Site Upgrade, Philosophy, and History of SGL
Site Upgrade:
Super Geek Life is undergoing an upgrade. The traffic has increased enough to the point where adding more features and truly trying to do an email subscription for those who want articles emailed to them when they come out is impossible using my current format. Don’t get me wrong I like the simplicity of my current CMS, but I basically had no clue what I was doing with a blog. I’d made other websites before but blogging was a new animal to me.
So like many naive new bloggers I’m eating my choice, moving forward and upgrading into the world of WordPress. It’s probably going to take me about a week to do it but the experience will be better. I can already tell (I may or may not already be developing it in parallel on one of my other domains). While I am pained at the chore of moving everything to a new CMS I am looking at it as a wonderful learning experience and overall a really good problem to have!
That being said it’s a wonderful opportunity to express where all of this Super Geek Life stuff came from. First and foremost I do it for me. It’s therapeutic to hold myself accountable for all of the opinions I preach as well as to call myself out later on when I was wrong about something. It’s also fun generally speaking to put out skills that I worked hard to learn and to hopefully give some pointers to the would be geeks who want to learn also.
Philosophy:
I feel like my opinions are well rounded. I’m a flawed person, and as much as I like to improve I realize that I’ll always have some sort of odd bias towards whatever I’m reading. I try to call myself out on it as well as any preconceived notions I may have.
I think as individuals (if our opinions and ideas were buckets of water), we tend to want to shoot holes or at least point out the holes in the buckets of other people. Obviously your bucket holds water and that idiot’s bucket does not. I think that this is toxic though. I strongly believe that in every situation, whether it be personal or business, one needs to step back and shoot holes in one’s own bucket thoroughly before shooting other peoples buckets apart.
We need to accept that we could be wrong in an instant given the gift of new information. It may be a hard pill to swallow depending on how fervently we were defending something but then you have to realize you’re only holding on to something because of pride (and pride is also toxic). This doesn’t mean be a pushover, or don’t be confident. It simply means that when you bring something to the table you should have fully weighed its merits and faults before hand. It also means that while you don’t have to agree with someone or like them (even if you absolutely detest their opinion), it is very valuable for you to understand how a person came to that conclusion in the first place. This is root cause analysis at its finest.
I think if more people did the above we would be able to get out of this polarizing BS social media crazed political monstrosity that we find ourselves in these days. Too many people, too sure of themselves, too militant, with no understanding of what got them there in the first place. But I digress… this commentary is not what this blog is for.
History of SGL:
How did all of this come to pass? Well Super Geek Life started as just myself learning to learn. It became this obsession with fiction and non-fiction alike and seeing what values in the geeky things I enjoyed could be introduced to real life personal development and improvement.
At some point after leaving the military, getting a bunch of degrees and computer certifications I went to work in the corporate jungle. I’ve done well for myself. But the geek still hungers. At some point I wrote an article outlining my first experiment and lifestyle organization which utilized a checklist system.That article was:
I had written several other articles but this one was different. I threw more of my professional decorum to the wind and let my productivity and geek freak flag fly. I didn’t realize it yet but in that article a small seed was planted and although I didn’t know what form it would
I also wrote a series of other articles about development some of the notable geeky ones are:
Going the Distance
Be Selfish: Go Help Someone
I Can’t Because: The Diabolical Excuse Machine
Exude Confidence Without Arrogance
Creativity: Think Like a Child
Then the last one that I wrote prior to Super Geek Life being launched was actually a revised edition in which I admit my proverbial eyes were way to big for my stomach. So I revised and updated the newer version of the checklist that I was using at the time. That article was:
Be Batman: A Resolution Part II
By that time I owned the domain and knew what I wanted to do. I spent the next few months planning and lining up the first SGL experiment (the 30 day body transformation challenge testing Tim Ferris’ “From Geek to Freak” article).
The rest as they say, is history. Thanks for reading and stay Geeky!! I look forward to sharing the new page!
