Success (n.): the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. I know I'm not alone in feeling that sometimes success feels more daunting than failure. Failure is so often an end point, but success must lead to further and greater success in order for it to really count. This translates to more work, greater effort, and in the best of cases, potentially higher reward.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I feel like I've learned a thing or three from my recent adventures in industry-land. Putting new skills into practice has always been a main tenet of teaching -- learn long division, eat it for dinner every night for a week -- and developing my voice and professional relationships will always need doing.
In a concession to my apprentice status, I began speaking up on a small scale, using my least-favorite communication tool to force me to stretch a little: Twitter. A few interactions (tweets? tweet exchanges? does one even "exchange tweets"?) later, I received some easy and excellent answers to my question from two highly successful known quantities in the industry. I solemnly swear to write posts based on their suggestions, but both deserve some extensive time and thought to pull together.
Anyway, each person's response was gracious, unique, and thoughtful, which I'll admit felt somewhat intimidating: They saw my tweet! They read it, oh god, did I make a typo? No, okay. Someone favorited my tweet! Is that even a word? Why is that a verb now? What the heck is a re-tweet, and what does it mean? What do I say now? Emoticons are unprofessional. Do not use. Wait, did they use one? Does that mean I should, too? I haven't answered yet. Has it been too long? Do they hate me now?
Ahem.
This brief venture into the unknown caused the old worrier in me to surface, but only briefly. A silly thing, perhaps, to create such mental buzz about a relatively insignificant step, but progress is progress. Finding my voice and raising it to seek out answers to questions, advice and insight, or venture a comment or two is a brick laid in the foundation, and it's obviously up to me to pursue the personal growth I need to reach my goals.
If I'm going to log this little foray as I success, I have no choice but to follow it up with more -- and better -- attempts. I'm open to suggestions from reader-experts: how do I build on this experience?
P.S. The former English teacher in me cringes at all this "nouning" and "verbing," but I think I got the "favorited" thing correct. Right? Right??