Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
– “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor
When I first read that quote, it made me laugh. Then, it puzzled me. It made me question myself*, because most things that give me pleasure are small: a flaky pastry, a smooth cup of coffee, the smell of dew on a cool summer morning.
And these:
On the rare occasion that I’ve played an online game that awards badges, I didn’t care a whit about the little digital trophies. But on my blog? I get a jolt of glee every time one pops up on my phone. They totally motivate me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about drive lately, and in fact am reading the bookDrive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Uson the recommendation of a friend and colleague. I would classify myself as an intrinsically driven person. I often get so wrapped up in creating, whether writing, blogging, photographing, or working on my reading project, that I have to actively pull myself out of my own head and pay attention to my family and life.
Nobody is giving me anything for my writing, blogging, or photographs. I do them because I can’t not do them. I identified immediately with this statement the author makes in the early pages of Drive:
Enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on [a] project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.
At the same time, at work we’ve been discussing intrinsic vs. external motivation, and what it means to want external validation for a job well done. I find this discussion fascinating because of this key question: does a desire for external recognition indicate that a person is not sufficiently driven internally?
It seems paradoxical that someone who is driven from the inside would need recognition from the outside, but I am a walking example that it’s possible to enjoy both. My husband teases me about my love of praise. What can I say? I respond to positive re-enforcement.
Like “You’re on a streak!” trophies.
Internal drive and external appreciation do not have to be either/or, and they are not at odds with each other. Instead they work together to create a positive feedback loop. Even if it’s a simple digital badge. When I see that streak badge, I’m like, “Hell yeah! I’m kicking ass!” and I am inspired to keep posting.
*And that man in the Flannery O’Connor quote who was depressed by his mother’s small pleasures? I realized after finishing the story that he was the questionable one.
Note: on publication of this I will be on a 14 day streak. YEAHHH!
The Daily Post has a Photography 101 course coming up as part of the Blogging University series, and I’ll be helping out with the course (yay!). I may even participate by posting some photographs here on my blog (double yay!).
The course will run June 8 through July 3. Join us – it will be fun 🙂
When I originally started Butterfly Mind, I planned my site to be an online home for writing. I wanted words to be the focus – I didn’t foresee using photographs at all – and I selected Oulipo, a journalist theme (layout), to highlight that intention.
Recently, I’ve been feeling the limitations of that choice. I’ve started posting more images on my site, and my original theme was not kind to photography. The column was too narrow to showcase landscape layouts, and there were no options to feature images.
But aside from that, I felt an itch to move the furniture.
Back in June, Cheri Lucas Rowlands wrote about her choice to redesign her blog. She got my wheels turning, and I think I browsed the WordPress.com theme showcase at the time – just to see. I didn’t do anything with my site then, but the seed had been planted. Though I didn’t water or feed it, it grew anyway.
When I returned from Hawaii, I returned inspired. More fluid. Vulnerable to beauty. The past few nights I’ve been staying up, computer on my lap in the big comfy chair, while my husband watches The Walking Dead. I signed up for a free site, set it to private, imported all of my content from Butterfly Mind, and started playing with themes.
I tried several that didn’t suit me, then found a post highlighting themes for writers on Hot Off the Press, the WordPress.com news blog. From there I narrowed my choices down to two. I tweaked widget areas, played with featured images, rearranged menus. And I ultimately decided (with our 9 year old daughter’s help) on Hemingway Rewritten; I was a little giddy that the theme that works best for my blog is named for one of my favorite authors.
The influence of Hawaii is obvious in my color choices and header image, and what I love about Hemingway Rewritten is that it still offers a sidebar like my previous theme, but it eliminates a third column by moving the menu to the top.
Now photographs can take up more space. They can breathe. And I particularly love that I can customize a particular post’s header by attaching a featured image, like here, here, and here. Of course, that means I need to go through nearly 300 posts to attach featured images, but that’s okay – my husband has a lot of Walking Dead to watch.
In the month of October, I focused a large portion of my extracurricular work time on training new Automatticians and Happiness Engineer trials. We covered tools, tickets, tone – and in every session, a trainee taught me something new.
This is a reason I love to teach. The joy of a student’s discovery is always contagious, and that delights me, but I also love teaching because I learn. Trainees’ questions show me gaps in my approach, our tools, our assumptions, my own knowledge; their strategies show me new thought processes and workflows; their knowledge enlightens me in areas I previously lacked insight.
The student becomes the teacher.
For the month of November I am super excited about another opportunity for this exchange of knowledge: starting Monday November 3, I will be providing support for the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero course. I am giddy for the opportunity. New and experienced bloggers are going to bring a freshness and impart unique perspectives to each other and to those of us helping out. I can’t wait to see how everyone approaches the daily assignments, and I’m eager to help bloggers navigate their WordPress.com dashboards, find themes, fidget with widgets, and press that beautiful blue Publish button.
I’ve been through almost all of the Blogging U courses, and even after several years of blogging, I learned new tricks from the assignments and the community. Now, as a former student, I will (sort of) be a teacher. That’s kind of awesome.
