It has been almost 15 months since I started this blog. When I started it, I felt like I had plateaued in my career and needed the next uphill climb. Since then I have come out of my shell, made a lot of friends in the user experience and greater tech communities here in NYC and around the country, quit my job, started my own full-time consultancy, and made a foray into the speaker circuit.
I’ve learned a lot about myself, begun to recognize my strengths and accept my weakness, and mostly, discovered where my true passions lie.
It is with a heavy heart and considerable trepidation that I announce the next jump in my career. After much success with my presentation, “Evangelizing Yourself,” and my innate ability to acquire Twitter followers, I have decided to put my user experience consulting business on hold in order to pursue a career as a motivational speaker.
I know it sounds like a dramatic shift, but I feel that my true calling is to help people discover their inner selves. Using a patented five-step program that I have be working on for the last six months, I will enable people to experience a positive, permanent shift in their quality of life, redefine the very nature of what’s possible, and create a future of their own design. These shifts are the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power, which I will be credited for giving them.
In a fun, exciting, and collaborative setting, I will breathe inspiration into people and organizations. My keynote speeches, delivered to groups of 10 to 10,000, will be rich in content, riveting and entertaining. Initially I will teach audience members to first transcend thought through meditation where we experience our essential nature, our pure Being in the now. While this state of being and silence will be lost after we come out of meditation, over time that state of pure consciousness in meditation becomes so firmly established that it is not lost even when we are engaged in our daily activity. It is then that they will be able to comprehend my true message.
Next I will impose my system for strengthening emotional impact and increasing your sales, which primarily integrates proven psychological tools with sales tactics that will help you better understand, persuade and influence others to ultimately achieve your most ambitious goals and objectives. Together we will uncover solutions that work with timeless strategies that can be applied to any situation. Additionally I will teach people how to understand and appreciate their origins, how to dress fashionably without buying designer labels, how to make tripping up look like breakdancing, how to control their anger, and how to deal with peer pressure and alcohol addiction.
My ultimate goal is to become a fully-fledged performance enhancement company serving myriad disciplines guided by the belief that you build better companies by building better people. I believe through my own experience building a better me, I can no doubt impart these nuggets of wisdom to the general public seeking salvation.
So yes, I have begun to make a name for myself in the user experience community, and I have thoroughly enjoyed making millions of people’s lives better by helping to design easier-to-use and more pleasurable products and services. But that is simply not the legacy I want to leave. I want to cast a wider net and reach a whole new realm of people who need my inspirational guidance and wisdom. I hope the users will understand why I felt I had to leave them behind.
And I hope you, my loyal blog readers, will stand by me in this sudden but necessary career shift. Thank you for your constant support and encouragement. Each and every one of you is special, and I’m positive will greatly benefit from my teachings. Until next time, I’m signing off, your guru extraordinaire, Whitney
P.S. April Fool!
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I don't think the “P.S. April Fool” addition to the blog was necessary. ;) Although the presentation i spotted on slideware was very nice, I don't have the feeling that presenting stuff all the time will make you happy day in day out. And of course we cannot lose a young, good and ambitious evangelist like yourself in our UX community. So I'm happy it is a joke on the first of april =)
You just couldn't do it, eh? You just couldn't keep a straight face? Pshaw.
I mean, “pshhh”
:) what i have to do guru? hahahaha
You had me up to 5 step program. Probably the best April Fools I've seen this morning.
We had a bunch of funny questions on the UK Answers homepage including this great one: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=…
Wow Whitney, I was rolling my eyes wondering whose cool-aid you'd been drinking!
Cute ;)
Hey Whitney – you really had me there for a minute – I was thinking, wow, really? Great April fool's joke!
But…
Five step programs aside, I actually think you *would* make for a great motivational speaker. After all, isn't that something like half of what we do in UX anyway?
Really nice – I love how you've managed to pull a self-parody of your usual hubristic style. Maybe there is some soul under there, after all :)
I read all the way to “It is with a heavy heart and considerable trepidation that I announce the next jump in my career.” when I realized ;) You don't announce and you don't trepidate ;) Happy April Fool's!
I'm kind of let down. I was psyched to hear you speak. -Will
you *almost* scared me!!!