I have no web development or design skills. Can you tell? I am learning as I go. Luckily my sister is a fantastic web developer. I would share a link here but I will have to ask her for the correct one. I have managed to get the basics set up. You can see a photo of me and some biographical information somewhere on this site. The rest is still a work in progress as I figure out how to remove all the bits I don’t need.
I don’t sell courses (yet). I work full-time as a Certified Financial Planner® and I am going to incorporate financial planning information into this website, while hopefully not putting you to sleep as you read.
After years of writing and not publishing anything because what I wrote wasn’t perfect, I have decided to hell with it. I will put things out in the world because the time is passing and I may never have anything perfect that I am prepared to share.
I had a devil of a job setting this site up. I registered it but then didn’t look for someone to host the website. Luckily my sister helped out there. I I forgot my password and reset it. Then I shared it with my sister via email and had to change it again. I have created an about me page and accidentally deleted it twice before I found how to save and retrieve after an accidental deletion.
What can you learn from this? Most of what we truly know how to do, we learn by making mistakes and correcting as we go. Most of the things I still know and remember in my life and the skills I have were earned by trial and error, rather than book learning. I guess that makes me smart but not wise. As Ken Schramm apparently said: “A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others.”
I recently read Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead by Jim Mattis and Bing West. (In case you haven’t heard of either of them, here is the blurb on Amazon: “General Jim Mattis—the former Secretary of Defense and one of the most formidable strategic thinkers of our time—and Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine.”
I learned that General Mattis is a prolific reader. When he was chosen to lead the invasion of Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, he started by creating a list of books about the region and the country and learning from people who had been there and had done what he was about to do.
I am not going to go into the morality of the invasion of Afghanistan or the terrible calamity that has now unfolded there with the Taliban’s return to power. The key thing I took away is that General Mattis aims to be wise by learning from the experience of others, so as not to repeat their mistakes. This has certainly worked well for him throughout his career. It will probably work for you and me too.
I guess I should end now as I must go and read the WordPress literature on how to edit a web page, rather than fumbling around for a few more hours trying to figure it out for myself.