Hello there, listeners! I’m Amy Chaplin, and you’re listening to the Piano Pantry Podcast—a creation by me, myself, and I, your host.
If you don’t know me, I’m an independent piano teacher living in Indiana in the United States. I’ve been teaching music for over 20 years and have been running my piano studio since 2011.
Today we’re celebrating a milestone. My Piano Pantry blog—the sister content to this podcast—is hitting its 10-year mark this week.
To celebrate, I’m sharing 10 things I’ve learned from the past 10 years of blogging. I’m also going to sprinkle in some fun facts about the Piano Pantry blog along the way. And of course, it wouldn’t be a celebration without a special discount on products in the Piano Pantry shop.
Next week I’ll be at the Music Teachers National Conference in Chicago for the organization’s 150-year celebration and will be offering a 25% discount for those in attendance. I thought it only fair to offer the same discount to you as well.
So from now until April 1, 2026, you can get 25% off anything in the Piano Pantry shop using the code 10YEARS at checkout. Visit PianoPantry.com/shop to get your discount today.
For those of you joining me in Chicago, I’ll be in 4th floor exhibit hall at Table #1 with my Piano Pantry display table. Be sure to come say hello! I’m not in the coupon book but will still have a fun little swag item for those who come by to visit the table but they will only be available when I’m at the table.
I’ll be in and out but am planning to be at the table as much as possible every day between 10:30-1:30 and 3:30-5:30pm.
I will also be doing a special giveaway for some super extra fun special swag at 5:00pm on Tuesday evening at the table. You must be present to win.
The first thing I’ve learned from 10 years of blogging is that it made me a better writer.
In all honesty, it’s shocking to me sometimes that I even started a blog, because I remember always kind of hating writing. I was more of a math girl than an English-class girl even though I took AP English and not AP math in high school – go figure. LOL
Looking back, though, I realize I started it because I had ideas to share – not because I loved writing – and I’m so glad that I did. It was rough at the start, but over time something surprising – or maybe not so surprising – happened.
You guessed it.
I became a better writer.
Over the years I’ve also tried to keep the practice of refining older posts when I can. Sometimes I go back and my eyes just balk at how rough my writing was. So I improve it a little here and there.
But really, it just comes down to practice—which, as teachers, you all understand.
One day it kind of hit me over the head while I was revising a post that my writing had improved so much. I had moved through the messy middle without even realizing it. (And this was all before AI!)
The second thing I’ve learned is that the process of starting fuels motivation.
Very rarely do I feel super motivated to sit down and write a post. I usually just have to make myself do it. If I waited for inspiration to strike, honestly, I wouldn’t have nearly the content I do today.
The act of beginning often fuels and creates the inspiration and sometimes the ideas with the most value are the hardest ones to start writing about.
The third thing I’ve learned—and this one has been hard for me to swallow at times—is that comparison will drain the joy out of my work.
If you know anything about the Enneagram personality types, I’m a Type 3 through and through. They say 3s are competitive, and I found that hard to accept at first because I never felt like I had a competitive bone in my body. Growing up, I didn’t care about piano competitions or sports competitions—especially sports, which I didn’t really participate in anyway.
But time and age have helped me see another side of that trait: achievement. That’s the bone in my body. I feel value in myself when I achieve things. And when I see others appearing to achieve more than I am, I’m prone to feeling a little behind.
We’re all works in progress. I’ve at least learned to acknowledge this in myself, and every day I try to remind myself to focus on inspiration and joy rather than comparison.
With so much visible online today, it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle—or your 10 years to someone else’s 20.
When I see creators doing so much more than I am, I remind myself most of the time it’s because they’ve been at it longer. But it could also be that they’re not living a well-balanced life and what appears on the outside is not what you think it is.
Funnily enough, our pastor talked about a similar idea at church yesterday—about comparing your inside to someone else’s outside. Funny the timing of that.
The best thing we can do for ourselves is simply be ourselves and share what inspires us so we can keep the joy in our work and stop comparing our now to someone else’s now.
Before we move on, here’s a fun fact.
One of the first posts I published during the first month of the blog back in March 2016 was about my addiction at the time to creating assignment sheets for my students. Every six to twelve months I’d feel inspired to tweak something or create a better layout or make a whole new sheet more attuned to a different age group.
Eventually that turned into a free resource that is still the number one free download on the Piano Pantry website.
It’s called Assignment Sheet Central, and it includes nearly 25 different assignment sheet variations. I’ll link to it in the show notes.
OK so the fourth thing I’ve learned in 10 years of blogging is that impact is not always visible in the moment. These things take time.
This is another reason comparison doesn’t help – it’s not always about what you see in the moment or what’s visible in the moment.
One of the most meaningful compliments I’ve received is hearing teachers say that my content helped them feel more connected to other teachers—that they discovered new people, ideas, and friendships through it.
Those are the things you don’t see while you’re doing the work.
That, my friends, is the long-haul impact.
The fifth thing I’ve learned is that sustainability matters more than output. If I want this work to feel sustainable, I have to engage with it in a way that flexes with my life.
There was a period back in 2018 when I was teaching, doing part-time work at a church, playing for another church, serving as president of my state MTA, and my husband and I were building a house. Understandably, I couldn’t find much time to share resources on the blog. The only thing I could consistently publish was Friday Finds.
Being that this was only two years into me starting the blog made that really hard for me – that reality.
The same thing happened when I started this podcast in 2022. Producing a weekly podcast took a lot of time, so the blog slowed down—but again, I kept chugging away at those Friday Finds.
Which actually brings me to another fun fact.
Friday Finds started as a weekly post, and for about five years I published one almost every week along with other content.
