Doing the Write (sic) thing.

I noticed today that this blog is now approaching 400 entries and that according to the google statistics there have been over 60,000 page views.

Now there is no-one more surprised than me that I have found so many things to write and that so many people have taken time to read them - and some have felt moved to comment too. All this from a boy whose Headmaster described him as an "intellecual philistine" and took it upon himself to provide additional tutoring in the art of writing. I remember slogging one summer over an essay I was set entitled "A man is what he is, what he thinks he is and what others think he is; discuss". This was long before word processing and had to be drafted and written long hand. I seem to recall it was 10,000 words, but my memory may exaggerate. I know it felt like that. As I write this I think I may still have that piece in a briefcase at home and I am feeling tempted to pull it out and see how bad it was.

My Headmaster did concede one thing towards the end of our time working togather and that was while (in his assessment) I had no style, when he read what I had written he could always hear me speaking it. It was something of a personal stamp.

He also had me write poetry, but that is another story for another day.

The criticism I received from my Headmaster probably set in my mind that I was not good with words. Certainly in my early career, at interviews, this was  the "weakness" I would confess to. I certainly disliked writing long hand and indeed still do. It seemed as if my mind worked faster than I could write and I quickly grew bored of editting and redrafting my work.

It is possible that one could trace my rebirth back to my Amstrad 8512. This was pretty much the first retail word processor and personal computer. It came with a word processing package and printer as standard and a fully integrated processor screen and disc drive (two, I think). I have since moved to PCs, owning one with word processing since the late 1980's. I have used them for my studies and so much more. I have even attempted to write a book a couple of times, but without conclusion so far.

I took up blogging at around the time my career was making a detour. I started looking at how I could create more of a personal brand. I had no idea what was involved with blogging, but thought I would give it a go and see. Initially I did it through another identity in order to protect myself if it was a disaster. The question was what to blog about?

I thought about this for a while without finding a specific topic, so in the end I decided to blog about things I found interesting in the hope that other people would too. I used the moniker "Tales of an Active Mind" and started posting and eclectic mix of things - indeed much the same as I do today.

Last year I came out of the blogging closet and pooled all my material under IanJSutherland and have only used that name since.

As noted in a recent blog I have also entered a short story competition and am slightly nervous to see how my debut effort stacks up against the other entrants.

All in all I guess I need to recalibrate my thinking about words as a weakness.

I did adjust elements in the past, but referring to words as being "relatively weak" compared with my fierce abilities with numbers and patterns. This was partly to play the interview game, but also followed three realisations. The first was that many project managers were coming to me to help them write the textual elements of their plans and reports - I was seen as being pretty good at communicating with stakeholders. Linked with this was the realisation that my generation were given a much sounder education in grammar and English than the following year groups, giving me an edge over many younger managers. The last was when being assessed for a senior job and my verbal reasoning result placed me in the 98th percentile of those involved in Finance. OK that is a skewed sample as it would not include the naturally artisitic, like true writers, journalists, actors, etc, but was still something of a wake up call.

So back to today, I plan to give myself a pep-talk and remove "words" from my list of personal weaknesses. That is not to say I can or will become complacent, or stop striving to improve, but there is no reason to put myself down when the evidence suggests the weakness is primarily in my head and not in any rational assessment.

I am far from being a writer, but I can write; I just need to remind myself.