If a day goes by where you don’t learn something new, what good is it really? Sometimes that new nugget of knowledge is welcomed and cherished, and sometimes it is scary as all hell and you wished you didn’t know it. Nonetheless, learning is what we do on this journey of life, whether we like it or not.

What you just read was how I opened a post on March 27, 2020, when I brought back the concept of writing on what I learned in the previous week. This was also how I opened the original series of these posts, which I started on a Friday back in 2014. As lockdowns and shutdowns were underway and everybody was now working at home, I thought of resurrecting this idea. Call it a distraction, call it a way to breathe new life back into The Hot Iron, I figured I’d give it a try.

A year later I am still at it. Every week without fail I wrote what crossed my purview the previous week. Some weeks it hit on Friday, other weeks on Sunday, but nonetheless it did hit. Looking back on these posts, as well as the year in general, here’s what I learned on this strange trip.

I’m not tired of doing this – Going into the first edition of the series last year, I had no plans for how long I would do this. I looked back at the first run and I ended it after 8 months, and wrote a summary like this one a few months later. Trying to recall my thinking 7 years ago, I wanted to get back to writing standard, one-topic tomes rather than weekly summaries.

This time, I looked forward to compiling my weekly notes. I still do. I also tried to write one-topic posts as well, and I was relatively successful at that over the year. I continue to strive to do those as well.

This serves as a personal archive – Years ago I had a separate blog called sourcegate where I posted tech tips. Although I was glad to contribute contextualized tools to the world, its true catalyst was a personal quick reference library. My What I Learned posts ended up serving the same purpose, especially chronicling such gems as the link check tool and better meme generator I found.

People are reading it – If you know me, you know I am not exactly an introvert. My ego, though kept in check through marriage and fatherhood, is still alive and kicking. However over the years I have never assumed anything I wrote here was going to be a runaway hit. Often I wrote something for a specific purpose, striking the iron while it is hot, but much of the content here has been to share my thoughts and observations in the realms of business and technology, with the occasional diversion.

As I wrote What I Learned columns, I got feedback from people. It came in the form of comments to a post, as well as a reply to the email they received through their subscription or even a text message. And the feedback was positive! I appreciate that my thoughts in digital form resonated with people, and that has been a part of why I continue doing this.

With this I will pat myself on the back and continue looking out there. Whether it’s on the screen in front of me, the podcast playing in the background or the people I meet (and hopefully much more frequently going forward), I enjoy learning new things. Maybe you learned something new yourself?

Photo collage of images from past What I Learned posts made with Canva. Yes, this is an affiliate link.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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