About lowering the bar
I did it! I made it! My very first blog post! Not quite how I’d imagined or planned it whatsoever, but maybe that’s kind of the point.
Want to read this article in Norwegian instead? You can!
Hi! My name is Lene, and I’m a procrastinator.
I’ve been wanting my own blog for maaaaany years. So many years actually that the name I chose for the blog no longer makes any sense. More on that later. At least I think I want a blog, but surely there’s a reason I never made it happened? Until now! I love writing, I always have. For me, writing is a kind of therapy where I get things out of my head and suddenly they make sense. So I thought, being the logical person I am, having a blog made perfect sense!
That’s how I work with design too, everything is a massive jumble in my head, and then it magically makes sense once I get it down onto paper. I’m a designer. Graduated as a graphic designer, now I’ve worked in the design field for over 20 years. You can read more about that here if you like (article in Norwegian)
That is almost guaranteed to be one of the reasons my “dream of a blog” has been so hard to realise. The designer’s curse. When you make something for yourself it HAS to be perfect. I need the perfect layout, the perfect font, the perfect colours… It is like my entire career and all my work up until now are suddenly going to be presented for the whole world to judge. No wonder performance anxiety wins.
I have written articles before, the article on UX Norge is just one example. Maybe this isn’t my first blog post after all? Maybe all that performance anxiety was for nothing?
On top of that, I’m not the kind of person that wants to work in my free time. I get enough of work at work. I love my job and my profession, but in my free time I’ve got loads of other hobbies I’d rather spend my time with. As a good friend once said; I don’t want my hobby to become my job. I think it’s important to keep those two worlds separate.
Oh right, blog!
Every year, usually around New Year’s, I get a fresh burst of motivation. NOW is the time! I open the Figma file with the blog design, browse WordPress templates, talk to that friend of mine who’s promised to help me with the code, and I tweak the text of “the very first blog post” that I’ve been writing for about five years now, which has just been sitting there for my eyes only. A few weeks pass, the daily grind returns, and nothing blog-related happens.
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One of the challenges with postponing things is that things happen. Life happens, things change. The name of the blog; Garden of Lene, came to me on a beautiful summer day at Lian many years ago, while the blog idea still were just a tiny seed, guessing around 2020. I was sitting outside in the garden, feeling very content, almost like I was in my own little paradise. Life was falling into place, everything was good. And suddenly it floated in on the summer breeze what the blog just had to be called! Not the Garden of Eden, but Garden of Lene! It couldn’t have been more perfect! I bought the domain straight away.
I probably should have foreseen that it is actually NOT the most perfect name… By the time I’ve finally managed to post “my first blog post”, gardening and growing vegetables have become one of my biggest passions. It was never the plan for Garden of Lene to be a gardening blog, I didn’t even start gardening until we bought the house in Vanvikan in 2020 and I finally actually had my own garden. It probably doesn’t help that the Instagram account I created with the same name around that same time, now is used to share photos and tips from the vegetable garden.
No matter, I’m gonna give it a go, I got a gut feeling.
New Year 2026 was no exception when it came to thoughts about the blog. I was ABSOLUTELY sure 2020 was going to be the year. Then I got a fresh boost in 2022 and was convinced THAT was the year. January 2025, NOW the time had come! Or not. I’m very good at procrastinating. The queen of procrastination at times. But I also really love that feeling of having completed something.
I always set the bar VERY high for myself. In everything. My expectations of myself are many magnitudes higher than anyone else’s expectations of me. For anything to happen at all, I simply had to lower the bar! People don’t read blog posts because the layout is so pretty and perfect, or the font and colours are so carefully chosen, they read for the content. Content first, as a designer I should know this. (Although I have actually stopped reading content because the design was awful.) The user experience is important, of course, but Medium has actually done a very good job here. You’d almost think this is what they make a living from…
So I lowered the bar, pulled out my logo and some colours from the Figma sketches, and decided to use a ready-made tool instead of building it from scratch myself. A tool I’ve actually been paying for for five years… I even wrote this entire “first blog post” from scratch and ditched the one that’s just been sitting there. It can keep sitting there. So this thing you’re reading right now is my very first blog post under the “Garden of Lene”-name, after at least five years of procrastination. Not that perfect post I had imagined, with perfect design where I’d chosen the perfect, most readable font, text width and layout myself. Medium’s font is very readable actually, and the layout is good. Both actually quite similar to my Figma sketches…
Being the queen of procrastination that I am, I thought of this Medium idea around January 1st. Fixed up the account, uploaded the logo and made a draft with a few bullet points… and then put it aside again. But, since I’m fond of “signs from nature”, I took the fact that my hibiscus suddenly stood there in beautiful, full bloom on a January day with -9 degrees outside, as a sign to just go for it.
The message?
My message in this somewhat impulsive, unplanned first blog post: (because you don’t just create things without a reason, you have something you want to convey or share, something you think others might benefit from) Don’t set the bar so incredibly high for yourself. No one has higher expectations of you than you do. Try lowering the bar, start small, and see if it doesn’t actually turn out just fine anyway!
No one has higher expectations of you than you do.
Anything is better than doing nothing, right? Give it a try ! I can’t guarantee anything, tho, the world might just implode tomorrow because I posted “the wrong way”…
Disclaimer 1: The world didn’t implode
Disclaimer 2: The original post in Norwegian is completely AI-free, but I did have some “help” getting started on this translation.
