If you have been wondering where all my posts for the One Post A Day challenge are, then you can heave a sigh of relief and get on with your life. You haven’t missed anything; in fact, I basically had to pull out before I ever really got started. Wow, you say to yourself, how pathetic is that? I agree. However, the best I have to offer is this quote on failure by Herbert Swope:
“I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a
formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
When I heard about Cole’s call for daily quality posts, I thought that would be a great idea. Really, I did. I might not have all the topics laid out before the month even began (like that darned showoff Reginald Golding), and I’m not smart enough to get my blog post out of the way the evening before (wish Cole had let that helpful hint slip a little earlier), but I thought I could give it the old college try. Ha. That would be like my first attempt at an 8:00am calculus class as a UT freshman: FAIL. I won’t go into the specifics but, quite simply, what I thought was an
excellent idea in theory just simply couldn’t have come at a worse time in practice. Between getting 58 course sections ready for fall
semester opening, completing my work on the Learning Design Summer
Camp, negotiating co-worker’s vacation schedules, and a few curve balls
from left field in my personal life, I realized that even I am human,
and this current workload is not. I still have a number of posts in my
mind–and in draft– on my machine. But as the boys in the ETS Talk
podcast pointed out (although they were kind enough not to mention me
specifically), I simply failed to perform on this challenge.
So I am going to brush this dirt off my shoulder and move on. I could totally guilt myself into a corner, but I have more things that need to be done, and need to be done well. I am incredibly excited about the Learning Design Summer Camp, and I am happy to be a part of it. So I will engage with my community at camp, and I will do it well; and perhaps I will shift this challenge to another month when I can manage some breathing space. Until then, if I happen to hear you whistling a certain tune from Queen, I’ll smile and try to shrug off my stumble. After all, one good quote deserves another, and this one from Denis Waitley sums me up pretty darn well.
“Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.”
I’ll see you at camp.
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