One of the hardest things to do in any profession is to accept setbacks. We do our best to avoid them & mitigate them but no matter how hard you try you'll always run into them. The trick here is not to try to avoid every single setback since that's impossible but to build your business & life with setbacks in mind.
A few days ago Daniel announced the winners for the Blogging for Benjamin competition and a few hours after that I received a notice from PayPal saying that I had $100 bucks waiting for me. Well I don't know about you but when I have money sitting in my PayPal account I have to spend it on something fast because it's so darn easy to spend it on frivolous things! There are plenty of new board games I want to buy but I instead I decided to do something fool smart and invest in myself.
Over the last couple of years the WordPress platform has really matured. Now, premium (commercial) plugins aren't just for developers they're used by developers and users a like. It isn't uncommon at all to see lite versions of plugins in the WordPress repository with a pro version available on the developer's site. So if you have an idea for a plugin how do you capitalize on this? How can you build a valuable product and market it to users?
A friend told me about this new store that combines two of our favorite things. It's a coffee shop and it has 400+ board games that you can play. They even have employees that can recommend new games or demo games for you! What a great idea! But of course shortly after telling me this he says, “too bad I won't be able to do that”.
I've never understood this mentality and it seems so prevalent. Right after coming up with an idea the first thing people tend to do is shoot holes in it. What's the point in that? If you do that you'll never change anything or do anything new… ever.
A few days ago I created the Blogging for Benjamin plugin so I could easily mark the Blogging for Benjamin articles as part of a series. The plugin only lasted a few days before Mike Jolley wrote WP Post Series plugin. To put it gently Mike Jolley's plugin destroys my plugin, it blows it out of the water, it disintegrates it, it banishes it to another realm – you get the idea. And you know what? I'm really happy about it.
Developers if you see something that I made that can be made better then do it! One up me! Just look at the WP Post Series plugin to see how much more flexible and usable it is. I've already replaced my own plugin.
Last year I created some programming resolutions and shortly after writing that post everything started falling into place. I certainly don't believe it was magic or divine intervention but I do believe in positive thought and setting an intention. Since I did pretty well with my resolutions from last year I wanted to come up with some new ones.
It's December 31st, the last day of December, and also the last day of the Blogging for Benjamin contest. This is the final post I'll be making for this contest. I'm really pleased that I participated in this contest because I learned quite a few things, I've communicated a few things that I'd been meaning to share, and I've created a bunch of snippets and tutorials for WordPressers.
One of the things I knew I wanted to do when I started this Blogging for Benjamin competition was to easily link users on one of those posts to the original post about the competition. That way users know why there's so many posts in December and about one a month in every other month. So I created a plugin to automatically add a message at the top of each of those posts.
One of the most important parts of creating a new habit – whether it be running more, eating healthy, or forming better writing skills – is to reward yourself when you accomplish the task. That's why we often set milestones for our selves like running a race. There's actually a lot of value in creating these meaningful milestones / goals for your self. They help motivate you push yourself just a little harder and once it's accomplished you'll feel proud of your achievement and you can share the experience with others to relive some of that joy which is very rewarding.
I have some pretty exciting news that I've been waiting to share for a while now. Back in June I released the User Analytics extension for Ninja Forms. That was definitely the start of my entrepreneurship but there is another aspect of being an entrepreneur that I've been looking forward to. Back in November I used the commissions from my extensions to purchase the rights to another developer's plugins so I can resell them as my own. And now I really feel like an entrepreneur!