Learn By Doing- Help Me Edition

When the words are flowing fast and furious from my fingertips I never stop to think about whether people will read my words or if they will like them. I just write.

Out on the basketball court when I let the game come to me and I don’t think about what I am doing I make more baskets, grab more rebounds, make more assists and play better defense.

I like looking at those two areas because I see them as being representative of life. They cover success in both the mental and physical arenas and that is what I am looking for.

So I ask myself several questions:

1. What am I doing right?
2. How do I apply that to my entire life?
3. What am I doing wrong?
4. How do I avoid making those mistakes over and over again.

And that is how we reach the:

Learn By Doing- Help Me Edition

The premise of the learn by doing-help me edition is very simple. The best way to learn how to do something is to get off your butt and do it. Turn theory into practice and find out what is involved in whatever it is you want to do by doing it.

Now obviously this doesn’t always translate well. I am not suggesting that we can learn how to become brain surgeons by cutting open the skulls of random strangers or that you should learn how to fly a plane by knocking out the pilot on your next transAtlantic flight.

But we are not talking about extreme examples. Our focus here is upon blogging and I can tell you that the best lessons I have learned have come from my willingness to step outside of my comfort zone and try things.

I can provide a number of concrete examples:

• When I didn’t like the way this joint looked I made changes that were more significant than just purchasing a new theme. I messed around with HTML and CSS. I tinkered with this and that and if I broke something I figured out how to fix it.
• Promotion- I started reaching out to my community and asked you to become fans of my Facebook page and or follow me on various social media platforms.

There are lots of other examples but I want to take a moment highlight the newest leap of faith, my newsletter. That was a bigger step for me than you might realize. I almost didn’t do it because I wasn’t really sure that it made sense. I wasn’t sure that I could fill it or that people would want to subscribe.

But I thought about it and I came up with a few things. It might sound silly to you but sometimes am I surprised that anyone reads my words. Sometimes I am surprised that I am not being used as a cure for insomnia.

When I thought about my desire to live my dreams and to write books a newsletter made sense to me. It made sense to use it to help build the community and to communicate more intimately with those who wish to join me on my journey.

So I took a leap of faith and opened my account with AWeber. Took a leap of faith and decided that I would share my journey with you and talk about my growing pains. I don’t want to embarrass myself, but I might make a few mistakes here. I might screw a few things up, but I believe in learning by doing.

Help Me

This is where you come in. I have ideas and  a rough plan for what I want to do with the newsletter but I want to hear from you. What do you want to see in it? Many of you use Feedburner’s email subscription service to read these posts so I expect that I will probably turn that off and ask you to subscribe via AWeber.

But that isn’t going to be it is only purpose. Like I said I have plans, but I want to know what you would like to hear/see in it. You are always welcome to email me directly but it would be great if we started a discussion in the comments too.

What do you think?