As I write, I get more clarity on what I don’t want to write about. My vision for starting all of my blogs and podcasts was to share insights about things I learned in hopes that they would inform and inspire other people in the same way that I’ve been informed and inspired by other people. Many of my insights and interests are in personal and professional development.
That said, I like Scrum principles, but I’ve not worked on a Scrum team. This makes a lot of the topics theoretical. On the other hand, all of my project management experience has been in traditional project management, so it makes more sense to talk about concepts I use every day. It might also make it easier to integrate Agile topics because I have a solid understanding of traditional project management.
To that end, I’ll link the Scrum guide here. https://scrumguides.org/index.html
If you’ve enjoyed learning about it, then you can read it. But I want to shift toward a new direction.
In addition to sharing what I’ve learned, blogs and podcasts give me a way to crystalize and memorialize my learnings. Sometimes there are so many insights in books that I need to spend a couple of days just on a few words. I want to spend time with these thoughts, nurture and cultivate them, and have them become a part of who I am. I can’t do that if I don’t slow down and unpack all the lessons.
I’ve thought about doing this for books and for articles. And I have almost 100 articles saved in my inbox that I want to read and write about, but I haven’t. So this might be an opportunity for me to get some of that done.
One of the challenges I have is that I like to read, re-read, and then re-read the articles again. I spend more time reading and thinking than I do writing. When I finally sit down to write, I’m overwhelmed by all the ideas, and it takes too long to write. I get hung up on sounding smart and making everything perfect. If I allow myself to move slowly, I can meet my goal. But I worry that it will take too long to get through all the articles and books. What happens if it takes me a whole year to unpack a book. Paradoxically, that’s the entire reason I want to take my time. Think about how well you know something if you stick with it for a whole year. I understand this intellectually, but emotionally it’s hard for me to make that trade-off. I can do tons of shallow reviews or much fewer thorough reviews. But I can’t have both.
Interestingly, the more I think and talk about it but don’t do it, I’m not making any progress at all. So let’s start doing.
I want to explore the first article, “How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You,” by Michael Gervais. It was published in Harvard Business Review on May 2, 2019. It was timely that this article showed up in my feed because I struggle with this concept. In fact, I’ve struggled with it a lot. One interesting manifestation of this is my sensitivity to whether my meeting invites are declined and about declining other people’s invites. When people decline my invite, it feels like they are declining me as a person. It feels like they are rejecting me. Intellectually, I know that’s silly. And even if they were declining me as a person, doing it via email invites is a poor way to do it. I also don’t want to decline a meeting because I don’t know if the other person will think I did it because I don’t like them as a person.
Geesh. The more I write this out, the sillier it sounds. But I cannot deny that it is a thought pattern that causes me grief from time to time. So I hope this article gives me some tips.
The Common Blog 