When does a Newbie stop being a Newbie?
There was a time when I could accurately describe myself as a newbie internet marketer. But I need to figure out what I am now. Sometimes I think like an expert, and sometimes I behave like a novice.
I’ve been learning about Internet Marketing for several years, so it’s time I call myself something other than Newbie.
But what?
Looking for an analogy, I cast my mind back to some years ago when my wife and I arrived at a new church. We discovered that there were groups for young and older adults but nothing similar for people in our age range. So, we started a new group called the Tweenies. This name for our group was fair enough, except we started referring to the older group as the Wrinklies. I don’t think they liked that!
Age-wise I am now a Wrinkly. But when it comes to Internet marketing, I must be somewhere in the middle, between a newbie and a veteran. However, sometimes I feel more like a toddler. Mind you, when I think of my son’s computer ability as a youngster, that insults toddlers.
Left Bemused and Flabbergasted
The first computer I bought was a Commodore 16, which gives my age away. Many of you may be too young to have even heard of it. The thing is, I bought it thinking that I could teach my 4-year-old son computing. Unfortunately, I either underestimated his ability or overestimated mine. He was reading machine code within a few weeks, and I was left bemused and flabbergasted.
Fast forward almost 40 years, and I still need to catch up with him. True, I know a lot about Internet Marketing. Yet often, I get stumped by something or another because there are so many different approaches and pieces of software that it’s impossible to get to know them all.
This week I’ve been trying to get to grips with WordPress and Optipress. It should have been straightforward, easy-peasy. Because, after all, I was following prerecorded step-by-step instructions. But even our brilliant tutor couldn’t be expected to think of everything or cover everything that could go wrong.
Struggling with Incompatible Plugins
I struggled to get the Optipress page builder to work. In the end, I deactivated most of the WordPress Plugins in case one or more of the third-party plugins was incompatible with Optipress. However, it was such a relief when the templates appeared on the screen.
Then when I’d almost completed the training session, my pages went haywire, and I felt I had no option but to scrub most of it and start all over again, which I did. But I messed that up too.
Whatever I did, I lost that day’s work and much of my previous work too. If I’d paused for a moment, I would have realised that all I had to do was press a button, and the backup files from the day before would have restored my work.
If I were a toddler, I could have thrown a hissy fit. But I have to act my age. And anyhow, what’s the use of throwing a tantrum when there’s no one around to see it?
Failure Could Be The Key To Your Success
Still, if everything had gone smoothly, there are some lessons which I would not have learned at this point. Indeed that’s the stuff of life. But the truth is we can learn more from our failures than from our successes. Though only if we want to learn from our mistakes and failures.
If you were to ask me for the best tip for learning from failure, I’d say, “Never give up”.
Sometimes we are tempted to give up when things go wrong, but we’ve all been there. So stick with it, and you might find that learning from failure could be your key to success.
I still don’t know what to call myself, but it doesn’t matter because I’m a lifelong learner.
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P.S If you go to the HOME page, you will find a form where you can download a FREE book (PDF) called “Why You’ll Never Succeed Online”
