During Laurie Miller’s presentation on digital eminence, she asked us to set an example for people by making sure all of our posts were relevant and meaningful.

That didn’t feel right, and I wanted to understand why.

I realized that I want people to see that they have permission to fail. To write boring things.

Blogs written by professional writers are inspiring. Tweets by stand-up comedians can be consistently amusing. But you can’t get to that point without slogging through the boring bits. Master photographers take thousands of pictures that will never see the light of day. The best baseball players still miss half of all their shots. You can’t be excellent if you’re terrified of imperfection.

You need to write badly in order to learn how to write well. That is, you need to give yourself permission to share, to make mistakes, to have errors and failed experiments.

So my contribution to helping people increase their digital eminence is this: I will be human, imperfect, and actively learning, and I hope that will help people see that it’s okay.