At one point I texted some friends and said I was ready to quit. I was burnt out from the Friday Finds posts. They encouraged me to do what I needed—but they also howled a little because they loved Friday Finds. Then they reminded me of something simple that hadn’t actually occurred to me.
Just because it’s called Friday Finds doesn’t mean it has to be weekly. I could still publish it on Fridays – just not every Friday – and that completely shifted things for me. So I kept publishing them 1-4 times per month inconsistently until January 2025, when I finally decided to move to once a month for consistency. And I’m happy with that.
You can find Friday Finds at PianoPantry.com/category/friday-finds, and I will of course link that in the show notes.
It was through that I realized that sustainability was more important than my output and I had to remind myself it was about sharing what’s inspiring me and working for me rather than just sharing content for the sake of producing.
The sixth thing I’ve learned is that people matter more than content.
As a teacher and consumer, I’m most drawn to creators who keep things personal – who share what’s happening in their teaching life – and that’s how I’ve tried to keep things with what I share with you.
I try to keep in mind sharing what bring me joy, what I’m inspired by, and what’s working for me and sometimes what’s not and hope you find support through that. My blog and this podcast both reflect the kind of content that I as a consumer would want to consume from the flip side.
This idea of people over content reminds me of episode #137, where Kyunghoon Kim and Elizabeth Yao shared survival tips for busy musicians. They talked about evaluating opportunities using the three P’s: Pay, Prestige, and People.
When deciding whether to say yes to something, ask yourself if the opportunity provides one of those three – pay, prestige, or people being is it important to you because of who you’re doing it for or the people it will impact. If you want the full explanation, listen in to episode #137 which is linked in the show notes.
OK so the seventh thing I’ve learned is to trust that what you have to say has value.
We all have something to contribute—whether you’ve been teaching for five years or twenty-five. Ideas are worth sharing. Learning and growing involves considering ideas, shifting perspectives, and trying new things.
Along those same lines, we can’t base our sense of value on social media comments, likes, or reactions. Just because a post doesn’t receive visible engagement doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.
Again, let me remind you of the long-haul. Blogs respect the long haul.
And that, my friends, is the eighth thing I’ve learned from the past 10 years of blogging – blogging respects our time.
More than almost any other form of content, blogging is timeless. Unlike social media, it isn’t fleeting. It sits there patiently waiting for the right person to find it.
The famous marketing guru Seth Godin once wrote that:
“Good blogs aren’t focused on the vapid race for clicks that social media encourages. Instead, they patiently inform and challenge, using our time with respect.”
Blog posts and email subscriptions remain some of the last spaces online where people can engage thoughtfully rather than reactively.
Before we move into our final two lessons, here’s one more fun fact about the Piano Pantry blog.
As of today, there are 594 blog posts on Piano Pantry from the past 10 years—a number that surprised even me especially being that I had periods of time where I wasn’t posting much at all.
Of those, 295 are Friday Finds, which means nearly half of the posts are from that series.
When you do the math, that means I’ve averaged almost one blog post per week for the past decade or one every two weeks if you don’t count Friday Finds.
That leads me to lesson number nine: looking back matters.
After all those times I felt guilty for not publishing as much as I thought I should, it turns out I’ve actually done pretty well—averaging roughly one post a week for 10 years.
Looking back helps us see the bigger picture so much clearly. Whether it’s reflecting on a month, a year, a decade, or a lifetime, those moments of reflection matter.
I need to give myself a break and release expectations – we all do.
If you want to explore that idea more, check out episode #51: Take Notice: Your Year in Review.
The tenth and final lesson I’ve learned is that you don’t have to do everything yourself.
There comes a point when it’s okay to ask for help—and that point looks different for everyone.
I’m very much a do-er and an achiever and I like figuring things out myself. But about a year ago I finally reached a point where I needed help managing the back end of my website.
Since then, the Piano Pantry blog has been undergoing a slow overhaul. I’m still doing a lot myself and I really do enjoy it but now I have support when I need it.
And part of that support now comes from you.
Your experience matters to me. That’s why I’ve always refused to put ads on my site. Last year I started publishing recipes on the blog and as an avid recipe blog reader myself, some websites are rendered almost useless these days because they are so full of ads. It is so frustrating – especially on mobile. The scrolling experience is just terrible with all those ads in there.
So I’ve chosen not to run ads on the podcast either because I don’t enjoy having to fast-forward through ads when I listen to podcasts myself.
Instead, I decided to turn to you. About two and a half years ago I started offering listeners the opportunity to support this work through Patreon.
What confirmed it was the right decision for me was when a reader actually reached out asking if there was a way they could donate to support the work. Little did they know at that moment I was in the middle of setting up Patreon and they ended up being of my first if not the very first to sing up for Patreon.
So thank you to all my Patreon supporters who have helped keep the blog and podcast ad-free these past two years. If you’d like to join them, you can do so for as little as $4 a month at PianoPantry.com/patreon.
Before we wrap up, here’s a quick recap of the ten things I’ve learned from ten years of blogging:
If there’s anything I hope you take away from this episode, it’s that meaningful work—whether it’s teaching, blogging, podcasting, or anything else—rarely happens all at once. It grows slowly over time through consistency, reflection, and simply showing up.
If you’ve been part of the Piano Pantry community along the way, thank you for being here and celebrating this ten-year milestone with me.
One way you can support this work besides joining Patreon is to grab a new resource from the shop at 25% off using the code 10YEARS at checkout.
Like always, you can find links to everything mentioned today—along with the 25% discount code—at: PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode179
Have a great week friends and I look forward to connecting with some of you next week at the conference!
