There are thousands of articles out there praising the joy of setting and achieving goals, making most of us wonder where do these authors live.

Having goals is healthy and help us to grow. But achieving our goals is easier said than done. I am 46 years old and nothing was easy throughout my personal & professional life. I had to work extremely hard in order to achieve a certain quality of freedom in my life. And all the real people I know had to struggle for reaching their goals.

So why there are so many fast-food-for-thought guides, seminars, books about self motivation that promise to transform us in 30 days into a success machine?

My personal opinion is that people prefer to believe a lie than look inside and find the strength to do the hard work. Especially young people are looking for ways to find the express highway to success. Sorry, there isn’t such a thing in real life… unless you are part of the “1% billionaires elite” of the world.

Ideadeco Blog

I started this blog as a side project in 1994, in 1998, and in 2000 in different platforms. For years it was like a zombie blog with only a couple of posts. In 2000 the idea of a personal active blog seemed warmer and my plans were enormous… The result was again a couple of new blog posts. The year that the idea became solid was 2008.

I had been working in several top notch websites in the USA since 1998 as a digital copywriter, SEO expert, digital marketing strategist and graphic & web designer. Everything was new and still formatting on how to do things.

Meanwhile, my time was separated between Europe, Greece and USA in Tech companies and sales projects, which I am really grateful for that. My twenties were challenging and all I can remember is studying, working and traveling for a decade!

Most of the projects were into a hard corporate environment and I wanted to have a break from technical demands and relax my brain from statistics, strategies and reports. I was responsible for creating digital content for so many companies that my personal blog was a natural thing to do.

I decided to turn my love for words into a blogging routine. In 2008 my blog lived for 4 years in greek but without any success. In 2013 was the year that finally settled in WordPress.com in english. There it was, my own personal blogging corner: www.ideadeco.co … It took me 2 more years before I started to blog regularly and end up blog daily in 2019, in my free time. You see, writing 3000-5000 words every day for clients doesn’t make it easier for you to find the energy to craft your own copy of 1000 – 1500 words per day.

I have to confess that my dyslexia demands double the effort and energy for every single page I create. But I keep doing this for more than 20 years. Not even cancer and a minor disability (in my legs) that came to stay with me (when I was 30) and made my daily movement quite difficult, had ever stopped me from working. I had never missed a working day in my life. Until 2013.

WordPress Changed my Life

Life teaches you that you have to play the game with the cards that you have on your hands. We control nothing, only how we react to what happens. You can only make the best you can with what you have.

My health was weak for some years and that was the beginning of a big change in my life. Suddenly, my doctor has forbidden traveling so I moved back to Greece and start working remotely when that wasn’t so trendy. I was lucky enough to have clients that were open to trying this new approach.

To everyone’s surprise, this model of remote working was successful and the following quarters had an amazing growth for almost all projects. Then the unexpected happened, my health condition got worse and I had to stay in bed for more than a year. Unable even to walk a meter without support. It was a blessing that my books, my music, my cats and my laptop became my companions.

WordPress was one of the CMS I was using for my clients’ websites, next to Joomla and Drupal. But that year working was like walking barefoot on ice. Disappointed from the outurn I started to use my personal blog as an escape from the four walls of my bedroom.

WordPress.com was friendly and easy to use. It made me feel that I could stay in the game without too much effort. As most users at the beginning of WordPress, I had fallen in love with their culture. WordPress mentality put the user’s needs as a top priority. That was and still is its winning point.

All the years before 2013 I had used only WordPress.org and thought that WordPress.com was only for amateurs. Oh boy, I was so wrong! It may seem like a non-professional solution only for those who haven’t try it. Like me.

I dived into WordPress.com and keep swimming into its deep waters. The development team behind the scenes has made an astonishing work. This easy to work open code CMS platform is built with thousands of excellent written code and millions of working hours.

WordPress.com changed the philosophy of digital existence. It shifted the boundaries between those who own the knowledge of web development and those who are not familiar with Dev Education.

WordPress.com open the road for every person in the world and made accessible the right of having a digital voice. WordPress.com is like Promitheas who brought the light from Gods to humans. And yes, to the rest of the world, Devs look like Gods.

WordPress.com

My eyes and my hands couldn’t follow my will to code and create any website. WordPress.com gave me back a sense of freedom and a bridge where I could work but without using development or coding.

I was free to use my last drops of energy in creating content. Day by day, these little wins brought me back to life. Solving all the technical hows through WordPress.com, it created more space for Motivation and Inspiration to drive my will and find a new purpose. I wanted to wake up in the morning and type my next blog post. That literally kept me alive.

I studied everything about WordPress.com… I even learned the code by heart. For 650 days my brain was absorbing all the information I could find about WordPress.com

It’s only fair to admit that my previous engagement with WordPress.org made this process smooth and joyful. My dedication to this platform is based on its excellent technical structure and to its core mentality of democracy.

WordPress.com shouts out loud that everyone with access to the internet can make use of his/her fundamental right to express their voice, without any financial, racial, sex, educational, geographical or ability limitations. In 10 minutes you can create your own digital space and thrive. With zero development knowledge.

Thanks to WordPress.com everyone has a chance to succeed in life.

My success story is bittersweet but it’s 100% true that I owe everything to WordPress – Areti Vassou