The Learning Curve

Pixabay image

I've been trying over the past couple of months to finish writing on two projects.*

For the first time in a very long time, I found it a real challenge to get down to business and put fingers to keyboard to do the actual composition of what amounts to five presentations all due within a few days of each other. I procrastinated over this in November and December. EVERYTHING seemed to take precedence over writing - from the ridiculous to the mundane. You know, that stuff.

While immersed in this procrastination period, I worried whether I was having some kind of performance anxiety. Why couldn't I get down to business? Was I struggling because I had bitten the forbidden fruit of retirement relaxation and lost some of my drive and discipline? Was I feeling like I had less to say on these subjects because I was less active in the day to day of librarianship? Or had I simply lost the confidence to express myself?

January finally kick-started me (as looming deadlines will) and I got 'er done (hurray)!

Then the tinkering started.  I dipped in and out of what I wrote constantly (thank you computers for letting me make constant revisions so easily). No sooner would I say, "I'm done" then a new piece of research would be published, a new blog post from a peer, a new article in the professional journals, a new Twitter thread, a new conversation with colleagues would get me right back to revising and refining my thinking.

If that all wasn't enough, over the past few days, during the amazing Wild WI Winter web conference developed by the equally amazing Jamie Matczak from the Nicolet Federated Library System, I plunged into webinar after webinar (and so can you - all the webinars are archived in the site).

You guys, I learned so much!! And that lightning bolt thought stitched together the last few month's writing delays into a realization.

It wasn't performance anxiety that held me back. It was more that I was learning so continuously that committing to something as a finished product seemed almost sacrilegious. Each revelation adds to my thinking and enlarges my view of librarianship. How can something one writes or thinks or believes ever be truly "finished"?

I don't think I'm alone here. In fact you may be going "She is one dense person. Isn't this obvious?" But that's learning for you.

Our lives are constantly about learning and revising and growing. This best part of our librarianship involves that ability to absorb, debate, revise, change, evolve and build on what we know given all the things we encounter in all the places. I am so appreciative of all the sharing everyone does that helps me keep learning and growing.

And I swear, I'll stop and call the class finished now (oh, look, a link....).

*One was a webinar on my 10 biggest management mistakes for the Wild WI Winter Web conference (above). The other is an upcoming four week class on youth management problem solving for UW-Madison SLIS CE