It's been 7 years!
7 long years of procrastinating about building my personal website. I procrastinate a lot, but this is definitely the one thing I've put off the longest. I have a ToDoist task that explicitly orders me to build my personal website that I postpone every single week.
I bought my domain years ago, spent countless hours browsing themes and discussed the idea of what I would do with my website in-depth to my husband. In the end, on a random Monday evening, as I was washing the dishes, I decided that 'Today is the day'. I will not put this off any longer, I am going to build and publish my website tonight.
I chose Gatsby & Netlify as I'm familiar with them as I used them to build the Women in Tech SEO website. I allowed myself a maximum of 15 minutes to choose a theme from Gatsby's starter pack and I filled in bits and pieces of content here and there. 5 hours later, and it's done!
Why do we put things off for years?
I don't know about you, but here's why I put it off:
- When I first got into SEO, I was told that in order to learn SEO properly, I should build my own website and use it as my playground. That advice freaked me out. "So if I don't build my own website and use it as my playground, does that mean I'm not a real SEO?"
- "If I build my personal website, it needs to be perfect in an SEO-sense. Because if it's not, people will judge my knowledge and experience," said the imposter syndrome in me.
- "If I build my personal website, I need to publish the most elaborate, extensive data research that will 'wow' the industry," continued the imposter syndrome in me.
So, what changed today?
I read something a year ago that stuck with me. It's called the 'Do Something Principle' by Mark Manson. He explains that humans are programmed to typically think motivation works something like this:
Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action
But if we choose to re-orient our mindset as follows, magic happens:
Action → Inspiration → Motivation
Ever since I read that and it's stuck with me. Every single time I'm dreading an audit, a piece of analysis, a slide deck, I think of the above. All it takes is to simply 'do something', anything. For example, if I'm prepping for a talk, the action of simply opening an empty slide deck and adding my title slide to it is enough to inspire me to do more. Once I do more, I'm filled with motivation to finish it. So this evening, while I was washing the dishes and thinking of what's on my To Do list, I remembered this principle and I decided to finally take action.
What am I hoping to use this website for?
Anything and everything. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I try to express in 280 characters on Twitter. I'll use this space instead. Whether it's SEO related or not, I plan to share things I know, things I'm learning and things I find inspiring.
If there's anything specific you'd like me to share, let me know.