Everyone Deserves a Website They Love

I was sitting with my new friend Mende hundreds of feet above Sukhbaatar Square, in a high-rise at the center of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital city.

I looked out the window and below was the statue of Chinggis Khan and the Mongolian Parliament building. I turned back to Mende's laptop.

He was showing me the website he was building for the Prime Minister. "Your website is the hub," he told me. "Social media matters, but this is the hub of the wheel, the rest are the spokes. Everything points to one place."

It was our first meeting together. Mende had found me online and enjoyed my writing and my work with the Peace Corps. He surprised me right away by asking my favorite question, "How can I help you?"

I laughed and told him I usually ask that question!

When I visited his office, Mende gave me Gary Vaynerchuk's book Crush It!

This was the central idea of Gary's book: Reach people where they are and bring them back to one place every time.

The hub of your wheel is where you really want to spend your time. This is your website.

Shortly after working with Mende, I fell in love with Squarespace. Back in 2012 it was revolutionary to me. It was a simple drag and drop platform that made it easy to create a new site. I could bring in my 300+ blog posts from Blogger really easily. It gave me so much energy and I loved creating my site.

But as the years wore on, the platform made it harder for me to write. It was difficult to search. Everything was manual and it took hours to update things. Each year Squarespace would email me:

Your annual subscription is coming up for renewal soon. We will automatically charge you $298 for the next year. Thank you for your business.

And every year I would see that email and think: maybe next year.

Maybe next year I'll figure out how to get off Squarespace.

Maybe next year I'll build a website I love that is a joy to use.

And every year I would try and fail.

I was literally paying them for the exact same service that I signed up for over a decade ago and nothing had changed. I felt trapped. I was locked into their system and there was nothing I could do about it. Looking back now, I realize it also started to suck creative energy out of me too.

I used to write 10-15 new posts a month and it dropped to writing 5-10 posts a year.

When I started, my website felt fun, light and happy. Now it felt like a ball and chain with Squarespace etched into it dragging me down a river.

But this month, after 14 years, I finally clicked Cancel Subscription.

It's hard for me to express how happy that made me. I've felt an explosion of creativity and possibility the past few weeks as I've worked on my new site. And that's something I wish for everyone.

I recently saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking about modern digital life. He says it's like we are living in medieval times with kings and serfs.

The tech companies have us working their rented land: their fiefdoms. We don't own our own digital land. They charge us to boost our posts, reach our followers, and often we are actually the product they sell to advertisers.

Things improved a lot when kings lost their power and it returned to the people through revolution. When people started to own the land they worked and lived on, it fueled centuries of innovation and a quality of life boom across continents.

We deserve to own the digital land we work on too.

The apps and the platforms are losing the power.

And the power is returning to us.

We have the power to build our own things now like never before.

The central reason I'm building this website on my own server is for my son Dalai. I want him to read essays like this and get a leg up in the world. I want to share lessons I've learned and the best wisdom I've discovered in my life: my favorite books, movies, speeches, resources.

As Randy Pausch said in his famous last lecture, "The head fake is you thought this was for you. It was for my kid."

Every time I write an essay or create something, I want it to be helpful to my son. Maybe it will be 10 years or 40 years before it is useful to him. That's okay.

This site is something I can leave him. I hope it helps him live a good life, make sense of the world, and more easily find happiness and fulfillment on his journey.

He just turned seven years old this week. We had a Minecraft-themed party and we are really getting into playing, building and making Minecraft LEGO too. This week we updated the Gratitude for Kids app together so that when you type in that day's answer it sometimes explodes in Minecraft blocks.

What he doesn't know yet is that app and all the fun things I hope to build for us live right here on this site: on the hub of the wheel that Mende taught me about 16 years ago.

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P.S. I'm tracking my personal journey while I build this in a few places. The first is my dream of Tech Independence. The second is my philosophy of Own Your Own. And lastly the Evolution of this site from Squarespace to my own server. It's pretty nerdy stuff, but if that's your thing I hope it can be helpful to you too.