At various points in my life I've felt like I'm on a conveyor belt.
And I think I've felt this because my life has been so… easy. It's weird to say that. It kind of makes it sound like I haven't done anything with my life. For most of your life you're in school. College is a thing people are doing now-a-days so I might as well go do that, and then after college I applied for a job and the manager graduated from the exact program several years earlier. Boom – first adult job just like that. It almost happened automatically. It feels like all I had to do was keep my arms and legs on the conveyor belt and I would have eventually wound up there.
A few years later I'm the product manager for WooCommerce, the most prolific e-commerce platform, holy shit – how did that happen!?
Why Not?
During my first job I started playing with WordPress and taking freelance gigs. From these freelance gigs I found an agency to work for and be their entire IT department. With no risk and a couple months savings why not? I took that job and then learned more about how plugins are created and eventually how to build and sell my own premium plugins. My job payed for all of my expenses so when I had free time why not learn plugin development? Who cares if it didn't pan out? It would at least be fun to learn.
From there I stumbled on an opportunity to join the WooThemes team doing WooCommerce support. I worked on WooCommerce for one of my projects so why not join them? I took on a few dev projects which took time out of my day but I had free time and nothing else to do so why not? I started documenting work in my blog – again I had the free time so why not? After demonstrating I know something about what customers want (partly via my blog) I was offered the Product Manager position.
My Formula For Success
It seems that all of my successes come from the combination of two things:
- A willingness to learn
- Having the time & money to follow through
So today I want to thank my parents. They were smart enough and fortunate enough themselves that they could put me through college without me taking on any debt. I wouldn't be here today if I had to worry about debt.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
– Seneca
Tomorrow I want to talk about the people who inspire me. But for right now I just want to be thankful for smart decisions my parents made that shaped my entire life. Decisions that enable me to say, “why not?”, when an opportunity smacks me in the face.
Are you making smart financial decisions? If an opportunity smacks you in the face tomorrow do you have the ability to pursue it financially?
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