This is the last post in the Blogging for Hippo challenge and I have to admit, I'm happy that it's done. On one hand blogging challenges give me the opportunity to find my voice, improve my writing, and share my ideas. On the other hand, it's completely exhausting.
Despite the exhaustion and the huge amount of time I've put into this challenge I'm thankful that I did it. It was challenging and that in and of itself makes it worthwhile.
About a month ago I shared a quote from Seneca:
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
While I love this quote it's a bit simplistic isn't it? The problem is that not everyone sees opportunity the same way. Some people choose to see misfortune instead of opportunity, some are too focused to see opportunity, . People create their own luck and there are a few things you can do to improve how “lucky” you are.
Note: none of these involve superstitious beliefs or lucky charms. They both require a shift in how you think about and look at your life.
I'm not the biggest fan of shopping but sometimes I do open up my wallet when I find a WooCommerce store. I know they're most likely some small mom and pop shop that setup their own e-commerce store and I like to give something back to them.
Just after Thanksgiving I was doing a bit of shopping and stumbled onto one of those stores and bought a small gift for a friend. The weird thing was that I never received any sort of email receipt. I thought maybe something was broken and I wasn't going to get my order. 🙁
It wasn't until days later when I took a look through my spam folder that I found those receipts. It was unusual that they were in there. I've ordered from plenty of WooCommerce stores before and never had any of these problems. So what was doing it?
When I tell people what I do and that I work from home they usually say, “that must be nice”. But they don't really get it. It's not nice. It's not cool. It's not easy. It's amazing. Let me tell you the things I can do from home and then how much (in thousands of dollars) working from my own home on my own time means to me.
I've spent most of this week talking about business. But today I really wanted to share a cool tool with you. If you're a fan of using Git on the command line you'll love this. I'm going to show you how to use git bisect to find bugs. It will help you narrow down when exactly a bug was created.
You'll find this very helpful when you start working on repositories that have hundreds of contributors (WooCommerce has more than 300!). Many times it's hard to figure out exactly when a bug was created and with hundreds of commits between releases it's critical you know how to go through them quickly.
This post is the 26th post in the Blogging For Hippo series but this isn't the 26th post I've written. It's actually the 30th. And that's because over the past month I've had a few days where I had a lot of creative energy and when it hits I take advantage of it. I can't tell you what works for other people but I can tell you that all my best work gets done in spurts and you need to maximize those spurts to get your real work done.
I've been thinking a lot about business this week. I've actually published three posts on it already and I could probably write a dozen more. This week I wrote about how to grow your business, minding your own business when you work for someone else, and the numbers of my own business. I've been trying to think of the best decision I made this year and it took me a while to come up with the answer. I had to look at some numbers, some products, and dig through my email. And once I saw that email I knew I found it.
I love this time of year. I love perusing the blogosphere as everyone starts publishing posts about how their year went. I love the introspection. We're so go-go-go that we never take the time to reflect. That makes this time of year that much more important. I stumbled onto Curtis McHales' post about 10x-ing your business and I wanted to unpack the message a little more.
I've really been getting into building a business and personal finance. One of the many books I read this year was Rich Dad Poor Dad. The author, Robert Kiyosaki, talks a lot about investing, real estate, and understanding the difference between an asset and a liability. There are so many good points in the book but perhaps one of the most important is mind your own business.
One of the most important things you can do is to look back from time to time and review where you are. Where did you start this year? Where did you end? Are you on the right path?
I did this last year after just getting into doing commercial plugin development and a lot has changed and my end of the year numbers (below) are very different.