Happy Monday. I am trying to get over my funk, sometimes I just like to be super transparent with you. Had a funky week last week. Last week, I was supposed to go to a mountain bike race and I was supposed to be a coach with the kids with the mountain bikes.

I was also supposed to go to Press-Comf. And I really wanted to go to Press-Comf, but here’s the thing, one thing after another, after another, after another was coming up as an obstacle for me to get to Press-Comf. And this is gonna sound really bizarre, but it wasn’t finances. Somebody else was willing to pay my way to go to Press-Comf.

So it wasn’t even finances, it was just in general. Life was getting in the way of me going to this Press-Comf event. Now, I want to take you back, way back. I’m gonna say 17, 18, 19, or 20 years ago. 19 or 20 years ago, I was supposed to be the camera bike in a movie about motorcycle road racing. If you know anything about me, or if you are seeing this picture right here.

That picture should tell you that I am into motorcycle road racing. I did it for about 20 years. Really loved it, was pretty good at it. Am I a household name? By no means am I a household name. So if you actually find any recordings of me, at a national, it would be when the leaders were passing me.

Okay, so I was not super, super fast. But here’s the deal. I got hired by this production company to be the bike that would carry all the cameras in a live, AMA sanctioned road race. And I was supposed to go do this, right after my daughter was born. And this was another one of these things where one thing after another after another just popped up and became an obstacle.

I was really bullheaded about it, like, I’m gonna go do this. I’m gonna go, no matter what gets in my way, I am gonna overcome it, and I’m gonna go do this thing. And finally, the day that I was supposed to hop in the car and drive to Colorado Springs, to ride this 200 horsepower GSXR 1000 with half a million dollars of cameras strewn all over it.

The day that I was supposed to go do this, I went to get my daughter out of the car, in a rather innocuous setting. She was an infant. I went to get her out of the car. She was in the backseat. And as I reached in to get her out of the backseat, somehow, the seatbelt, which was loose, got around my leg, around my ankle.

And as I started to step back with the infant in my arms, I realized I was tied up in the seatbelt, and I started to lose my balance. And as I lost my balance, I twisted because I didn’t wanna drop the baby. So I grabbed the baby really hard. And I fell backwards. The baby didn’t get hurt. The baby thought it was funny.

The baby, my daughter, my daughter Rainey, started laughing uncontrollably. She thought it was a great ride, but I spiral fractured my ankle, so I did not get to race that motorcycle. Did not get to do certain things. Press-Comf was like a very similar thing for me. I wanted to go, but there were all these obstacles, and then literally the week that I would’ve gone to Press-Comf, and I got a camper van, I could have driven, I could have picked up a last-minute airfare ticket.

I could have, we could go over all the things I could have done, but I didn’t do. And last Monday I was taking the trash out, and I kind of stumbled a little bit and loosened my grip on the trash can. One of those big trash cans on wheels – it swung back, landed on the ground, and the handle went through my pinky toe.

I say through because I didn’t realize at the time, My toe like, “ouch” it hurt. But, you know, I put the trash can out on the curb, walked back in the house, and sat down to do my work. Here’s the deal. About a half hour later, I was like, oh my goodness, why am I getting so sweaty?

Why is… why is my foot hot? And then it hit me, oh, no, I broke it. I broke it. I dropped the trash can on my foot, and I broke it. So I pulled off my shoe, pulled off my sock, and it was already bruised, turning colors, and pointing in a funny direction like I had broken my pinky toe.

It hurt like the dickens to walk on it. Later in the week, I couldn’t even put a shoe on. So all last week, when you saw me going live, when you saw me doing things and trying to be cheerful and smile through things, there were multiple things that were giving me funk in my week. I couldn’t wear shoes.

I didn’t want to take a bunch of ibuprofen or Tylenol. I didn’t want to damage my liver or any of that weird stuff. I quit drinking three weeks ago, right? So I couldn’t even have like a glass of bourbon with it, you know, to dull the pain. Let’s just be real, right?

No, I couldn’t even have a drink, right? ’cause I’m trying to lose some weight. And so last week was just kind of. A little bit of a bummer. I wanted to go mountain biking. Couldn’t go, wanted to go to Press-Comf in Arizona. Didn’t go, broke my foot, didn’t even wear shoes for the rest of the week. I did put on shoes, , to go to the grocery store.

Limped around for a while, came back and it was all swollen up and purple. Right. So still healing, still on, still on the mend from that. But then there’s other things and some of that funk came from. Some big personalities in the WordPress space, not getting along with each other.

Making me second-guess some of the decisions I’ve made. Oh, as an agency, I bought some software. I bought a lifetime deal. I. I’m a sucker for a lifetime deal. Bought a lifetime deal on some software. It got released last week for an alpha test, and I tested it and I’m not horribly disappointed, but it didn’t do some things that I thought I saw the founder doing with it on a screen share the week before.

