From Failure to Focus: My Journey to Launching a Blog

This blog was born from failure. I can recount at least three separate occasions where I tried to build a personal blog within the last five years. The most recent attempt was around a year and a half ago after some frustrations with myself and progress in my professional life (or lack thereof). I set out to finally make my blog so that I could begin documenting my studies and experiences. I came up with what I thought was a catchy site motto, Look for Failure and Learn, and began to build a new site using WordPress and cutting edge AI tools. I was so confident that I was going to finally do this that I made the password something along the lines of IwillNotQuit, almost as if typing that every time would help manifest motivation. I started designing my website, picked out the best template, created a sophisticated logo, researched color theory for hours, decided on the perfect fonts, and even wrote some content. Progress was steady at first, but slowly I started to get lost in the details. I would spend hours trying to get AI to generate the perfect hero image, and would write and rewrite headers over and over. The blog’s flattening trajectory started to erode my interest in the project until one day I had to call Bluehost’s customer service number to request a refund, because the annual auto-renew for my web hosting hit my account two weeks early and I intended to cancel. The personal blog was officially dead and despite my password being IwillNotQuit I had quit and failed once again.

At the start of 2024, I decided to take a different approach to my goals. For the first time ever, I wrote them down. I know this is a "revolutionary" idea, but I figured that if I wrote down what I wanted to accomplish it would help clear my thoughts and I could more easily come up with a plan. After much consideration this is what I came up with: I was going to read 50 books, build a marketing business with my sister, start a Youtube channel about literally everything I could think of, and I was going to write my own novel. If all that wasn’t enough, I still planned on raiding with my World of Warcraft guild weekly. Anyone who has played World of Warcraft knows the kind of time commitment that can be. Would you be surprised if I told you that other than reading, I wasn't on track for any of these goals?

“Never mistake motion for action.” - Ernest Hemingway

Let’s analyze my attempt at the blog and the approach to my goals for the year. There were two glaring issues. The first being, I focused on the little details and expected perfection when I should have created a baseline and built up from there. All the little details matter but if your trying to paint a house with no walls you're missing the point entirely. The second issue was that I spread my attention way too thin. I set myself up for failure by ensuring that my focus was always split between a million different projects. It is critical to give a task the attention it needs in order to complete it. Motion versus action is a concept popularized in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Motion is when you spend hours playing with MidJourney in an attempt to make an artsy hero image for your website. Action is using that same amount of time to build a minimum viable version of the blog. When completing a task that constitutes as action, the little details like creating an artsy hero image with AI matter, but these are tasks that you can come back to in an attempt to clean up an already functional product. It is very easy to fall into this trap, because completing a dozen meaningless tasks feels like you are working hard. It is important to take a step back and ask if what you are currently working on is contributing to your overall goal, if not find a new task. A concept that I have personally struggled with.

So what has changed? What prompted this self-reflection and introduction of my blog? Around March 2024, I felt like I was drowning in all of my goals. I was putting less and less work into them, and progress was quickly coming to a standstill. My World of Warcraft playtime was significantly increasing, and I resorted to comfort to deal with the stress. My lovely and observant wife, having noticed similar patterns before, decided to sit me down and ask me if I was getting fulfillment out of what I was doing. It was clear to her that my current trajectory was making me miserable, and she wanted to see me be happy and succeed. During our conversation, we decided that I needed to narrow my focus and pick one or two things to work on. I have always had an interest in technology and computers, and a couple of years back I took some programming classes that I really enjoyed. So we landed on the conclusion that I should continue to learn to code. From there, I wiped my slate clean of all of my projects, and picked up a Python textbook.

I began refreshing myself on the basics of programming and Python. I quickly regained a small amount of proficiency and decided to take on my first project. I wanted to automate a relatively simple excel routine at my job that typically took dozens of hours to complete. I had already tried to ask ChatGPT to do this using Microsoft's programming language VBA to no success. Determined to find a solution, I knew that Python was more than capable of accomplishing the task. Two days after starting the project, I had a working prototype ready for testing. After the prototype worked on my actual data, I finally got a small taste of success and it was sweet. I started looking for more inefficiencies to fix, and learned how to better leverage AI to make up for any gaps in my knowledge in a wide range of skills. This led me down a rabbit hole of learning about technology (mostly AI) and how I can use it to accomplish any task that I wanted.

This brings us to a couple of days before the creation of this website. While perusing Youtube looking for interesting videos to watch and learn from, I came across one from a channel named NetworkChuck titled, “you STILL need a website RIGHT NOW!! (yes, even in 2024)”. This video demonstrated how easy it is to get a website up and running leveraging free resources and AI. He proved this by having his two young daughters compete against each other for who could make the best website. This lit a light bulb in my head, why don’t I give the personal blog one more shot? I had a small taste of victory recently so the confidence was there and there was really nothing to lose. Surely I could finally conquer this beast, and have that elusive personal website.

I gave myself one weekend, to have a basic website ready to go. I decided to use the tools NetworkChuck used in his video and set out to work. In an effort to bypass some of the hang-ups I had on my last attempt to build a website, I started with a blank screen. I knew I wanted two pages, a homepage, and a blog. I quickly picked one color and one font that I liked, and I set off to work. Within three hours, I had a finished product. Was it perfect? Not even close, but it’s more tangible than any attempt I had before it, and I could easily build off of it. I had done in three hours, what I couldn’t accomplish in five years. I had failed over and over again, but that didn’t matter because this time I didn’t. All it took was me narrowing my focus and ignoring menial distractions.

All of this is great, but there is still one task left. My website needs blog posts. Here is what you can expect going forward. Having read above, you can see I am a man of a lot of interests. It wouldn't be genuine if I only wrote about one subject, so instead, I offer you this. I am going to continue researching AI and other tools to help normal people like myself level up their productivity. I will relay to you what I learn, give my feedback, and lay out my raw thoughts on each subject. This blog will serve as a medium where I dive into a topic I am interested in and then report back to you on my findings. I truly believe that the path to fulfillment is one of continuous education and the pursuit of growth in all facets of life. Many people stop learning after high school or college when in reality that’s when the training wheels come off and the real learning should begin. Let’s go on this journey together. Thank you for your time.

Whiteley’s World Blog,

Logan Whiteley