Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2019, in January 2019, as its remark about having no New Year resolutions this year shows; it reflects the author’s situation at that time.
I’ve used a video that has nothing to do with our usual subjects to talk about some of the problems the blog has gone through over the years, which most of our readers don’t know about. In the video I start talking about it from minute 10, and I apologise in advance for the cuts, but I had to bring a video of almost two hours down to less than 25 minutes, and it was a video with no script or predefined points to cover. I also didn’t want it to be too long.
Still, if you’d like me to cover the subject of the penalties, how they happened, how we got out of them and what happened in between, you only have to ask.
Why didn’t I throw in the towel?
I don’t say this in the video, so as not to make it too long, but there was a moment when I thought about giving up, when I was overwhelmed by difficulties I didn’t know how to deal with, because I didn’t have the technical knowledge I needed.
But as it happened, that morning I didn’t get the usual 20 or 25 emails asking for advice about… or how to… That day most of them were thanking us for the work we did and for how, in many cases, we had changed the way people saw life, money and success.
So I told myself it wasn’t the moment to throw in the towel, even though we had a very tempting offer to buy the blog. I have to admit that after the difficulties that followed, for a few minutes I regretted not having sold it (although it was just a momentary tantrum).
We got back to work and climbed back onto a roller coaster of ups and downs, going to war with some online media outlets from a disadvantaged position in the eyes of the referee (Google, in this case).
And the rest is history.
But as I said before the year ended: this year there are no resolutions. We’re going all in. So we’re starting by taking steps and telling you all this so you can see where we came from, where they put us and where we’re heading.
Featured image: Jason Zhang, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
