I'm so relevant, it hurts (by Patty Blount)

All this month, we're blogging about staying relevant.

I laughed out loud over this topic. Why? I'm so glad you asked.

Because I feel like I'm about 95 years old. I just returned home from buying orthotics, people! Yes, I spent over $200 on a pair of ugly-as-dirt shoes with enough arch support to hold up a small building inside them.

But that's not why I laughed. You see, the first thing I did before writing this post was a Google search and found an article on the Huffington Post. One of the first things this article suggests is never talk about your aches and pains.

*coughs*

Okay, so staying relevant... Here it is. Are you ready? It's super-simple. Don't close your mind. That's it. That's all the Patty Pearls of Wisdom I got for you.

Stay open.  I began writing seriously when my sons were still in elementary school. In a very real sense, my author career has grown up along side them. I paid attention when their friends visited or when I was ferrying them all over Long Island. I heard the topics they discussed, the things that worried them.

The things that mattered to them.

My oldest son asked me to buy him a CD of some metal band I'd never heard of. There was a warning label on the back that made my hair curl. So I listened to the CD first.

Every song.

I'm now a pretty big hard rock fan myself and my sons think that's pretty damn cool.

Learn new stuff.

My day job is corporate training, so I love learning. I just taught myself how to code in Swift, Apple's coding language. Before that, I learned how to use a tool called Adobe InDesign. Am I ready to hang out a shingle? No. But I achieved my goals for both.

And maybe that's the rub.... you achieve one goal. You set a new one that's maybe a bit higher. And along the way, you figure out that staying relevant is just another way of saying you're still willing to try.