 So, hello. My name is Corey Moss. I do indeed live near New York City these days, came over to visit you wonderful people and after a few days in Manchester, I've had a great time. Belfast is great. So, first and foremost, I want to say that I am not a psychologist. This is a standard disclaimer, right? There are, as it is still technically May, it is mental health month, which is great. There's a lot of attention being drawn to the trials and tribulations that a lot of people will go through and our industry, whatever our industry is, I guess, is not to be discluded from that. So, I encourage all of you to take this, not necessarily what I'm going to say, but take this stuff seriously, mental health, your own health is very important. So, with that going forward, as she said, I've been doing this for building websites for about 20 years. I've been specifically focused on WordPress for about eight. My main product is called Kanban. From those of you going, what the heck is Kanban? If you're familiar with Trello, Trello is an example of a Kanban board, and if you don't know what Trello is, come talk to me afterwards. So, what I wanted to talk about is, like I said, there's a lot of attention being drawn to some of the bigger issues, depression and physical problems, and especially where a lot of us work remotely. There are issues with isolation, that kind of thing. And, well, I find obviously that stuff is very important. For me, I went through a real hard time last year, but I didn't, for me, I didn't feel like I warranted, you know, the diagnosis, if you will, of depression. It wasn't that deep. I was still doing fine, happy with my dogs and my wife and that kind of thing. And a friend of mine said, you know, but you've still been going through something, and so I kind of wanted to share that story with you, just to draw attention to it doesn't have to be the darkest days for, there's still to be a need for community and, and getting some help. So, in 2017, it was actually the first year I'd been working on Kanban for over a year. And it was the first year that I was a responsible business owner and sat down and wrote out the goals for the year. I'd never done that before. Usually I'd just flown by the seat of my pants. And for better or worse, I accomplished them by May. So that kind of left me going, okay, so now what do I do? And I felt actually really good about myself. I thought, you know, I'd gotten a lot done. So I decided to look at, okay, so then what would be the next thing, right? And suddenly I'm back into my old patterns of flying by the seat of my pants. And the, the next thing that I'd had in mind was to rewrite my, my plugin. So here's where I'll introduce sort of the first. There's going to be, there's going to be some takeaways here. There's going to be little lessons that I've learned. Hopefully, you'll learn from my mistakes. But lesson number one, don't go off the rails. So think long and hard. If you find yourself the type of person anyway who does make a plan, the moment you suddenly sort of step sideways. Take a hard look at that. And I realized that self-awareness is, is very difficult and I'll address that in a minute with some possible solutions. But anyway, so lesson number one, try not to go off the rails. The next thing was I said, okay, I'm, I'm looking at this product and I really think that I need to rewrite it from scratch. And for those developers in the room, you'll understand lesson number two, which is conventional wisdom in development as you do not ever write something from scratch. Because you're reintroducing all of the bugs. You're reintroducing all the problems. And it's a hard decision. I still think it's the right one. But lesson number two here is basically if, if conventional, if there is conventional wisdom, if a lot of, you know, smarter older people than you have sort of laid down the law and said things like, don't write, rewrite your app from scratch, question it. So that led me to thinking hard about, okay, so what, what technology should I use? And, and last year, if, if you're a nerd like me and or a WordPress nerd going even deeper like I am, you know that there was this great debate about what should be sort of the next framework that gets JavaScript framework that gets introduced into WordPress. And there was a lot of discussion around, should it be react? Should it be view? And I was already looking at some of the issues that had led me to wanting to do this rewrite would basically be solved, built it with the built in technology of something like React. So I was already looking at React. But it led me to, you know, this great internal struggle, this great internal debate of like, well, a couple of things. One is there is this syndrome called shiny object syndrome. If you're not familiar, the joy is inevitably you're working in the way that you know how to work and there's always a new framework, there's always a new technology, there's always a new app, and it's always more exciting than whatever you're working on. Grass is always greener kind of thing. So thankfully, at least in this case, I'm looking at this and I'm going React at this point is being adopted by the WordPress community, is being debated highly, is being used by smarter, better developers than I am. I think this is the right decision. But again, it leads to a lot of insecurity. The other thing is that I am a developer for 20 years. I started this when there weren't frameworks, right? And so I'm just used to building a lot of things from scratch for myself. It also leads to a deeper understanding, right? But that's this thing called not invented here syndrome, which is many developers suffer from, well, I didn't write it so it's undoubtedly inferior because I'm smarter than everybody in the room, generally not true. But so I start to sort of end up in this mental cycle of what I think this is the right technology, but is this the right technology? I didn't write it. The other thing that started to happen was I said, okay, well, I don't know React at all. And I'm basically under pressure to rewrite my product using this new technology, which means that when I finally ship a product that it has React built in, it's got to be great. It's got to work, right? And so I don't have a lot of time to ramp up, which inevitably leads to yet another syndrome that is common to our community, which is called imposter syndrome, right? Where basically it's a nice way to say insecurity. We all feel like we aren't adequate, that we don't know in fact as much as we do, because honestly, we are constantly bombarded with, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but