A Lesson On Mistakes

Most people spend a lot of time worrying about the mistakes they make in life but we should really spend more time thinking about what we can learn from them. I recently made a pretty big mistake myself setting up a blog on a topic I was not confident enough to tackle and this was perhaps pretty arrogant on my part. It is sometimes hard to admit to our mistakes but I have learned some important lessons from this experience that I would like to share with you. While the topic area I was concentrating on may not be relevant to most of you, I think the lessons learned from this mistake are worth considering if you are thinking about setting up a website in a topic you are not fully confident in.

I absolutely love learning new things and seeing as I have a bit of an interest in computer programming I thought I would set up a site to tackle a very well established programming language that I felt had not been adequately covered. My initial thinking was that the subject area of Lisp programming is a vastly complex but interesting subject that is made confusing by a definite lack of clarity and a central site to find information. If you have every tried to look for straightforward lisp programming tutorials and scripts then you will soon realize that they are generally hard to find or incomplete. There does not seem to be one central site which contains all the information in an easy to find place. Considering the programming language is over fifty years old you would think there would be an over abundance of clear information and good looking sites on the topic but this is not the case. To me there is a certain air of superiority amongst lisp programmers and the community can often seem hostile or secretive to newcomers.

My initial idea was that I would set up a website to make it easier for newcomers to this niche area to learn and that I would write about the subject in a way that would make it easy for them to get started. In effect I felt that there was definitely room for improving what had already been done. I wanted to build up a single site where visitors could find all the information they needed neatly in one place. On paper I think this project has the making of something really great and I do not regret giving it a go. I still feel there is a lot of room for a really good looking and well written site covering this topic area. My main obstacle in this project was that I was fairly new to the language myself and I simply did not know enough about lisp programming to make this site work in a blog format. Sometimes you have to admit your limitations and find new ways to tackle problems.

The site received some pretty mixed feedback with some really positive and some negative comments along the way. I think you always need to listen to what your audience is telling you and this time I will gladly admit that I overstretched myself a bit with this project. Only a few months in I ran out of steam and realized that I just do not know enough about this subject area to write the large volume of content needed for this site to really succeed. I will stress however that I have not given up but learned that my initial approach was not working so I have started thinking about new ways to tackle the original problem.

The three things I have learned from the building of this site are:

Take action first and work on solutions as you go

Do not be afraid to make mistakes

Learning from mistakes will make you better

I have personally learned a lot from this project and I will still endeavor to work at it but just in a different format. I have lots of great new ideas for how to proceed and it has already inspired me to redesign a few of my existing websites. I see this project not as a failure but as a good hard lesson that will help me improve my existing websites.

If your ideas don’t work out at first then find new ways to approach your problems. I think the most important lesson learned from this project is to take action on a good idea even if it means you need to change your initial ideas as you go along. If you never take action you will never learn anything new. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and learn from them because they only help you think more clearly in the long run.