The Case for Cheap Micro-Successes

I needed a boost for my ego.

enlivenworks.com, the website of my little leadership coaching gig, is up. It was built with WordPress, an unnecessarily more complicated option, instead of WIX or Squarespace. I wasted hours on it, because I was too proud.

I was good at building websites. I built the site of a Student Association back in college (👆🏻), the site of the consulting firm I worked for in Beijing, our start-up’s page, online shopping carts for Accenture’s clients, etc.

That was back in the 90s/00s. In 2020, nothing I knew worked anymore. I couldn’t even create a damn blank page! It sucked to be reminded of my age and irrelevance.

And people would say, “Stop wasting your time such on non-essential task, outsource them!” My wife, a superb website creator, volunteered to build it. “Don’t insult my manhood~~” I gasped in humiliation.

Pride aside, the other reason of this irrational decision was I craved the hit of self-worthiness. Since I had the basic skills, the chance of me overcoming this struggle was actually high. This struggle was a potential cheap micro-success. So I cheated and indulged myself in tinkering with web forms and corner radius.

Even though I still feel old, I also feel useful, like how my grandma must have felt when she figured out how to use the remote to turn on her VCR.