Whether you are new to blogging or are a seasoned pro, these courses are approachable, fun, flexible, and free – did I mention they are free? I encourage you to take advantage of them if you have any interest in blogging, writing, or photography. And if you do decide to sign up, I’ll be there, ready to support you, and ready to learn from you.
Do you want to be a blogging superhero? Register here for Blogging 101 or the brand new Photography 101. Courses begin November 3, 2014.
I just realized I posted my first Butterfly Mind entry two years ago today. We lived in Minnesota at the time and I was supposed to be packing up the house to prepare for our cross-country move. Instead I started a blog. Since then I’ve published more than 250 posts and am still loving every minute of it. Thank you, readers, for making it so much fun to be here. Here’s that debut entry.
WordCamp. It wasn’t a camp for writers, or even for word nerds. It was a camp for WordPress wonks, and I loved every second. I must have said ten times, “I feel like I’m on this level,” as I swished my hand parallel to the ground, back and forth at my waist, “And all of you are up here,” and I swished my other hand above my head. “But that’s okay,” I’d say, and I’d smile, and I’d mean it.
I was one of only a handful of writers there, one of a handful of bloggers, and instead of intimidating me, being among all those web designers actually made me feel special. At a writers’ retreat there would be so much opportunity for comparison, for reading someone else’s work and thinking I’ll never be that good, that the thought of a writers’ retreat kind of frightens me. But at WordCamp I didn’t compare myself to these people who write, but in a different language: they write in code.
The rooms, full of creatives, hipster beards and mustaches, fun colorful fingernails and patterned blouses, glasses, web designers, plugin writers, theme developers, who all make beautiful, elegant things only with a different medium from mine, they energized me instead of making me feel less than. I never felt stupid despite how much I did not know. Instead I felt awe, an emotion I predict will appear on the list of core values I plan to construct as soon as I finish this free write.
One of the speakers, Alicia Murray, when she spoke about work life blog balance she posted a slide with a quote from Albert Einstein: a fish is going to feel stupid if it tries to climb a tree (or something like that – find quote) –
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
– and I could totally relate. She was advising us not to compare, which is a very, very difficult thing to do when I’m surrounded by talented writers. But in a room full of talented code poets, I don’t compare myself. I just thank the internet gods that these poets exist so that they can make us beautiful websites on which we can write our words.
The conference, I should say for all the bloggers who follow me, was not a writing event, and it wasn’t a blogging event either. In fact, it was not a WordPress.com event. It was geared more to the nuts and bolts of designing, developing, and using websites powered by WordPress using WordPress.org (there’s a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, in case you didn’t know). As @Ashevillean tweeted
Wordcamp: NOT a writing event. WordPress-friendly conference for tech professionals: developers, designers, content creators, & more #wcavl
I knew that going in, and I loved that aspect of it, but I just wanted to let all of you know that in case you are considering attending a WordCamp. There were content and beginner tracks, but you need to know ahead of time that the language you hear might be unfamiliar. I used to have a self-hosted website for my soap company, a site that was powered by WordPress.org, and so I was familiar with the language many of the speakers used: plugins, FTP, PHP.
And, with your everyday WordPress.com blogger, very little of that applies.
When we had the self-hosted site I felt like half my time was consumed with managing the website: which plugins to use, which ones had glitches, how to resize my images to fit the theme, who to host the site, how to alter colors, fonts, headers. All by hand. All with very little knowledge. And while we had complete control over the look and functionality of our site, it ate a lot of time I could have spent making soap, or better yet, writing. It was a powerful, robust platform for our e-commerce site, but for blogging, I’m thrilled to use the streamlined WordPress.com and know all that is taken care of. I don’t have to sift through 500 “follow” plugins to find the one that works. If something goes wrong with my site I don’t have to disassemble it and reconstruct, piece by piece to find where the problem was. It’s all there for me and all I have to do is pop in my words.
That being said, I like to know how things work, and I learned a ton this weekend about things I can do within my WordPress.com site to tweak and improve if I so choose, and I understand the back end of a website much better now. I feel empowered by that. On top of sitting in on some great content sessions, I took a refresher on basic CSS so if I want to customize colors or fonts, I can. I learned some SEO tips so I can become more findable when folks are searching for creative nonfiction or literature resources. I learned the basic anatomy of a blog-perfect-story, and how to find balance in my life when I add a job to the mix of blog and family.
And the takeaway I am perhaps most excited about: a link to how to determine my personal core values. Those values will provide guidance as I try to navigate my career path, my blog posts, my writing. Because it’s when you’re writing about what you care about that your voice will come through, and when you have a niche-less (i.e. everything) blog like I do, the thing that holds it all together is not a topic or a product or a theme, it’s the author’s voice. The continuity, the It thing in a flitting, butterfly-minded blog, is the voice. And the way to find and use that voice is to write about your passion, the things you value most. Like family; like words; like nature. Like awe.
