Turning Failure into Learning Experiences and Using WA to Build Your Website

byMargarethe

386 followers

Updated 9 years ago

So, I do a lot of research and development in my home kitchen aka playing mad scientist while baking cookies and some days just turn out to be utter, wait for it, learning experiences.

You thought I was going to say failures didn't you? That's okay, because most people do.

Today, I tried to make a batch of peanut butter cookies using a different kind of nut butter as a substitute for kids who can't eat peanut butter. Seemed simple enough, but the proteins in the nut butter and the egg combined in such a way that the oils started weeping out of the dough. Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.

I sallied forth and baked the dough, just to see what it would do. The "cookies" turned out not terrible, but not good. The recipe definitely leaves some room for tweaking!! I need some emulsifiers in there and perhaps a different kind of binder than eggs, but I digress.

That recipe as it stands now is a failure, but the whole process is a learning experience. I learned a lot about the chemistry that is happening when creating a dough. I will write it down and create content for my website, helping others to avoid that issue when they try to recreate the recipe. So actually it turned into a win-win for me and my future readers.

This same attitude applies when creating a website or for life as a whole. There are combos of things that will work and combos of things that will not work. You have to be willing to take a step back, look at the larger picture of things and tweak what you are doing here and there. WA has already done a lot of the leg work and website building "recipe" tweaking so that you don't have to.

In my life I've had to do a lot of stepping back and looking at the larger picture. I was so focused on getting the one recipe in my head to work, but I never changed it. Metaphorically, I kept trying to bake the same wrong recipe over and over again, just in different ovens. It never worked. Now I am at a place where I've scrapped the original recipe of my life and started from scratch again, moving in an entirely different direction. I've had to find different keywords, create different content and create a whole new me that connects with a larger audience and gets a better response from life. Same as a website. Same as a reworked recipe.

I've been finding a lot of information on WA. Most of it goes waaaaayyyyy over my head, but I am continuing. Not with a dogged determination of I have to get this done a certain way or I'll fail miserably and be a total failure for my whole life...like I used to be, but with an open heart, mind and attitude of well, if it doesn't work today let's try a different approach and it will work eventually.

Today was a learning experience and I appreciate it. Now I am going to go bake a batch of cookies with a tried and true recipe. Kind of like using the WA "recipe" to building a website. It works so use it until you have enough information to start tweaking the recipe.