Another year has passed by and this little place on the web around Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Startup and stuff is now 2 years old! Wow, I really can’t believe it… when I started it as a marketing mean for my startup ImmotionAR (R.I.P.) I wouldn’t have thought it could have gone so far.
And in this crazy year, a lot of things have happened to me and to my website. My life is completely different. Regarding my professional life, for instance:
- I have started a new adventure with my buddy Massimiliano Ariani by creating New Technology Walkers, a network of professionals that offer high-quality AR and VR consultancies. It has been a tough start because at the beginning we had some problems finding the first customers, but then things started going better and better. I really want to thank Max for all the artistic things he has taught me in this year (and yes, I know, I have still to improve when shooting Youtube videos to not “look depressed” and I have still to buy you a decent camera) and for the passion he put with me to make things work. I think he never gets the recognition he deserves: for instance he restyled my website and he made the video editing for the augmented reality mode of the Vive Focus, but few people know this;
- I have been nominated as one of the top 50 VR influencers. I still don’t believe it and I think that there are people that deserve this title far more than me, but I’m happy that someone has recognized my efforts on social media;
- I have seen my name on Road To VR two times. As someone that reads that online magazine every day, wow, it was…unbelievable, I felt a bit like a rockstar. And then, some days later, I’ve seen also my name quoted on Forbes… so I felt like a rich rock star that has a bath in a Jacuzzi filled with champagne;
- I have traveled to China, where I got in touch with various Virtual Reality startups. It has been a dream of mine for at least five years… and now it has become reality, also thanks to the kind help of my Chinese assistant Miss S;
- I got to know tons of cool people. The engagement of my blog has grown a lot and this let me get in touch with fantastic people like Matias, Rob R F C, Charlie (Fink), Wes, Sam, Nicolas, Enrico, Luigi, Michael, Fabio, Alex… they are really a lot and can’t write all their names here (so forgive me if your name is not on the list, for sure I thought about you!). It’s fantastic to go on social media and talk with people about XR, exchanging our opinions on the various devices and such. I have learned a lot by talking to these people: I have made new friends and maybe one day I will be able to also collaborate with them professionally.
But for sure the most important event for me in this year of blogging has been meeting Mister President, Alvin Wang Graylin.
Why do I say that this has been the most important event? Well, because:
- The one to him has been the most important interview on my blog up to now (and let me be featured on Road To VR). Yes, the audio was terrible and I was so sick in those days that I thought that I could die, but the interview was full of interesting information;
- Thanks to him, I got to know another amazing person that is Enea Le Fons. Enea has been another crazy encounter of this year: he’s someone really passionate about XR and he has an enormous heart. Sometimes he wakes me up at 3 am to talk about his ideas regarding VR or regarding how we should go to Mars, but it’s a nice toll to pay to know such a cool guy. He has lots of ideas and a big knowledge and always know how to make me smile;
- He helped me in doing my job well by providing me a Vive Focus and putting me in touch with Chinese startups during the trip;
- With his passion towards VR, he has inspired me to work more and better and made me even more passionate for these technologies.
It has been awesome to know him, from a personal and professional side. Even if it is sometimes hard to tell him that the tethered headset that I use the most is an Oculus Rift :D. And yes, the best VR game ever is Robo Recall.
I hope that the year that is coming I will continue meeting cool people: John Carmack if you’re reading this, why don’t you send me an e-mail? 😀
I always like to talk about the lessons learned during my professional journey. Well, so, what has this year taught me? I think that its has mostly shown me that if I work hard, the results will come. As you can see, after more than a year of blogging, I started having my first valuable results. And this has been possible because every day I work hard to try to succeed: even when I am tired, even when I don’t feel like to. Last year I pointed you to an epic article about why discipline is more important than motivation and I still think that that article was damn right: motivation just gives you some days of excitements and then vanishes away, but if you want to win in the long run, you have to be disciplined. As it has happened to me, if you work hard every day in the right direction, results will come, sooner or later.
It will take time: every ten posts maybe only one will get true attention, maybe even the one where you put the least effort into, the one that you didn’t expect to be interesting, but it will happen. I’ve written lots of posts that I thought were fantastic and got almost no attention (like the one on neural interfaces for AR and VR) and then suddenly for whatever reason, a completely normal post got a big number of likes and shares. Again: never give up, because sooner or later, results will arrive. I have experimented it even with New Technology Walkers: lots of effort to find the first customer, that seemed to never arrive and then by chance we had our first important project… and then various others came. Just fight for what you want, with discipline, just continue pushing, just earn every day that damn centimeter that will get you to the touchdown.
But I’ve also learned that this is not enough. Just pushing has no sense: you have to stop sometimes and think if you’re pushing the right way or if you can improve by changing something in how you do your stuff. For instance, I increased a lot the number of my newsletter subscribers when I added the above Hello Bar: I tried different strategies and in the end, I found one that worked better than the others. I haven’t got more subscribers by putting more effort in my blog, I just found a smarter strategy. So, find some moments to stop a bit and think if you can change completely the way you do stuff to obtain results better and faster.
And never be satisfied. Never think that you’ve become “successful”: if something good happens to you, like winning an award, celebrate it and be happy. But after some days, think about how you can change strategy to obtain even more: be risky, be passionate and change continuously to become always better. If you think that you are “successful enough”… if you’re afraid to change to lose your success, well, you’ve just begun to fail. Continuously change yourself and your method of doing things.
Furthermore, nothing will go as expected, so just do stuff and then adapt your plan to current circumstances.
This year I also got in touch with different cultures (China) and people (I’m a techie surrounded by artists). Thanks to social media I also talk with people that have a completely different opinion than me. Well, this helped me growing a lot and starting seeing things from different perspectives. New social media algorithms try to put us in touch with people that we may like because they have the same opinion of us. Well, fuck that: surround yourself with people that can enrich you with points of view different from yours. You will even quarrel with them, but you will come out as a better person.
I want to finish my article by saying a big “Thank you” to all of you that read my articles. It is because of you that I continue writing my posts and I continue putting so much passion in them. And by talking with you, I am discovering a lot of new things. Thanks for reading what I write, thanks for being part of my journey: I’m not the best tech writer at all, but for sure I have the best readers <3
And I want to celebrate this day with you all… I have not a cake, but I have a new Vive! 🙂
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