Retrospective Reflection

“Meme si vous voulez vous tromper, vous n’arriverez pas.” My engineering science teacher.

Translation: "Even if you strive to be mistaken, you will not succeed."

Today I would like to reflect on the blog itself. I have been very much consistent with my production. Without miss I have uploaded a new blogpost every Monday at 8:30 for the past 37 weeks. I am really proud of myself for keeping up with this throughout the whole school year, but since it is very much a hobby I have not reflected on its meaning enough. I would like to figure out what is the main thing I want to achieve through this blog. I am not marketing it nearly enough for it to grow in readership. So what do I want?

I know that I enjoy writing and it seems to me that this writing habit has improved my style and language use which is awesome. I have also developed the ability to produce large amounts of text in small time. Not perfect text but text nonetheless and that is what is important. It is as if I have sort of gotten over the idea that every single sentence I write has to be perfect with the first try. This was one of the goals of the blog – to battle perfectionism. That is one more box ticked!

About the theme of the blog – it has been a weekly documentation of my life. I tend to not dive very deep into my school life so it is not a pure engineering student blog. This being said it is not a pure productivity guru text either. I have experimented with writing a few paragraphs of valuable information, but it requires some research which I do not make time for very often. I would argue that it is just a public diary. I do not have a problem with this, but I do not find it to be the most interesting thing to produce.

It is great for me personally because every Sunday I review my week and reflect on it a little. This being said I do not know if I would personally consume this type of content because the ROI (return on investment) seems iffy. I have thought of producing videos because I have some basic knowledge about video production and I have enjoyed it in the past. Nevertheless I believe that it would be an extra effort that could be too much to handle. Writing this diary-type blog is nice and doable even on a Sunday evening whilst hungover. Furthermore it would be difficult to do both so I would probably have to make a choice.

But that's exactly what it is about. Choices. I should try to embrace the fact that there are and will always be very final choices that do close a lot of doors, and that is okay. Till this point I have been quite a passive writer. I have not even tried to look at the bigger picture. I have just concentrated on the present moment every time and written my little piece for the week. This is all cool and fine, but at the moment I have sort of lost touch with my goal. Of course my starting goal was quite vague. I just wanted to see if I could write a post every week and through that I wanted to battle my perfectionism. The vagueness is the problem. It goes against all the productivity advice that I have consumed.

Making videos would be interesting because it is a medium that is a lot more accessible to everyone including myself. I could just reduce the output of blogposts to one in two weeks and instead work on video production. This being said, I do not have a single clue what I would make videos about. It is the same thing as with my blog. I feel as if I do not have a niche that I could fit into. I am torn between music, sports, reading and productivity. Productivity is a vague term but for me it includes the idea of lifelong learning and being a better human being in all aspects of my life not only my work-life. This wider lens has in its field of view reading, music and sports. The problem with this is that it is not nearly niche enough. I need to niche down if I want to start something for real.

For some reason I am not sold on making content about school itself, doing educational videos about math and physics does not interest me. I am interested in the stuff I learn but I do not find that I take it seriously enough to produce content about it. I feel like I would need to have a deeper understanding of it and I do not see myself working towards that sort of mastery. Making content on productivity does not seem like a good idea either because the landscape feels too saturated. Of course all I would need to do is to address the same things that have been said since the antiquity but from a different angle. That is easier said than done though.

For some reason I still have a little hope that future-me will figure all this out and at the moment I do not have to lift a finger for anything. It is as if I refuse to accept constant change which is indeed absurd but it is even more absurd to not embrace it at all. Active reflection is the only thing that could genuinely help me. It is why I decided to write this brainstorm-blogpost. I will end it on that note. If You have any suggestions or reflections about my life choices let me know!

Till next time!