“Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.”

Charles Spurgeon

It was my intention to start this blog with a post focused on how I started this journey from legal assistant to web designer. Seems a logical place to start, but I never could get “started”. In fact as logical as it seems to start in the beginning, my real beginning is happening now. Which is kind of in the middle. It’s where the meats at. It’s where the lessons learned finally have value. It’s where all the flipping and flopping (and yes, failures) pay off. Well it at least is where I feel most comfortable starting this Blog.

Over time, the story of my journey will come out. You will see it revealed post by post as I impart the lessons I’ve learned. Of course, my main focus will be on web design/development. If there’s anything I can tell you it’s that the process of becoming a web design/development has taught me lots about myself and life. You truly get out what you put in. You misspell (and I’m a terrible speller) a tag, forget a semi-colon, don’t close a tag or any combination of typing error and the page will break. There no way to count the number of hours I’ve spent trying to figure out what was wrong in my code. Why my page was breaking after the first paragraph. In the end, only to find I had made the mistake of not closing a tag.

Learning how to code has caused me to face the reality that I had become sloppy and complacent. I was so up my own butt, I barely used spell check. Me the chick that can’t spell worth a dime. Spell check should forever be like my best friend. Being a chronic miss-speller is a hard habit to break. However, if I’m going to code (and that’s exactly what I’m going to do) I must become a better speller. Or at any rate, an eagle eyed master proofreading editor. I now check my work thrice. And I should probably triple up on that number of checks.

Bad spelling hasn’t been my only discovery. I tend to speed through everything. As if there’s no tomorrow (which could actually be true – that there be no tomorrow). Yet that’s no excuse to speed through work assignments. Some how I’ve picked up the impression that speed matters. This particular bad habit wasn’t developed in a vacuum. Not that I’m going to waste space expanding on it’s origins here. Still it’s an issue with real detrimental consquences. Speed does matter. It just doesn’t matter over accuracy. Multitudes of mistakes have been committed simply because I’ve sped through task just in case there is no tomorrow. I really don’t think I need to worry much about there being no tomorrow. If I wake up it’s to produce high quality work and enjoy life. If there is no tomorrow, well nothng matters. Think about it, I’m gone – dead. Dead men really don’t wear plaid. If your dead, speed is moot.

Which brings me to the journey so far. I’ve come to a place where I can be totally honest with myself. I not only realize I make mistake, sometimes sloppy mistakes, but that failing is not a bug but a feature. You can’t truly know you love something until you fail at it. Falling flat, picking yourself up and continuing to plug away will get you a win. Be kind and gentle to yourself. Take it step by step. It’s your choice. You can choose to hope around like a rabbit. Going nowhere fast and being destracted 24/7. Or you can go slow and steady. Making progress and winning races like a turtle. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself. The turtle wins the race, baby.