I’m feeling good
I wrote 3 blog posts today
1 for MagicWillMiddleton.com and 2 for WPCourseGuide.com
And I’m feeling prime.
My nipples are hard
I think my hairline is coming back
I’m actually getting younger.
I’ve been struggling to get my ass motivated to do blog posts for my business site for a while.
Today I just made a blog page for it and wrote 2 posts, 1 of which had an affiliate link in it, so maybe that page could start getting some traffic.
My use of profane language and whatnot I think is off-putting to some, but it makes me motivated to work on it.
The work I did at my previous LMS executive job had a lot of censoring and group think involved with what content was produced and how we were supposed to present ourselves.
I think this type of activity makes people less motivated to work on things.
At least it made me feel super low motivation to work on projects like videos, blogs, and documentation
When I can sit down and vomit on paper what I’m thinking and be 100% open, honest, and raw, with it, I feel much better about what I’m creating
I feel like I’m not worried about what people think
I feel like I’m worried about if I’m interested in writing it or not
Interested in showing up to work or not
Interested in being involved with this career or not
Putting things in place to make me like my job, like WordPress, like the tools I work with, and like waking up in the morning are really putting a new spin on my life.
When I was working my full-time LMS executive job, I had the Sunday scaries all the time. The “I hate Mondays” feeling.
That feeling is usually coupled with a “TGIF” mentallity.
Like the people there are kind, genuine people, and I head a lot of people who seem to have terrible bosses who don’t care about shit, and I think the people at my past job absolutely do care.
So I want to emphasize that and give credit where credit is due.
Like the way they treat people is good and with kindness.
There’s something that developed at least in me and I have a sense it’s developing in a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem
And that feeling is that, “I need an escape”
It could be spending time with kids, it could be alcohol/drugs, it could be fitness, it could be anything. And often results in selling the companies because founders/owners are too stressed.
But some kind of escape is needed at some point in the day.
Some sort of disengagement from what we’re doing for money.
Some kind of disengagement from the stress we encounter as we work.
I think this is indicative of a larger problem, a problem I think is solvable.
I had a conversation with a WordPress genius who said, “WordPress used to be fun.”
And I’m like, “wtf? It used to be fun?”
I view it as like a career and a puzzle, not really ‘fun’.
But how they talked about WordPress before 2012 was inspiring to me.
The first 10 years of the program and how people were still figuring out what it could do and were using it for personal projects and fun stuff.
It wasn’t a platform you could get expertise in and make a bunch of money from.
It was janky and that’s what made it fun.
Over the years, security has hardened, big venture-backed firms have invested in WordPress hosting companies and plugin companies, and it’s become such a cut-throat industry.
Still not as cut-throat as other industries, there’s still a lot of positivity when it comes to things like WordCamps.
And that type of in-person conference contributes to tech culture in such a positive way.
But WordPress was a place for people to express themselves and whatnot
It opened up creating things on the web to a whole new class of people.
Smart people who didn’t know how to code.
But wanted to figure out how they could put things online.
WordPress, now having about 40% of sites on the internet or something is huge.
It’s really gone a long way in democratizing publishing.
But in the process lost a bit of its charm from the start.
I don’t think it’s lost completely though.
I think it’s recoverable and that recoverability of a time when WordPress and logging into the wp-admin area made people smile and feel a sense of power is something I want to return to that platform.
When you log into the wp-admin area now, it’s a bunch of boring-ass bullshit.
I’m not saying I think it’s ugly, or old-fashioned looking, because I think it looks fine as it is and would look fine with an update (an update that is coming)
But the idea that boring corporations run by people who’ve developed boring personalities in order to appeal to as many people as possible have started to take a strangle-hold on how the industry is run.
When I go to these in-person WordPress events, I see a sense of flavor with the people who’ve been in this shit for more than 10 years.
I see a sense of love for the platform in their eyes.
I see a greater and more in-depth perspective on what’s going on than the perspective I have.
I’ve only been involved with WordPress for 8 years now.
I was not around for the before-times.
But the character of the people who were is inspiring to me.
There’s one dude with a crazy mustache and Bob and Raquel and Michelle and these iconic motherfuckers who are in a way their own story.
They’re WordPress celebrities, they’re weaving a story in a way much bigger than just a software platform.
I don’t think Squarespace has a Bob, Raquel, and Michelle.
Maybe they do
Maybe I’m wrong
But I feel like that’s what the vibe lacks.
Most people who use WordPress have no fucking clue who those 3 people are.
And you don’t really need to know who they are in order to understand the story I’m telling here or what makes WordPress great
But I think what they contribute to the community is what makes it great.
Or one of the things that makes it great
One of the top things that makes it stand out
I think it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes something great
Of course it’s a combination of a lot of things.
Skill/talent/intelligence/love for the game
But that last piece is “Love for the game”
Not just love for making money from the game
But loving the whole part of the game.
Writing blog posts at 3:21 am because you think about it.
That level of love for the game
Without people like Bob, Raquel, and Michelle, that ‘Love for the Game’ wouldn’t exist in as many people as it does.
