Lessons Learned After 11 Years Of Blog Writing

Somehow it’s been 11 years since I first typed words for this blog. That means that writing this blog has officially become my longest running hobby ever 🙂 . It’s the longest I’ve done anything actually – longer than my working career (9 years), longer than college (4 years) and way longer than my previous NaNoWriMo winning streak (2 years) before I boycotted them.

This hobby of mine has been immensely rewarding in ways I never would have dreamed. It accidentally helped build a community of amazing people that I met through this very blog, which has turned into meeting people in real life around the world while in retirement. I’ve felt more connected to the world because of this blog.

I also accidentally added some more purpose to my life in early retirement by hearing countless times that my influence has helped someone improve their financial life, which is the highest compliment I can think of.

But enough gushing 🙂 . On this writing anniversary, I thought it would be fun to reflect on the last year and what I’ve learned. If you’re curious, here are the previous posts I’ve written on this topic:

• Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 9 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 8 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 7 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 6 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned From 5 Years Of Blog Writing

So let’s get into some challenges I’ve had, my recent wins, and how my writing process is evolving going forward!

Challenges

This is the challenge I’m going to focus on conquering this year.

A Photo Backlog

A challenge I want to focus on this year is how behind I constantly am at posting my travel photos and videos on Instagram 🙂 . This is a difficult challenge though because I only do anything relating to my blog when I feel like it.

That includes writing blog posts and Instagram captions as well as editing video reels and choosing what photos I want to post from my travels. When I’m experiencing those things in the moment, I don’t want to be distracted by thinking about how I’ll capture them later, so I try to be fully present.

However, by the time those travels are over, I’m usually onto my next adventure that I want to be fully present during. This leads to me always being months behind on posting my photos. 

I had a goal to post all of my 2025 photos and videos before 2025 ends and I might reach that goal, but it will be difficult 🙂 . The second part of it is that I only like actually posting on Instagram when I’m in the right mood to interact with people online, and that is a weird and fleeting feeling since at times posting anything can randomly invite some troll behavior that I have to be mentally ready for 🙂 . 

The internet can be a minefield and I only like to do things I actively want to do. Those two facts combined mean I’ve been more behind than I would prefer. But I want that to change in 2026 🙂 . 

I think the fact that I have a homebase now and won’t be traveling constantly might help, but then again I have photos and videos I took around Upstate NY this summer that I still haven’t posted and probably never will at this point, so maybe not 😉 . 

I’m planning to set goals for when I want each location of my travels to be online, so I can work backwards and break down what I need to meet those goals. We’ll see how well this works. 

The Wins!

Now let’s shake off that negative stuff and celebrate a win from last year!

Reacting To “Hole Poking”

I mentioned in last year’s post that my challenge during 2025 would be evolving my reaction to what I called “hole poking.” This was a new issue that I noticed in the past year.

I think I have a good handle on how to deal with trolls after writing on the internet for a decade and that’s not an issue at this point in my writing life. I also obviously don’t mind genuine questions – I’ve written over 600 articles on this blog so there’s a lot of info to sift through and I’m happy to point someone in that direction or just give a summary to save them time.

But last year I discovered a different type of interaction that started to chip away at me a bit. I started calling it “trying to poke holes”. Maybe it was because of my mainstream media exposure or my Instagram growth, but I had an influx of people trying to poke holes in my story, seemingly with the goal of exposing me as some kind of liar.

I don’t really understand the reasoning behind this kind of interaction since if something seems suspicious to me online, I just move onto something else. I don’t contact the person and try to poke holes in their story hoping to find some supposed slip up or hidden truth. There are so many people on the internet who can provide motivation, so I don’t spend time on ones that make me raise an eyebrow, but maybe that’s just me.

However, as I mentioned last year, with these interactions I’ve been trying to focus on the flip side of this, which is that people aren’t blindly believing something they read on the internet, which is a good thing! The internet is full of things to be skeptical about. I guess I just didn’t really think I would be one of them, which might have been a naive thought in retrospect.

I strive to be completely transparent on this blog and one of the reasons was so that this type of interaction wouldn’t happen, but that hasn’t been the outcome unfortunately. And for some reason, this kind of interaction had started to weigh on me a bit. At times it made me contemplate not sharing as much on the internet, but then I would look at all of the kind words people have sent me about how my transparency has had a positive effect on their lives and I quickly swung back in the other direction.

