrible pun.