It's OK to Change Your Mind

Last week, I was feeling fired up and ready to go. I wrote a whole post about some exciting things and plans.

But here’s the thing: I’ve thought some more about my plans for writing, and I’m changing my mind. Let me get into the “why”. The plans I made were way too strict for me. This is probably because of the spontaneous nature of my recent 30-day blogging challenge, but I think it also has to do with deadlines.

For more than 80% of my life, I’ve dealt with a whole lot of deadlines. That’s two decades! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think deadlines aren’t something we can totally get away from. I do think we can dramatically reduce the number of deadlines we encounter, however.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Here’s my new plan:

I’ll be blogging 4 days a week: Monday through Thursday.

How’s that different from what I originally planned? Well, I wanted to write a bit more about the things I’m learning in my Software Architecture course, but:

1. Making half of my posts about it is way too much
2. I would love to “teach” technical material, but Software Architecture isn’t where my passion lies

Today’s post was “supposed” to be about Software Architecture, as a matter of fact, but writing it to my standards was far more stressful than it needed to be. I’d rather save that energy for something I plan to immerse myself in by choice, not because I have to.

Here’s the moral of the story: you can change your mind whenever you want to. I was a little nervous about changing my mind on this because I really was excited to write about Software Architecture. Some people showed interest in it, and I also don’t want to appear like I’m not holding my word or something.

But then I remembered: I started blogging for me. People finding value in what I write is an added benefit! Of course, I still want people to enjoy reading what I write, but I also need to enjoy what I’m writing or I’ll burn right out.

You are your primary stakeholder. Keep doing the things you enjoy, and if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, give it your very best shot to turn that around.