It's the day after Thanksgiving but I haven't quite finished thanking people yet. Yesterday I talked quite a bit about the awesome financial base my parents provided me today I want to focus on the people that inspire me. It took an army of people to get me fired up about life and simply put: without these people I wouldn't be where I am now.
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!?
Four days ago it was Thanksgiving here in the USA. One of the best traditions (aside from eating copious amounts of food) is to go around the table and say one thing that you're grateful for. There's actually been quite a bit of science about gratitude and how important it is to your overall happiness. One of my favorite researchers in this area is Brene Brown. She has some amazing TED Talks and this great clip about how important it is to be grateful.
She talks about how it isn't joy that makes us grateful but gratitude that brings us joy. So to be as joyful as I can be I'm going to list several things that I'm so grateful for working on the web. These aren't in any particular order just how they come up naturally in my head.