They are the propagators of love for the game.
I’ve been hearing shit about people losing love for the game recently.
And that’s okay because it’s like, that’s how it goes sometimes.
People retire, people sell, people leave, people move on.
I think my love for the game is just getting started
I think I’m just starting to figure it out.
I know that I’m going to look back on these stories 20 years from now and cry about how sentimental I feel about having been able to engage with this generation of WordPress leaders.
Like god damn.
This shit powers 40% of the internet and I’m directly interfacing with the people who build that shit every day.
I don’t like meeting celebrities very much because they don’t remember me.
They don’t know my name.
My mom is a HUGE Bernie Sanders fan and I like his politics, but meeting him a few times and getting pics with him doesn’t inspire me.
I’ll vote for him and whatnot because I think he’s got a good basis, but he doesn’t know my name.
And so I don’t really care to see him in person.
I don’t care to see my favorite song artists in person because they don’t know who I am.
On the other hand, these WordPress legends, they’re starting to know who I am.
These people who power the people to build things online.
I know who they are and they know who I am
I feel like I’m looking eye-to-eye with people forging the future and creating great shit.
I can have conversations with these people about the coolest shit in the world.
I can make friends with the people who are doing what I think is the coolest shit in the world.
I hope one day I can inspire others who are doing the coolest shit in the world to do the coolest shit in the world.
To inspire people to get involved with something like this.
Because day-to-day shit can feel boring depending on where you’re at in the ecosystem.
Depending on who you’re talking to and how you’re taking to them.
But all these people have deeeeeeep stories and if you get to know those stories, you’ll see a bit more of what is truly playing out here.
And that shit inspires me hard.
I think these people who check out of the industry, sell out of the industry, move onto bigger and better things.
I think they’re about to get hit with a wave.
I hope they’re about to get hit with a wave.
A wave of, “god damn”
A wave of, “What the fuck is going on in WordPress?”
Like if I could contribute to that wave in a way that’s authentic to me
In a way that’s similar to what motivates me to write these blog posts in the middle of the night for 4 hours.
If I could engage with the community in some kind of way that overlaps with that, I think the energy I can add to the system would be huge.
I hope it would be huge.
Maybe I’m dreaming of some bullshit that will never happen, but whether I do some incredible shit or not, I’ll be happy with the fact that the process of dreaming of bigger things is something I’m actively engaging in day-to-day writing these blog posts.
Others who wish they had greater results in the world don’t seem to have the urge to give more.
That shit used to bother me.
I’d be told stuff like, “If you want to receive more, there must be some sort of giving you’re not doing”
Like I’m not giving enough and that’s why I’m not receiving enough.
But I work my ASS off.
I try really hard
I’m very bad at remembering details and doing things at certain times
Like I need people to work with to basically baby sit me and think through others
Because I’m terrible at clocking my hours on time, tracking my hours to begin with, etc.
This isn’t about hours to me. I now manage my own business and need to track hours in order to set my own ‘reasonable salary’ for my business, but even then, there are week long gaps where I just forget to clock my hours.
When I’m writing blog posts like this, time stands still.
There is no time and no hours
There is just my thoughts, the keyboard, and the publish button.
Jason has been looking at me weird lately
But like in a cool way
Like I think Jason is one of the people in WordPress who has the most love of the game I’ve ever seen.
He wrote a rap song about WordPress that inspired me to start writing lyrics and whatnot.
Now that I know how to make some beats in GarageBand and have my friends starting to amp up about that program too, maybe that sort of WordPress rap for me is in the future too.
Maybe not, but maybe
And I think Jason might see that love of the game in me.
Maybe, maybe not, but maybe
Like I always wonder, like, I obsess about tech, I surround myself with it
I think about it with a lot of time
My life is my job
I have no personal life
Well, I do have a personal life, but I find a way to turn that into work.
Like my friends and music needs to become some kind of published thing
My friends and Magic the Gathering needs to become a YouTube channel and it did
My personal Minecraft playing needs to be on the internet
Even though I don’t think I’m great at entertaining and I don’t put a lot of effort into editing usually
I’m getting super side-tracked, I think and hope what Jason might see is love for the game
And maybe I could exude love for the game even more.
Maybe I could pass that vibe
If that vibe is true
For anyone who meets me to be like, damn, that person loves the game
I was hanging out with friends tonight and I was holding my girlfriend’s hand and not really paying attention to the conversation because I was reading about curl request options.
Looking back on that makes me inspired to think about how my mind is automatically more interested in curl request options than it is in random drama.
I’m happy about that
I’m also happy about realizing (or think I’m realizing) that love for the game is what Jason sees in me and that’s what Jason had to begin with years ago.
Is pure love for the game
These WordPress greats who are thinking about giving up and WordPress greats who are thinking about leaning in more than ever, both give me a motivation to do some motivating shit.
But I don’t know what it is.
Probably absolutely flopping as usual.
It’s almost 4:00 am, I need to go the fuck to sleep.