Learning Requires Effort

Learning involves so many things. I thought I had left it all behind when I left school but another kind of learning had crept up. The internet was here and computers came into existence, followed by mobile phones, rather huge clumsy things unlike the sleek smart sophisticated phones of the present.

I wanted to learn how to use a computer so I attended a couple of short courses but having a brain that is not wired to absorbing anything technical, I learned practically nothing. It was too complicated, with the computer language, loops and what nots.

There were floppy disks which had to be slotted into the drives. Anyway, time passed and computers became smaller and cheaper. Then came laptops!! And the mobile phones evolved into smaller ones which you could keep inside your pocket. These gadgets were expensive and I couldn’t afford them. So, it was the old computer on which I hunched over for hours on end trying to get the brain to understand and learn.

By trial and error I discovered how to create a blog on blogger.com using a very basic page. I had a few blogs because I wanted to try things out. Later on, I discovered I couldn’t keep up with managing the blogs so only 2 are left which I sometimes update. Rainbows and Swinging By.

Then I attended a short 3-day course to learn about setting up a website. Oh my, there was a huge learning curve for this non-tecchy grandma. It was a word-press site. I enjoyed posting on this site but I didn’t realise that I needed to have a backup and I didn’t know how to do it either.

Guess what? It disappeared one day and I couldn’t get it all back. How heart sick can that be? On top of that, I forgot to keep tabs on the hosting package, when it had to be renewed. Can a senior foggy brain be blamed for these lapses? All the silly mistakes that could be made because I wasn’t hands on in monitoring the website and the expiry dates, etc, I’ve made them and at such great cost!!

So I started again. This time it was about Facebook. Never heard of it before!! I didn’t even know Google or what it was until my 6 year old granddaughter mentioned it!! I had asked her where she found the lyrics to a song which I couldn’t remember. She replied, “Google, Poh-Poh (grandma). I just went to Google and found it.” Oh boy!!

Well, the trial and error path began all over again. Created facebook pages without knowing that you need a cover/banner and having no idea how to create one even if I had been aware of that!!

To cut the story short, I finally managed to find sites like canva and fiverr which was another tough learning experience itself. So now I managed to create covers for my 2 FB pages, peggychanbooks and yourpuppyneeds/puppydearest.

Fiverr is a site where you can get your covers created for your books. YES!! I started my writing journey. So self-publishing was another huge learning curve!! But it was so very satisfying to complete a book, get its cover done on fiverr and then upload it to amazon.com. I thought that was it, uploading it and putting it out there in the cyber world and people would see my book and buy it.

Boy, was I wrong!! No one saw my book among the hundreds of million books out there. I didn’t know there was marketing!!! I thought marketing was going to buy meat and groceries in the wet market. Or if one wanted to shop in classier shops, then one went to the supermarket where prices are much higher than in the wet market.

How to market, what to do to get your book in front of people who will or will not buy. That is still bugging me still. Advertising!! Writing copy, etc., etc. There is simply no end to learning and not enough time to do it. Age is against me.

My sleep has been sacrificed because of the different time zones in the world. Very good courses are usually held as webinars and always in the US which is on the opposite side of the world. So, the classes I attend usually begin from midnight onwards. Some start at 3 a.m. How crazy is that?

So now I’m wondering, is sleep deprivation worth the learning?  Especially when I’m tech disadvantaged, a befuddled brain when it comes to tech stuff and more pain than gain. Should I just throw in the towel and as a relative put it “Why suffer? Just put your feet up and enjoy the tv serials. After all you have retired and you should be enjoying life, not hunch over a computer for hours.”

Meanwhile, the clock ticks on…..