Fucking Up and Being True to Yourself

I fucked up

Firstly, you might be wondering why I’m writing that and the proceeding words here. Well for me getting words out of my head and written typed out really helps me get my thoughts in an order that make more sense. I’ve done this for a long time, way before blogs were an actual thing there were online journals and diary’s, I used Diaryland for mine. Comment sections weren’t actually a thing and you had to have a separate guestbook you coded into your diary. While the diary has long gone, I can still access the guestbook, still see comments from people long gone, and some of the people I still know today.

So, this post isn’t an excuse, it’s not a thing I am using to excuse myself for dumb shit I’ve done, it’s a post to document what I’ve done, to get the shit out of my head and to maybe help someone else in the future.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Gary Vee lately, I find what he has to say really good and it really resonates with me, more so than other big name people out there.

A couple of things Gary says a lot are:

• Have patience
• Be true to yourself
• And work on your passion

I try and do those things in general, it’s just how I am. The joy of being a human is you make mistakes, and most people learn from them.

A while ago a friend of mine was thinking about selling an online store they ran and they contacted me about it. This person inspires me with all the things they are doing and have done in the past, and to be asked about something like this really excited me, mainly because this person asked me meant they believed I had enough knowledge to run this store and that meant a lot to me.

The deal didn’t go ahead which was OK, and I started thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, I knew I had the skills to build something like that, I knew I could work it all out.

Motivation

Knowing what motivates you is a strong thing that drives what you do and where you are heading. I’m very fortunate that in an old job, due to me not knowing what I want to be doing (I still don’t really know what I want to be doing) they sent me to talk to a workplace psychologist/councilor and through talking with them and answering the most questions I have ever answered in a survey, I got a better understanding of myself.

The biggest thing that motivates me is:

Anything fun and exciting

Anything that is fun and exciting ranks highly for me so does security of working for a large company. Near the bottom of the list is the financial side of things, where money doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to other people.

Fun and exciting led me to learn how to publish a podcast, how to build other sites, and what keeps me moving forward with giant pumpkin stuff.

Building the Site

So, building this e-commerce website was fun and exciting, I proved to myself that I could do it, I also know I am a kinesthetic learner, I learn by doing, buy making things and working things out as I go along, and I think in some ways that is how I learn how to interact with people, I have to go through a situation to then learn how to deal with the same sort of thing in the future.

I finished building the website, which in itself is a good thing for me, I sometimes don’t finish things I start, I get bored easily, especially when it comes to traditional learning of things, I think that’s why school wasn’t the best fit for me in a lot of ways.

So, then I had this website, and while money isn’t a motivator, you do want to cover your costs. And that’s what it’s been doing, I lost money for a while as I had things priced wrongly, and my need to help people overtook the need to run it as an actual proper shop. Doing business stuff isn’t in my nature, and I didn’t do much with it, I attempted to do some marketing via social media, but I was never “into” it. It wasn’t a passion.

I never told my friend I had set this up, I wanted to, but I never knew how to say “hey, I built another version of the thing you have, that now competes with you”

And every time I saw them, I was thinking I really should talk about this thing, but I didn’t, was a fucken idiot and never mentioned it. I think if I fully believed in it like I do with the pumpkin website, I would have been telling everyone about it. It wasn’t on this website, it wasn’t shared on my personal social media accounts, just because I didn’t believe in it and I felt like a fraud.

And every month I started thinking about what the hell am I going to do with this website? I really didn’t want to be running it all the time, and I don’t want to offer support to someone if they bought it off of me, and just when it wasn’t doing anything, another order would come in, help pay for the cost of it, and help validate to me, that hey you built this thing, and it actually works. And as dumb as it sounds, that is a kind of feedback that helps me feel like I know what the hell I am up to (sometimes I don’t feel like I know what I am doing)

In the back of my mind I knew my friend would work out I was behind this website, they are smart and know how these things work.

Being Exposed as the Asshole I’ve Been

And they did, I got called out 2 days ago about it, and I feel like shit, and I should.

For people that have a different outlook on life, have different drivers and values, if you’ve made it this far down the post your probably just thinking so what? What is wrong with you, business is business and life is life, get over it and stop being a whining pussy. And to other people that might be true, but to me, it’s not.

This is the sudden jolt of reality and the slap in the face that brings me to the realisation that I haven’t been 100% true to myself, I’ve fucked up a friendship which means more than bullshit material things. People come and go in your life, and it’s not until you lose people or you fuck things up that you realise how wrong you have been. I can’t change the past or what happened, and I’m not sure how any of this will play out, I’m not sure if I totally fucked everything up with my friend, I hope not.

I think people trump everything, they are better than money, they are better than things, and for me, that is something I needed to remind myself of.

I just know moving forward I have to do more of the things that are right for me. Focusing on my passions, having patience and doing the right thing. I’ve decided to close down the site, it’s not just for me and I’d rather spend 5 hours working out the best way to embed a PDF onto the pumpkin website than spending 20 minutes sorting out an order for someone.

Knowing who you are is important, and I think it’s something everyone should look at, it could change how you look at the world and help you do the right things.

Just for people that are interested, I identify as a ESTP (extroverted, sensing with feeling) in the Briggs Myers Testing, Fire in the Tetramap system and RCA (Realistic, Conventional, Artistic) for the psychometric testing I did in 2012