experts who clearly come across teaching us new things and whatnot, and so leaves you going, well, I don't know as much as this guy or gal, am I good enough? So just to put a cap on the first half of this story, basically while I'm sitting there, kind of learning React, kind of insecure about whether I should build React, kind of insecure about, well, if I build it in React, is this going to actually do what I needed to do, and all that kind of stuff, I of course basically stopped working on the product, because I don't want to keep developing it if I'm going to rewrite it. So that starts to introduce feelings of depression and anxiety while I should be doing these other things, but I'm not doing these other things. Where my priorities, I'm also watching other businesses succeed, you know, everybody blogs about how great they're doing, and you go to a meetup, and you talk to people, and how is your company doing, we're killing it, it's the best year ever, because what else are they going to say, right? But so now I'm starting to get a little jealous, and basically all these emotions are just running through my head, running through my head, and this is where I basically just froze in place for a few months, where I just couldn't get out of my own way, I couldn't decide, nothing quite felt right. It's a little pause there. I'll leave you, that's where a boy loses girl, right, or developer loses Wi-Fi password, or whatever it is. So what I, thankfully, at that point, you know, I could pick my head up, and there were at least a few things that I had done right, because I have been doing this for a long time. One is, I had been working alone for a year and a half, and realized that I needed help, specifically with marketing, but also just a sounding board, so I basically, I'm now collaborating with Jake, who's sitting there, I'm calling him out, the other handsome gentleman in the Kanban shirt, but having somebody else, any other voice, and this doesn't have to be a coworker or colleague, it could be a friend, it could be a loved one. Just having somebody who's willing to listen makes all the difference. I'd also just previously joined, there's an online community called post status, which is kind of meant for people focused on business in the context of WordPress, but there are WordPress forums, there are Facebook groups, and again, it doesn't have to be WordPress, that just happens to be the world that I revolve in. But again, having these people and watching these conversations go by, and seeing that at least once in a while, I wasn't the only one chiming in and saying, hey, I'm having a hard day, or I'm not sure about, you know, this technical decision, or that kind of thing. The other thing that came out of those communities was I started what's called, or joined what's called a mastermind group, really, really handy, I encourage everybody to start one, you know, free and easy. Basically, you find a few like minded individuals kind of pursuing the same goals in life and business, and do a once a week call. And there's, you know, I won't go into this, but there's lots of different ways to run it, the simplest one just being each of you take 15 minutes to kind of talk about the problems that you're having. And everybody helps brainstorm solutions. And then there's a nice element of accountability. What are you going to do by next week? And then the next week, you say, I did it, or I didn't, and your group very nicely says, why? Or why not? But it helps keep you moving forward. And it helps, it's again, just voice of reason, or one of my favorite phrases, sanity check, right? Kind of to just make sure you're on the right track. The other thing is, I see a therapist, and I'm willing to admit it. Just somebody that I talk to once a week. Sometimes we talk about, you know, personal problems or my frustration with my dogs, or, you know, road rage when I yell at somebody, because they cut me off. Sometimes I talk about business, my career, all that kind of stuff. And this doesn't have to be a lay down on the bed and tell me about your mother kind of thing. But a weekly check in again, with an objective voice, somebody who is literally paid to be honest with you makes all the difference. The last thing, no, not the last thing, the next thing. During this whole process, something was wrong. And this is where again, I'll say self awareness is really, really tough. But again, having voices coming in from the outside that can sometimes enable your self awareness or be your self awareness, which makes no sense at all. But hopefully you understand the point I'm trying to make. My gut just told me that there's something about this process was wrong that I dug a hole. And it wasn't the right place to be. So I kept questioning. The other thing is I'm a bit of a productivity nerd. And I've tried to develop pretty good habits over time. And so understanding the power of something as simple as making a list and going, okay, sorry, what was that again? Oh, I'm done. Oh, shoot. Okay, fast forward. Well, that's most of the good stuff. Anyway, these are the solutions mastermind group, lots of peers, people around you. So the punchline or the inverted punchline to this story is basically in my mastermind group, I had a gentleman tell me, you know, why are you using react? And I had a can dancer that I told everybody over and over again. But dumb luck, the plumber rang my doorbell at that at that moment. And I had to go let him in to fix my hot water heater that was flooding my basement. And he said, and so I didn't get a chance to give my my standard answer. So I walked around for the rest of the day going, why react, why react? And basically, it came down to, wait, no, this isn't the right answer. And I was kind of able to walk back through all of these decisions that I'd made, and all these syndromes that I'd experienced, and said, you know, this isn't the right decision. And suddenly, a lot of other things started to make sense. So a couple of other quick things that I'll leave you with is, is constantly, you know, spend a little time every week looking at your priorities, you know, stay at the 10,000 foot level. And also look at ways to, to reframe your thinking, ask your friends or, or loved ones or, or, you know, your mastermind group to sort of say things back to you, and see if it makes sense and see if, if they can say it in a way and with a straight face, so that you in fact know that it is the right thing. So the good, the good news at the end of all this is, I'm solidly halfway through rewriting it exactly the way I know, and feeling much better about my day to day. Thank you very much.