Unfortunately, that means that I have not had enough time to write a second post this week for the blog, so instead, I have gone back through my newsletter archives and pulled out an email I sent to my list a couple of months ago. I hope you enjoy it!
I want to talk about a huge failure of mine. Something that I look back on in regret — not only for it specifically, but for what it represented.
Youthful Enthusiasm
My old About page here on the blog used to include the following paragraph:
I once set up and ran an information site called Florida Facts. You can probably guess what that was about. This was before the days of blogging, and I took great pride in my design and content. There were one hundred plus pages of original content. Unfortunately, I received very little traffic, and that little venture died…
I loved that site. I started work on it around 1999/2000, when I was just 15 years old. I put an astonishing amount of work into it. It was essentially a blog, before blogs really existed. I was getting barely any traffic (I distinctly remember being over the moon when I received a single message from a reader), but I loved it anyway, and I was sure that if I persisted, it would eventually come good.
Unfortunately, a few kids at school found out about the site, and apparently decided it was “totally gay”, or whatever the vernacular was at the time. Cue a torrent of email abuse, followed by a knee-jerk “Screw this, I don’t need this shit” deletion of the whole damn site.
10 Years Wasted
Florida Facts died, and for about 10 years following on from that, so did my entrepreneurial spirit.
I had tried all sorts of things as a kid – buying wholesale and selling retail on eBay, even starting a web design business — but that drive seemingly disappeared overnight (only to resurface last year).
So my huge regret is “What if?” What if I hadn’t shut down Florida Facts? What if my entrepreneurial spirit hadn’t sputtered and stalled for a decade? Where would I be now, and what would have I achieved? If I had consistently been on the blogging bandwagon from a time before such a bandwagon even existed, would I now be the owner of a huge conglomerate of A-list blogs?
I’ll never know. And some people will tell you that dwelling on such regrets is a pointless exercise. But I disagree. That regret fuels a fire in me now to achieve as much as possible. To make up for lost time.
The moral of the story, my friends, is this – you’re never to young, or too old, to make a start. There are no excuses. There is no “Well I could do it, but…” There is only accepting the circumstances in which you are operating, and doing.
Are you doing? (tweet this)
Creative Commons image courtesy of yeowatzup