What just happened?

Some of you might not know this, but Thursday is actually a big day over here. On that day, Tea with Liya will have been around for a year. It might sound like a long time, but really, 10 years from now it won't.

In my last Saturday post, I was talking about trying new things. But it's hard to do that when you don't know what to try. How do you know what things will succeed and what things won't? How do you know what ideas are good? How do you eventually decide something to do?

My answer is: you look back.


What do I mean by that? Well, I've been here almost a year. Right? I have 61 posts that I can look at. I can scroll back through my post archive and see what things were successful - what you liked and what I liked. What things I would want to change in the future.

For example, I noticed that my first posts were significantly shorter than the ones I'm writing now. That's probably a part of doing something for the first time. After a few months, I started making them longer.

I also noticed on my YouTube channel that I was putting in a little 5-second musical intro before the actual song. I started wondering why practically no one was listening to the song all the way to the end. Then I realized that the intro could have been confusing people. So I got rid of it, and that helped with keeping you around.

I've also played similar songs to ones that you seemed to like... and the list will probably go on for a while.

After enough time and enough looking, you can start to get a sense of what is working. And don't start tearing yourself up because of something that didn't work before. You can't change the past, but you can change the future. I'm sure there aremusicians that would tell you to listen to recordings of yourself playing. You can pull out some good ideas from your solo that you didn't really know about, and see how you can improve on playing that song, and things like that.

What I'm really saying is that by looking at what you've done in the past, you can improve for the future. And this doesn't just apply to music. In fact, I was thinking of it applying to a lot more things. Hopefully drinking your tea can help you find out how much sugar you need for it.

(By the way, a little side thing. If you happen to also be interested in popular songs, I've started putting those out on my YouTube channel every Sunday. If you want to look at those, just click here.)

What do you think about what I've said? Have you tried it? Please leave a comment and let me know!