Whoops! This post is a little late, but I will still count it as a daily post because it's the wee hours of the morning, which, in my head, are counted as the late hours of last night.
Anyway, this post is about expanding your horizons and how it can be so very frustrating at times.
Take the example of my brief stint as a transcriptionist. I have been working with an interview for my forthcoming post at Refuse the Silence*, and I found it extremely difficult. I was omitting words and going back over things four to seven different times just to get things right. My punctuation was all flubbed and I had to do some serious editing to bring it up to the standardized interview transcript state. Thankfully, it is now quite well done and I feel happy about the work that I put in.
The point of this story is that, in trying something new, my experience was less than perfect. It was downright mediocre in the beginning. And I think that applies to anything and everything you first try at. I was also listening to a podcast today that told me about the history of home economics (actually, it's a fascinating topic), and I found that the most intriguing part was the assumption that women did not automatically make good homemakers - they needed science and depth of analysis. That agrees well with my personal viewpoints, both by breaking the stereotype that a woman is a natural nurturer and by showing off one of my favorite self-motivators: you have to try things.
Try and fail. Try and succeed. Try and do an ok-not-quite-perfect job. But just try them out - maybe you'll make a method and set a trend.
That's what I'm telling myself about pretty much all my projects right now; from grant proposals to NaNo to knitting myself a skirt, there's no harm in first trys.
*If you are interested in reading this interview that I did with a certain awesome Barnard administrative director, please look out for my post in the next week or so at Refuse the Silence.
