Getting Off the Factory Floor: Doing What You Love and Getting Paid for It
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Adam left college with a degree in Advertising Design and went straight to work on the factory floor making office furniture. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined but having been raised in a blue collar family, he was taught that a strong work ethic would make you invaluable to “the company” and “they” would provide the financial security and stability needed to raise a family and enjoy life. In other words, this meant working in the same stark metal building for 30 years with 20 minute lunch breaks and two weeks vacation in the summer. In this session Adam will detail how he discovered WordPress and the open source community, the many businesses that he’s started and failed at, and how he’s utilized these experiences to continually fuel his entrepreneurial spirit and create his own path to a work/life balance and how you can too. No matter what your passion, WordPress can be an integral tool to helping you achieve your dreams and success in your own business. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” ― Babe Ruth
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Getting Off the Factory Floor: Doing What You Love and Getting Paid for It
- 1. @ S I T E L O C K@ S I T E L O C K Getting Off the Factory Floor: Doing What You Love and Getting Paid for It W o r d C a m p A n n A r b o r 2 0 1 6
- 2. @ S I T E L O C K Adam W. Warner • WordPress Evangelist at SiteLock • Co-Founder at FooPlugins • Discovered WordPress in 2005 • WordPress Community Addict • Fan of Fractals • Lover of Meatballs • Proud Dad!
- 3. @ S I T E L O C K Childhood
- 4. @ S I T E L O C K Work Ethic
- 5. @ S I T E L O C K It Started with a Paper Route
- 6. @ S I T E L O C K College
- 7. @ S I T E L O C K Factory Life
- 8. @ S I T E L O C K Realization
- 9. @ S I T E L O C K Lost
- 10. @ S I T E L O C K The Day that Changed the World
- 11. @ S I T E L O C K Forced a Personal Change
- 12. @ S I T E L O C K Leaving the Comfort Zone
- 13. @ S I T E L O C K Flowered Shirts and Sandals
- 14. @ S I T E L O C K Paradise Lost?
- 15. @ S I T E L O C K A New Beginning
- 16. @ S I T E L O C K Attitude Adjustment
- 17. @ S I T E L O C K Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.
- 18. @ S I T E L O C K WordPress Led My Way
- 19. @ S I T E L O C K Never Give Up. Never Surrender!
- 20. @ S I T E L O C K Opening Doors
- 21. @ S I T E L O C K It’s Your Choice • Stop wishing. Start manifesting. • What you put out is what returns to you.
- 22. @ S I T E L O C K Takeaways • Follow your passion • Don’t accept what you “should be doing” • Change your mindset, change your life. • Utilize WordPress (of course)
- 23. @ S I T E L O C K Confession
- 24. @ S I T E L O C K Thank You • Follow at: • @SiteLock • @wpmodder • SlideShare • http://www.slideshare.net/wpprobusiness • My Blog Posts: • http://wpdistrict.sitelock.com • http://adamwwarner.com
Editor's Notes
- Adam left college with a degree in Advertising Design and went straight to work on the factory floor making office furniture. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined but having been raised in a blue collar family, he was taught that a strong work ethic would make you invaluable to “the company” and “they” would provide the financial security and stability needed to raise a family and enjoy life. In other words, this meant working in the same stark metal building for 30 years with 20 minute lunch breaks and two weeks vacation in the summer. In this session Adam will detail how he discovered WordPress and the open source community, the many businesses that he’s started and failed at, and how he’s utilized these experiences to continually fuel his entrepreneurial spirit and create his own path to a work/life balance and how you can too. No matter what your passion, WordPress can be an integral tool to helping you achieve your dreams and success in your own business. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” ― Babe Ruth
- WP Evangelist means that I attend WordCamps and other events and listen to the community.
- Typical 80s kid. Letting my older brother convince me to let him shoot me in the backside with BB gun. You know, typical 80s kid stuff I was also “the artist” of the family. Always drawing what I saw in Mad magazine, etc.
- Blue collar values Wait for Dad to come home in his dark blue work pants and light blue work shirt with name on patch. All I wanted to do was play catch.
- Newspapers, anyone remember those? Get home, roll papers, rubberband them, load them into the basket on the front of my bike. 7 days a week. I was know fully immersed (and proud) to be living the blue collar life. Short stint working for ”the man” as bus boy, dishwasher, line cook Second “remote” job - Wee Willy’s Weeny Wagon First REAL work from home jobs, although part-time: pen and ink portrait business – working from home part-time. Memorial DVD business - working from home part-time. Back into “regular jobs”
- Fast Forward to college. Advertising Design degree, goal was new york city Ad Agency Instead went straight to the factory floor making office furniture.
- Office furniture Cleaning, packaging Running machines and eventually programming CNC machinery
- 30 years in same building, two weeks off in summer, and 20 minute lunches. Slowly but surely, I was feeing more and more unsatisfied and unfulfilled. Not to mention that my marriage was failing. We were separated and I had to take in roomates to keep the house I was in.
- I didn’t know I then, but I was depressed. With all these things swirling around, I felt lost. The only thing I knew how to do was to work even harder. I volunteered for double shifts, 16 hours days. My thought process was that if I had more money, I would find my happiness
- It was a typical morning. I was working along like a good little busy bee, listening to Howard Stern on the radio, when the normal routine of his show was interrupted with news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center We all know what happened that day
- Loss of government contracts Round of layoffs I volunteered to be included in next layoff and I was. In retrospect, I was putting the pieces in place that forced myself to make a change.
- Again, only thing I knew to do was go back to school near separated wife’s home town Lived in a dangerous little trailer in dead of winter Took one semester of “web design” and basically brushed up on my HTML skills Full Sail, Roommates online, sold all I had left at that point Loaded car with chocolate lab and headed to florida.
- Ended up working at Discovery Cove Meeting and working with people from all over the world REALLY OPENED MY EYES to see the bigger picture
- Dad in spring Mom in fall Brother died (suicide)
- Created photo memorial DVD for brother. Created a business and partnered with local funeral home. Worked in customer service for audiobook publisher managing website orders and processing It was also when I discovered WordPress. I migrated the memorial business website to WordPress
- It was around this same time that I started to work on my mindset. How I choose to see the world, the daily routine. Remember, I was pretty depressed before moving to Florida, and after what had happened in the past year, it got even worse.
- I don’t know what sparked the change in my attitude. Maybe it was the deepening family relationships Maybe it was the fulfillment I felt by providing other grieving families with their photo memorials It was probably these mixed with the uncertainty of life that prompted me to take my life into my own hands and not depend on others (the company).
- One thing I do know, is that the more I became involved with the growing WP community online, the more I felt like I had the power to change my life to something I wanted it to be.
- WP Tutorial sites, pet supply store, a multi-author blog about dreams, a WP Multisite install providing sites for artists and musicians, ebook sales Lots of failures. A few small successes. Each failure a learning experience in what NOT to do. More I learned about WP, more I applied that to web dev and marketing and upped my skills.
- By following my passion Bugged IT guy at audio publisher enough that he gave me a job That turned into full time WP work back in Florida as Web Development and Internet Marketing Manager for a large North American fan company. That turned into a full time plugin business Work from home for 4.5 years. That turned into SiteLock opportunity to get back to community.
- Your place in life and where you want to be is all in the mind. And in the mindset. Stop wishing. Start saying yes! Start manifesting. Believe it to be true. Guide the universe, guide yourself to the goal. Enough Tony Robbins
- I still work on my mindset daily. I still have many more failures than successes.
- SiteLock – security news/tips, WordPress community interviews Wpmodder – Mostly WordPress, direct replies