At the start of this year I had an idea while out on a run: A website for English students that would help me reach a larger audience than the conversation groups I was hosting each week. I envisioned a variety of different types of content, from short stories and blog posts to interviews with everyday students around the world. There was endless ESL (English as a Second Language) content out there, but none of it felt practical or accessible. My students weren’t searching for explanations of the past perfect tense. Instead, they were asking for recommendations for easy-to-read articles, short stories and TV shows with simple plots, and tips from their peers about how to improve fluency. I could fill that void.
As far as running epiphanies go, this one had staying power. I settled on the name Bare Naked English – “Only what you need to learn” – and my first blog post explained the play on words in the site’s title: “Bare vs. Bear Explained.” My logo was, you guessed it, a big brown bear.
I built a website, and wrote out a couple of future posts and short stories. My cousin drew up a handful of cartoons and I interviewed my COVID pen pal and now friend Farith, in Bolivia. I bought a Blue Yeti microphone and recorded audio versions of my posts. I solicited testimonials from past students and international friends that spoke to my abilities as a teacher.
At times it was very exciting work. I let myself imagine a future in which I spent a month traveling in South America, interviewing students I’d met online and dropping Bare Naked business cards in cafes and libraries. I had no plans to monetize the site, but dreamed instead of 1,000 readers or more.
The problem was time. I didn’t have enough of it, and I spent as much time worrying about not working on the project as I did working on it. I knew when I launched the website I would need a steady stream of content to keep students engaged, and I couldn’t find the time in my week to generate that steady stream. My first pass at a student interview took weeks to plan, hours to transcribe, and when all was said and done I wasn’t a very good first time interviewer. It was hard to imagine tackling the uphill climb ahead without serious changes to my schedule. Added on top was the return to “normal” life and all the diversions that came with it, particularly the disappearance of my free Saturdays and Sundays.
So here we are, heading into the final two months of 2021, and Bare Naked English is just sitting there, collecting dust in the ether. I haven’t logged onto the backend in a couple of months and have no plans to launch the site in the future. It’s an abandoned, fully-completed pilot project that cost me a few hundred dollars and dozens of hours of time. It’s a failure.
While there’s no laundry list of useful lessons to come from this experience, two things stick out with hindsight:
- It is very hard to build something in the free time outside of work, and
- It’s infinitely harder when that free time is already split between multiple other commitments
Bare Naked English had some promise, but only with my full attention. And I wasn’t willing to give it that. Something to keep in mind for next time: Define the scope of a new project in advance and make sure I’m up for the commitment.
Sitting here now, I feel a bit like a coward for having never launched the damn thing, and a bit like a hero for taking it as far as I did. The website doesn’t look half bad, and only after pulling it all together could I make an informed decision to abandon it. It’s a weird place to be, but that’s where I’m at.
Zooming out, there’s a delicate balance to strike here. How do I test out new ideas without committing too much time to bad ones? And how do I keep myself from bouncing between ideas without giving each one enough of a chance? Anyone who’s ever tried writing fiction knows what I’m talking about here. The minute your creativity encounters an obstacle, it’s tempting to just jump ship altogether to the next idea. The discipline to resist that urge does not come easy.
One salve in all of this is my personal website, EF Writing Project. I’ve now been at it for over two years, since August 2019, and that consistency has given me confidence that I can in fact stick with something worthwhile. At times I’ve had zero new ideas, thought the site looked awful, and felt like an idiot for spending time on something that so few people read. Writing on the site has been frustrating, fulfilling, and every once in a while pure magic, but it’s the times when I’ve convinced myself to just stick it out that make me proudest. This site was itself a running epiphany back in the day, and keeping it going is nothing to sneeze at.
As for Bare Naked English, my plan is to continue paying the small fees for the domain name and website upkeep. Like I said, I have no plans to launch the site in the future. But that could change, and if it does I’ll be happy to hit the ground running.
Flying
I’ve flown something like eight times this year, which has given me time to think about the air travel experience. At its best, a routine domestic flight is a mild inconvenience, an irritant. At its worst, it’s a nightmare.
It’s tough to capture all the obstacles standing in the way of a good flight. There’s being stuck behind a first-time traveler at security, and being blamed for their ineptitude by some underpaid TSA agent. There’s being forced to check your bag when you didn’t want to, to be on an overbooked flight late on a Sunday afternoon, and to be on a plane that is too cold, too bright, or too dry. Boarding takes too long, as does taxiing back into the gate. Getting to and from the airport requires more logistics than flying, and is almost as expensive. Masks feel worse in midair, and throughout the entire journey there is an unhealthy level of tension bubbling just beneath the surface.
And yet air travel is incredible. It’s unbelievably safe to hurdle through the air at 30,000 feet, far safer than trains and cars. It’s cheaper than ever, and more accessible. The juice is worth the squeeze of cramming yourself into a 17-inch wide seat and tolerating the person hacking up a lung beside you. Otherwise no one would do it.
The horror stories to come out during the pandemic, of unruly passengers throwing tantrums over the minor inconveniences I mentioned above, are awful but not unexpected. I’m certainly not there yet, but it’s not hard to imagine what a combination of bad day, itchy mask, airport cocktails and no overhead space could lead to, particularly for someone predisposed to outbursts. Waiting for a flight this past Sunday, an announcement asked for “passengers who are absolutely excited to check their bags at the gate for absolutely zero charge.” I’m no sales expert, but it seemed like the wrong tactic to use, and one that was guaranteed to lead to more tantrums, not less.
I have no good ideas to improve the experience, but given all the potential irritants involved, it’s obvious that relying on passengers to take a deep breathe and behave doesn’t work so well.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents – Isabel Wilkerson
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
What I’m Listening To:
Conor Neil on Becoming a Truly Impactful Speaker and Leader – Elevate Podcast
“Faith is this sense that all the decisions that I’ve taken in the past were the best decisions that Conor age 20 or 25 or 30 could have taken.”