So that was the main challenge I tried to solve related to the blog during the last year and I think I did it! I’ve resisted the urge to defend myself when people say incorrect things about me in secondary online spaces. Though I admit it was difficult at times 🙂 .

I’m not responding and I’ve noticed that after moving on with my life and doing something that actually matters, I usually completely forget about those comments. People are being wrong on the internet (shocker 😉 ), but it’s not my job to correct them. 

So once again I’m glad people are being critical of things that they see online and not just immediately accepting them, even if those things include me and my blog. Hopefully that critical thinking will save some people from falling for MLMs/pyramid schemes, crypto scams and get rich quick schemes going forward.

My Evolving Process

My writing process has changed a lot over the years. Here’s what I learned about it lately.

Stepping Offline

This is something else I’ve found helpful in the last year: taking a break 🙂 . If I get frustrated by the relatively tiny percentage of people online that are trying to be annoying, I’ve started stepping away from the internet for a while. 

That’s not difficult for me since the only time I’m on social media is to dump photos on my Insta and basically peace out 🙂 . So if I’m getting annoyed, I take a total break until I’ve forgotten whatever silly interaction happened, remember what actually matters in life and am excited to engage with people online again. And then I come back!

So if you notice that I go a while before answering blog comments or being on Instagram, that might be what happened 🙂 . Either that or I’m just busy traveling and living IRL. 

I think this approach is really working. I truly love being here with y’all and I don’t want to let a small, vocal minority of people drive me away. So I’m going to keep up this approach!

Audio Recording

I also started doing something new this year that I’ve found really helpful! I often can’t keep up with how quickly my ideas are flowing when I write, even though I think I’m a fairly fast typer. So one day I tried recording myself on my phone instead and it was a gamechanger! 

My Pixel 8a phone has a Recorder app that I can open and it immediately starts recording. And not only that, but it also automatically creates a transcript of the recording that I can easily share with my go-to notes app Google Keep. 

• How I Stay Organized While Enjoying Life

This has been amazing when I’m busy doing something else, have an idea and don’t want to be wildly typing on my phone. Instead I record myself and send the transcript to Keep. Easy! 

In Focus

Another change related to my phone is that I used to take one picture while walking for example, and have the thought “if it’s blurry, oh well.” I don’t want to stop what I’m doing to capture a moment – I’d rather be fully present in that moment. However, as I’ve started writing more travel reviews, I decided that approach wasn’t going to fly because I find the photos in detailed reviews other people write to be super helpful.

So I’ve started taking multiple photos, but still not stopping walking or whatever I’m doing to do so. I’m busy 😉 . This now means that usually at least one photo is in focus so I always have one to share on the blog or Insta to help me illustrate a complicated travel process or something similar. Then I just need to remember to routinely delete my multiple photos so my phone storage doesn’t start yelling at me again 🙂 . 

Chipping Away

My blog posts keep accidentally getting longer and longer in retirement (I guess I have a lot to say 😉 ), which obviously lengthens the entire writing process from idea to publication. As a result of this, I’ve found that it’s easier to think about each post in sections and tackle them one at a time, sometimes days apart.

Then the completion of each section is a small accomplishment that makes me feel good instead of me not being able to celebrate until an entire, long post is fully written. I think of this approach as slowly chipping away at a project and seeing constant progress as a win instead of the only change in my mind being “not written” to “written.”

This has really mentally helped me with the longer length posts I’ve been writing even with the increased amount of time it takes me to finish posts these days. I’ve just started celebrating every part as a win 🙂 . 

Conclusion

I honestly didn’t expect to still be writing this blog after over a decade. I had no expectations but looking around, it seemed that after retirement, most people leave their FIRE blogs behind since money is less interesting to talk about when you have enough of it.

But this blog has transformed into something I didn’t really expect – a curation of my retirement, a travel blog and a lovely community of people trying to improve their financial lives. I’m still having a blast and am excited to still be writing on here.

I can’t believe it’s been over a decade and am excited to see what the next one holds. Thank you for being here 🙂 .