Thanks for checking out the blog, I'm guessing if you've landed on this page then you've read the about section. I'll need to think of another bartending joke to fit in with interviewing here. Leave it with me...
I used to love writing blogs when I was younger, one of the greatest rejections I've ever gotten in my life was from the Irish times.
When I was doing my leaving cert, I was also writing for a website called AllHonours.ie. It was a load of 6th year students who would write a blog about their experiences in THE WORST YEAR OF THEIR LIFE (at the time). There was about 12 of us, some people posting once a week, others once a month. It was a virtual "Here's how much study I'm doing, so you should feel crap about yourself" boasting competition. That didn't really apply to me however, I was more down for keeping it real on the blogsphere.
A couple of weeks before the leaving cert, I was contacted by a writer for the Irish Times. Every year they have a student who will do a piece every day for the paper about the leaving. How they were getting on, how everybody was feeling, how many candles elderly relatives had lit for you, the usual stuff. I was told they really liked my style of writing and the stuff I was producing so they asked me to do one more piece so she could give it to her editor.
At this stage I was set on going to college to study Journalism. What a time this had come at, I was going to get the points and head off to college with a bit of exposure and experience contributing to the Irish times. At this point, only the gif below could describe how I felt.
I wrote the piece and the editor didn't like it, I wrote another one and it was even worse. The writer who contacted me initially said she didn't know what was different, but the two pieces just weren't the same. I felt I had wrote them no differently than my other pieces but in the end they went with someone else.
My writing was too colloquial, it didn't have great structure loads of things that really annoyed me. Someone else got the gig and I read every article and I thought that 100% should have been me. That person was not better than I was. When in reality, she definitely was.
This is where I learned the lesson, it's something that's stuck by me since then, and has proved true in almost everything I've done since.
Rejection and failure are all apart of the process. When you screw up at something you learn the lesson and you adapt and change. There's never anything wrong with getting something wrong, failing or making mistakes. It's learning from all of these things that define the person in the future.
It was this rejection that made me realise my writing style wasn't that of a journalist. Even now if you read back over this, it's likely all over the place and reads like I'm speaking or telling a story. That's always been the way I preferred to write to begin with. It was also this rejection that prompted me to stop writing about the MMA shows I attended, and start to focus on interviewing the fighters in an audio format, which subsequently evolved into a video one.
Now here we are :)
Thanks for checking it out, I've a lot of similar stories and tales from a couple of years traveling and other experiences. Hopefully i'll be able to keep this blog updated quite regularly.
Andrew.