When I first started writing The Hacker Chick Blog, I was incredibly taken by Kathy Sierra and her Creating Passionate Users blog.
I loved how fun and edgy she was. I was in awe of her fearlessness in advancing her own ideas even when they flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Not only was she unapologetic for this, she clearly reveled in the idea. The mere thought of publicly standing up for my own ideas when they went against what others thought scared the hell out of me. But here she was – not only doing it but thriving from it. She was a huge influence in how I did The Hacker Chick Blog and I really tried to match her in both courage and style.
Later, while watching the early seasons of Criminal Minds, I became captivated by Penelope Garcia’s character. This crazy, edgy, ingenious hacker who was not only a girl (that parts okay) but she was downright flamboyant about it.
As someone who’d been coding and doing all sorts of other primarily male activities my entire life, I’d been a tomboy since I was a kid. I made it a point of pride that I personified J. Random Hacker – right down to my obsession with wearing hiking boots everywhere (you know, in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room).
When I saw Penelope, I thought this is what a hacker chick should be (duh!). And so I changed my own style to be more colorful and edgy and to just have fun with the fact that I ama chick (huh).
When I started at Microsoft, I immediately adopted Gus Weber as my mentor. He wasn’t even on my team or anyone that I was supposed to be working with, but there was no way to miss the awesomeness he was doing for the Boston startup community. And so I did everything I could to ignore my official direction and instead follow in his footsteps. I thought, okay, I’m probably going to be fired for this – but it was so powerful what he was doing, that was more important to me then keeping my job. The entire experience would have been drastically different if I hadn’t decided to take that risk and imitate Gus’s actions, ideals and love for the community.
I am so glad every day that I did because I’m such a different person now and in a totally different place. In fact, for all of them for making me who I am today.
And so now, as I’m wondering what my next “big thing” will be (no pressure, Abbs) – I also wonder who might be next. Am I exposing myself to enough awesome to let me grow or am I getting too comfortable with who and what I know today?
It’s not that I haven’t done a damn amazing job of surrounding myself with awesome (you all know who you are). It’s just that I wonder… maybe there’s someone else out there doing something totally unthinkable to rock my world and flip it on it’s head… I sure hope so. Life is too short to stand still.
What about YOU? Who are you imitating?