And so I was like, well, did I get a bad version? Is his version different? Of course, his version’s different. So right now this alpha version is still very, very light on what it’s delivering. I still have a lot of hope in it. I still have a lot of faith in it, all these things. But I was hoping for more last week.

So that funk now, in my mind, I’m like, dude’s making a whole new thing. I don’t want to go into details about it. But all these people are like, ah, it’s a rip-off. It’s a, this, it’s a, that he’s not coming through. In reality – the progress he’s made is staggering.

Folks, I work directly on the lifter LMS team. And you know, sometimes we come up with an idea and we go, Hey, we’re gonna put this on the board, we’re gonna make this thing happen. And then the developers start working on it, and six months later, ooh, six months later, we have something to see, right? That’s for a little piece of something in a bigger platform.

This person is building something huge, and it’s only been six months, and people are putting these crazy expectations out there that, you know, this should be a competitive piece of software right out of the chute, and it’s not. His marketing technique was to give us a taste, right? Like any good drug dealer, give us a taste, and then hopefully, you know, see us clamoring for more and increasing demand.

So, you know, those of us with the lifetime deal, we should be happy we got in on a lifetime deal. But when he releases to the public, it’ll be at some escalated price based on the hype and the hoopla and all the promises. And, and I get it. I totally get it, but it’s still added to the funk. The funk.

And so I wanted to break outta the funk. So I thought that doing something would make it happen. How about a new Podcast? Last week, we had our first episode that we recorded. Today was our second episode that we recorded, and we have a new podcast coming out, me and Toby Cryns are the co-hosts. It’s part of the WP Minute menu. I’m sure that Matt is gonna do some awesome release or do something wonderful, but for us, it’s just fun. It’s like WordPress agency base. It’s giving me some energy back, and it’s helping to break some of that funk that I was talking about, and I thought, well, how do I, how do I articulate that funk?

I was on Reddit, and Reddit’s another thing that I just decided to do. I wasn’t on Reddit before, but now I’m like, you know what? I see a lot of screenshots from Reddit or links to Reddit. I’ll sign up for Reddit and I’ll see what I can. I came across this one that said, I’m a WordPress developer with 11 years of experience, but I feel left behind trying to catch up with Gutenberg, full site editing, React, et cetera.

Any advice? I think that’s part of where the funk is coming from. If I’m gonna be honest with you. I said that was a really big project that was getting released last week where I’d get a preview of this new platform, this new builder in WordPress.

There’s the work I do directly with Lifter LMS. There’s the work I do directly with WP Tonic, and you know what the customers in those spaces. They require different expertise. People will say, oh, membership site’s a membership site, a learning site’s, a learning site. It’s different eachtime, as the creators in these spaces vary.

They’re just a little bit different all the way around. And so when I look at this, I think to myself, well, how do we get out of this funk? What you know and our other people. This funk. And you know, I try to generalize my talks when I jump on lives, right? So it’s not just about WordPress, it’s about things in general.

I am seeing wholesale funk come in, in general business, like we’re not making any decisions on training until X, Y, and Z happen. We wanna wait and see what President Trump does with tariffs. We wanna wait and see what happens with immigration. We wanna wait and see. This wait-and-see thing with business, to me, is one of the most toxic things that can possibly happen because here’s the deal.

People who wait and saw, waited and saw during the pandemic, what did they do? They lost to people who found an opportunity within the obstacles. What did they do? They won. They won. My agency is one of those agencies that found opportunities within the obstacles during the pandemic. I thought that it would be a much higher range of opportunity than it was. But it happened.

I thought that I could shoot for the moon during the pandemic, and things would happen. It turned out that I didn’t exactly get to the moon. The good news is that when you create goals that are really far out there, and then you attain a portion of that goal, chances are a portion of that huge goal is still greater than the person who said, I’m gonna stick a pin in things and wait it out.

This is not the time to wait. So just as I said, I’m trying to break through this funk that I’m in this right now, like I don’t want last week to be the next month. I want last week to be done, right? So even though my foot still hurts, even though I’m still looking at things like I gotta learn this new platform, I gotta get better at bricks.

Like, and subscribe, like, and subscribe. Here’s the news, flash. I make all these talks because I’m trying to show people that I would be a good business consultant. I’m somebody that says, Hey, here’s reality, but here’s optimism. Here’s reality. This is what we’re dealing with, but this is where we can go.

Book yourself some time. Take a look at what we offer.

So you’re either going forward or you’re going backward, and you have to choose which way you want to go. Which way do you wanna go? And so my commitment to you is, today’s Monday and I’m getting outta my funk, right? Today’s Monday. Today, I’m getting out of my funk. I encourage you to get outta your funk, figure out whatever it is that you gotta do to make that happen, and I will talk to you very, very soon.

Bye-bye.