Does Your History Determine Your Future?

Sometimes looking back out how we got to where we are today can show us our successes, mistakes, what we could do better and what we should avoid. If you are young enough you might not remember a time before there was the Internet. For you this is the only life you know.

For others, the Internet was something strange that happened along the way; something that complicated our lives even more than they already were. I remember times before the Internet when monitors were green text on a black screen. If we were adventurous, we discovered how to change those colors, create our own text-based menus and enjoyed ASCII art: pictures made using only the characters on your keyboard.

Am I starting to sound old? Think about what you were doing in 1979. I remember that being the year I heard about computers, took an interest in them and enrolled in a computer technology course in Minnesota to learn not only how to operate them, but also how to repair them. What we were taught instead was how to find that bad circuit board, replace it and send the bad one back to the factory for repair.

After graduation I moved to Florida, thinking that technology would be ripe there. Boy was I in for a surprise. They still had rotary dial phones! Ok, so I got into repairing pinball machines, juke boxes and video games. That was more of an education than trade school was, even though it did not last long. See, the manager got tired of seeing me either getting shocked and thrown off my stool or across the room, or having fun “testing” the video games. He replaced me with 2 new technicians.

A few jobs went by and I landed one as a part time janitor. Within a month I was promoted to Janitorial Division Operations Manager. I was in charge of 85 people who cleaned 73 commercial accounts. I met every one of them, gained their respect and never had a building left uncleaned. That is, until I made a purchasing mistake and ordered too many trash bags. That somehow was determined to be grounds for dismissal.

By now 2 years had gone by and I moved back to Minnesota, had multiple supervisory jobs, with the longest being in manufacturing. That was my favorite until the chemicals got to me and after 5-1/2 years of seeing doctors, had to give it up. While there I went back to school for purchasing management, supervision (my description of a Theory X Manager is, “Where there’s a whip, there’s a way”), and enough others to fill a small wall with certificates.

One of the things I learned while there was how to read binary input/output diagrams. Everything happens in sequential order. I translated what I could from the German operating manual and wrote the rest, which last I heard was still being used. I researched potential vendors, visited them and set up Just In Time delivery contracts that saved the company lots of money. Working with a local power company technician, we devised a plan to reduce the electric operating costs by $10,000 per year.

After all that experience in manufacturing and being forced to leave for health reasons, I met some people who ran local bulletin board systems, known then as a BBS. While running my own BBS, I heard of this new communication thing called the Internet that was supposed to replace the local BBS’s. The time line is somewhere around 1993. AOL was not born yet and CompuServe was text-only. It was like one big BBS with complicated commands.

When AOL was launched it changed the way many of us used the Internet. Around that time the Netscape browser was updated to allow graphics. Interested in how web =ages worked, I started looking at the source code of most pages I visited. As I learned, I put that new knowledge to work on my own website. By 1998 I had won the Best of the Planet, People’s Choice Award for design.

In time the design technologies got away from me as I was looking in the direction of what made those pages interactive. Even though I still do not know how to design in flash, am limited in JavaScript and some other areas, I focus on the backend of things, designing databases and PHP scripts to interact with them. The advanced designs are handed off to others when clients demand them. For basic designs, I can still make them look good and functional.

Now I am planning to move away from the programming side and more into project management and real estate investing. However, finding a good, honest and reliable programmer is tough. Even ones who claim they have the skills to do what my clients want, I usually end up going back in to fix the programs. Those that are good either steal the work and take it to build sites for competitors, or simply steal the clients away. The choice left is to keep working while looking for the right person.

Looking back at all of that I see building blocks to the present. I also see missed opportunities, such as in the area of animated designs, but there are plenty of people who do that. Do you know the building blocks that got you where you are today? Do you know where you are going? Do you know the mistakes you made or opportunities you missed? What you would do different in your life to reach your destination?

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Jim Hutchinson is lead Website Developer and Project Manager for Website Managers. He has studied affiliate marketing from some of the most influential leaders in Internet Marketing. Many of those resources are available on WebsiteManagers.net
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