Today, I will share part of my story and journey that you may or may not know. I don't talk too much about myself though it's been a fascinating life.
Let's turn the clock back to 1997. I was working for an ISP (Internet Service Provider), and my job was to sell websites to businesses. Not knowing much about the Internet back then, I was excited to learn so that when I went out, I could talk intelligently with my future customers about the benefit of having a website. Most businesses were starting to have a web presence, and I could help them start with a smaller budget and a digital brochure for their customers.
Sales was an easy job; I liked people and was interested in what their businesses did, who their customers were, and where they wanted to take their business into the future. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would also have to learn to code to create marketing brochures for my clients.
Geeks were the only people I knew who coded, and I met quite a few of them in our office building. Let's face it; I wasn't one of them. My only exposure to computers and computer programs was my HP 486 Home Computer with Wordstar, a word processing application, and I didn't know it at all. Little did I know that my boss had plans to expand my role from just sales to designing and coding my clients' websites in HTML.
With encouragement from our other employees, I dug in. I struggled, staying most nights past 7 o'clock trying to perfect my HTML coding abilities because initially, I wasn't allowed to use any other programs other than Notepad. The boss wanted me to understand what I was writing so I would know how to fix it if a problem showed up in the code. I started practicing with one page and decided to do a motivational quote each day until I was somewhat proficient with the placement of pictures and words.
Fast forward to Today's "Something Extra." Late last year, I received a message through LinkedIn from a woman who first visited MotivateUs.com when she was a teenager. She introduced herself and told me how MotivateUs.com had helped her all those years ago. She also said her experience with being exposed daily to all the positive quotes and stories was her inspiration to start her podcast, and could she interview me.
I was so humbled and inspired that I said yes.
So today, I am sharing the podcast; it just went live on Tuesday. The interview is about 1 hour long, and I hope you enjoy my story and understand why I picked today's quote.
It's been a long, incredible, and very hard-at-times journey. And I'm not done yet! Our new site is almost ready to go live; we will celebrate 25 years on the Net in October and have dreams for even more. Together we will continue to motivate the world and lift people up with your help.
As Jonathan Tisch said, "You were there for us when we needed you, and we will be there for you."
I know his words are true. Start thinking of what you will do to help us!
Here's the link to the podcast: Motivating the World in Moments with Marlene Blaszczyk
