The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [97]
But soon his programming got more sophisticated, and went way beyond hit counters. In fact, it went on to revolutionize the Internet. This was the very early days of blogging, and Matt decided to create a blogging platform in PHP, called WordPress.
As more and more people starting using the platform across the Web, his notoriety rose, and CNET contacted him with a job offer. “This was the kind of job I hoped to have when I graduated—great salary, great everything. So I asked myself, ‘What am I waiting for?’” Matt dropped out of the University of Houston after his sophomore year to take the job at CNET.
However, Matt says, “One characteristic of a lot of entrepreneurs is that they’re relatively unemployable. I don’t think I was the best employee at CNET, honestly. I was really focused on my own projects, really into WordPress.” The blogging platform was starting to take off, and Matt decided to leave CNET to focus on his creation exclusively. Now, WordPress (http://wordpress.org) is the largest content-management system and blogging platform in the world; somewhere around 13 percent of all websites in the world run on WordPress, and as of this writing its latest version has been downloaded 27 million times. Many publishing commentators have blamed the Net in general, and blogging in particular, for the decline of interest in serious long-form reading—that is, books— in favor of more superficial, bite-sized “multitasking-friendly” blips online. Yet Matt Mullenweg, a major player in the blogging revolution, couldn’t be more passionate about the importance of long-form reading and writing.
At a café near the WordPress office, in the San Francisco Embarcadero area, Matt told me: “A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers. The book as a format is underrated in the digital age. I’m the first one to say blogs are fantastic, obviously. But they tend to be shorter form. Longer-form works stretch my mind more. When you write a book, it consumes you. What you get when you read that book, then, is someone’s entire life for several years or more, distilled into one work. That’s really powerful.
“I feel like these things have super-cycles, and I think we’re at the nadir of long-form writing. I think we might have just passed it, and it will rise again. The e-book revolution puts an entire library into something as small as a paperback. For me, as I stopped reading books in favor of Internet content, I felt myself getting dumber. Several years ago, I thought, ‘Man, I don’t think I’m as smart as I used to be.’ I just felt a little duller. So I realized I had to start reading again. When I was starting [my company] Automattic, I realized, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, so I need to read as much as possible.’ An e-book is ten dollars these days. Anyone can afford a book. Take some of the best books on entrepreneurship. Maybe Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker. Or The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, which I was really inspired by when I was first starting out. What’s holding you back? It’s your time and a few dollars. Or go to the library if you don’t have a few dollars. And you can have access to the world’s greatest wisdom on any topic.”
SUCCESS SKILL #6
BUILD THE BRAND OF YOU
(or, To Hell with Resumes!)
In August 2009, I saw a tweet from a famous publishing industry exec I’d been following, Debbie Stier (http://debbiestier.com), then senior vice president of digital marketing at HarperCollins, which read, “Will Somebody in Publishing Please Hire This Woman?”
Intrigued, I clicked through the link, where I read about a recent college graduate named Marian Schembari, who had just done something remarkable.
Like many recent liberal arts graduates, Schembari dreamed of working in a major publishing house. And