The Hard Road

People say life is a journey and that we choose which roads we travel. Personally I have travelled many, changing professions more than once, as well as where I live and the people I know. Today however I want to talk about a section of road that I decided to travel along one year ago.

One year and three weeks ago I had never owned a computer. One year and two weeks ago I purchased my first computer, a cheap laptop. One year ago today, I signed up to the print on demand site zazzle and started to teach myself graphic art and design. I saw what the site could offer and with no experience or skill, optimistically thought - Yeah, I can do that.

Today is my first anniversary as a zazzler.

Not surprisingly, it has not been the easiest of journeys. My first forays were, well lets face facts, they were terrible. Never having done anything like this before I made plenty of mistakes. The upside is that for the last few months I have been fairly consistently completing designs that I am happy with. Even better is the fact that people are buying them. There is nothing quite as satisfying as knowing that somebody thought that your work was so good that they had to own it.

In the past year I have learned so much, met a lot of great people and my friends now ask me for computer advice. Just over a year ago I never thought any of that would ever be possible. I was a technological neanderthal.

I certainly do not want to look back at the road that I have travelled to get to this point. I can imagine the carnage that I have left behind and that is something that nobody should have to look at. I prefer to always look forwards. Unfortunately the sun is shining in my eyes so there is no way of knowing if the road ahead is straight or curved. The best thing is to just keep moving forward slowly in the knowledge that at least the way is bright in that direction.

This whole point of this post has just been to give a little insight into why this last bit of it is so important.

I would like to publicy thank all the people that have helped me along the way. Putting up with my dumb noob questions and mistakes, giving me encouragement and helping to promote my work.

A massive thankyou to you all. You know who you are.