Tag Archives: Success

[ad_1] Here is Donna reading her own story aloud. At the age of 62, I finally feel like I’ve found success, and I hope I wear it well. It doesn’t wrap me in the look I’d imagined, however. It feels like quality material, sure, but not ostentatious or high-falutin’ or fancy-pants. (Well, maybe there’s the occasional fancy-pants aspect of it, which I’ll be sure to mention at the end of the story).  What is Success? One of the definitions that Merriam-Webster presents for the word “success” is “the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.” My definition of success has always been to live free of poverty. I don’t ask much of success. Just the vision of a life without the constant weight of poverty wrapped around a person’s neck is enough for me to define that life as successful. But of course, there are many ways to define success, and I suppose that makes a big difference in how people view their own lives. I’m a late bloomer to my version of success, although most people would have assumed I’d been this successful for decades.  But in every way, WordPress is at the heart of my newfound success, regardless of how or when it happened.  I’ve told parts of my story before. In that telling of my tale, what you won’t find is any indication that I was poor – miserably poor – throughout most of it. For years, I’ve joked to my family that I’m great at becoming “industry famous” but terrible at earning money at it. At one time, I was one of the premier Cold Fusion developers in the world, though I doubt CF’ers would remember me all these years later. After that, I was a well-known SEO, although I went by a “forum name” at the time, so my name now isn’t recognizable except to those I’m still friends with. And while I wasn’t necessarily ever WordPress-famous, I wasn’t invisible in the community either.  The main reason I was industry famous each of those times was that I spent a lot of my time in the forums or communities where everyone hung out. In my time there, I gave back every chance I got. I’d generally learned my craft from those same types of communities, so once I had obtained valuable knowledge, I answered questions and helped people learn there. Eventually, I would end up being a moderator in most of those communities. So if success is defined by eminence, as Merriam-Webster suggests, or the level of recognition you get from your peers, or the amount of respect you earn from those you mentor, then I was very successful throughout much of my adult life.  Eminence Does Not Equal Wealth Despite that version of success or what I called “industry fame,” I could never afford to use any “pro” plugins or tools that weren’t free.  I’ve never owned a copy of Photoshop in my life. (I take that back. A friend gave me a nulled version once – a really old version – but I was too paranoid and “law-abiding” to ever use it). Even though my job as a web designer pretty much required the use of Photoshop, I had to settle for Gimp. Priced at somewhere around $600 (if I remember right), Photoshop was about $599 too expensive for me. If a client handed me a .psd file, I’d ask industry friends who owned Photoshop to turn it into a format I could import into Gimp. Of course, that meant there were many Photoshop files I couldn’t work with at all if I needed to access some aspect of the file that Gimp didn’t support. In those cases, I had to turn the job down. SEO was made more difficult without money to spend. Paying even $20 for an SEO tool that would make my work easier was never an option. If it wasn’t free, it didn’t happen. Occasionally, I’d get lucky and win the use of a tool during an online giveaway. You have no idea how excited I’d get when that happened. It always felt like I’d won the lottery. I did attend as many SEO conferences as I could over the years. Industry acquaintances who believed I needed to be there generously paid for some of those conferences. I am forever grateful to those people. Some I managed to scrape up enough money to attend, especially if they were reasonably close to where I lived.  Where Did I Go Wrong? So why was I so poor? Why did my version of success elude me for so long? I’m not sure I know all the reasons for that, but I’d like to share some of the reasons that I do know. Some may be helpful to anyone in the same situation; others were personal and unique to me (perhaps). Let’s start with the most obvious. Imposter Syndrome. I did graduate from college with a B.S. in English Education. Back in my day, women were expected to do “women’s type of work,” such as teaching. I really wanted to study Computer Science, but the head of the CS department told my mom that it would probably be too hard for me, so Mom convinced me not to do that. (My mom loved me very much, and I’m sure she thought she was saving me from failure or something, but she was wrong to not trust in me). I graduated and never worked as a teacher a day in my life. (At least not in a formal school situation. Most of my life has been dedicated to teaching others how to do things, however). So instead of teaching, I moved to California, worked as a data entry person for years, and slowly began to teach myself how to code. In those days, we didn’t have an internet filled with free courses to learn from. I would occasionally find an old “How to code in Fortran” book, or something similar,  in someone’s garage sale.