Friday, May 12, 2006

Keep Learning. Always keep learning.

First off, I have to apologize.  I haven't been posting very much to my blog lately.  In the past I just posted about stuff that I knew about.  Only the facts.  I've been keeping very busy learning new things lately, so I haven't had much to write about.  I'm on a crash course of marketing and copywriting.  Of these things I know very little.  But they're intriguing subjects, and the basis for making the kind of money that would allow me to paint a custom color on my Ferrari.  So, I thought I'd switch it up a little bit and write about something that I think I know, instead of something that I definitely know...

The secret to life.  That one thing to live by, and be happy with forever.  KEEP LEARNING.  Never stop learning.  Don't think you know it all, because it makes you bored.  Boredom is the mortal enemy of creativity.

Just the other day, for the first time in my life, I discovered an honest-to-god bug in Internet Explorer.  When you're serving web pages from an IIS server farm using a load balancer (like many large web sites do), IE 6 will drop cookies when you jump from one server in the farm to another.  It doesn't matter if the cookies are server side or client side cookies, and the expiration date doesn't matter either.  Then, after I found the bug, I discovered the solution to it.  You must bypass the default behavior of cookies and manualy set the exact domain you'll be accessing them from.  I spent 6 hours on the phone with Microsoft, and they verified it.

People were very proud of me, I solved a major company problem, and accomplished something that not very many people ever will.  You know what joy I gained from discovering that bug?  Not much.  It's just what I'm expected to do.  I've gotten a big head, think I know it all, and gotten bored with programming.

When I'm learning new stuff, I'm excited.  I'm engaged.  When I'm doing the same thing for the 1,000th time, it's just the opposite.  I guarantee you're the same.  So, the moral of the story is still this: KEEP LEARNING.  Stay interested, or even the big things aren't much fun.

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Name: Travis Giggy
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado, US

I am passionate about business on the Internet. This blog is my personal archive of lessons learned while conducting business on the Internet.

I started programming web sites 11 years ago.

In 1997, I started my first Internet business, called Carryout.com. It was an online food ordering service that allowed you to order food from a local restaurant right to your door. At the time, that was pretty cool!

The fire was stoked, and I started learning as much as I could about Internet marketing and copywriting. I became an expert at measuring and testing.

I've been a success and a failure many times over.

Now, a decade later, I still learn every day what it takes to be successful in online business. This blog is how I record those lessons. Since I started this blog, I've learned the value of keeping a written record of my Internet business experiences. As long as I keep learning and growing, I'll keep writing about it.

I doubt I'll ever quit learning.