The Thing I Never Knew I Would Need
Some days just stick with you.
Not necessarily because you planned for them to be important. Sometimes it is because something happens that completely changes the direction of your life, and you know almost immediately that you will never forget the day.
Today is one of those days for me.
My world looks very different than I expected it to.
I certainly did not plan for the past year to unfold the way it has. There have been plenty of moments when I have had to stop, reevaluate, figure out what comes next, and try to make sense of a life that suddenly looks very different from the one I thought I was building.
There is one thing, though, that I am especially grateful I had already started building before everything changed.
This website.
A place to create
I started working on this website more than four months before my life changed so dramatically. At the time, it was simply something I wanted to create. I had ideas for what I wanted it to become, plenty of things I wanted to try, and a very long list of things I knew I still needed to figure out.
I had no idea how much I would eventually use it.
I had no idea how much I would learn from it.
I certainly had no idea how many different purposes it would eventually serve.
One of the biggest gifts this website has given me is the opportunity to actually create some of the things that had been living in the back of my mind for a long time.
I have been able to develop educational content, customer resources, blog posts, forms, pages, and other ideas that I might have continued saying, “I should really do that someday.”
Someday finally became a lot more available.
Over time, I realized this website was becoming a place for three things I did not necessarily know I would need: a place to create, a place to show what I can do, and a place to experiment.
Create
Educational content, customer resources, pages, forms, blog posts, and ideas that might otherwise have stayed on the someday list.
Show
A place to demonstrate my thinking, digital work, experimentation, and results in ways a résumé alone cannot.
Experiment
A place to test ideas, learn what works, discover what does not, and keep adjusting without needing everything figured out first.
Then there is the part I never could have planned for
If you had told me when I started building this website that it would eventually become part of how I navigated such a significant change in my life, I would have had absolutely no idea what you were talking about.
I was just building a website.
I was working through ideas. I was making pages. I was figuring things out. I was creating something that I thought would be useful.
I could not have known how much more useful it would become.
There are things on this website now that simply would not exist if my life had continued along the path I originally expected.
There are things I have learned. Things I have created. Things I have tested. Things I have completely changed my mind about.
There are things that have helped me professionally, things that have helped me with my businesses, and things that have simply given me somewhere to put my energy when I needed somewhere for it to go.
I am very grateful.
I am still figuring out what comes next.
I am still learning.
I am still experimenting.
I am still building.
Maybe that is actually the biggest lesson this website has given me: sometimes you build something without knowing exactly why you are building it yet.
Then life changes.
Suddenly, you realize you are really glad you started.
I would love to hear if this resonates with you. What is something you started before you knew how much you would need it?
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