Celebrity
So I’m reading the NYTimes magazine cover story about Emily Gould from Gawker fame thinking about micro-celebrity and how we all in some small way have the potential to be almost famous. It’s scary to think our words however innocuous to ourselves have the potential to be explosive or at least opinion-altering. How does one perceive your latest post in the blogosphere? Now, I admit I have at times fretted and worried about stupid things I’ve posted in my blogs, horrible math I’ve done and posted and other posts that could have harmed small animals in their creation but in the end I am of the belief that full disclosure is very important as it lets you lead a purer life and worry less about the bullshit we spew daily.
However with blogging comes the consequences of second thoughts. I use my blog as a public diary where I share my thoughts and ideas because I’d like to remember them for one in the day when I want to look back at what i’ve thought along the way. Sort of a public process of self-actualizing. I suppose Maslowe would be proud (no guarantee I spelled his name right).
A few years ago, I was leaving my first tech meetup and went to dinner with Scott Hieferman and a bunch of the other NYC techies at a Moroccan restaurant (which was good) and someone, who is a professor at Cooper Union, said hey aren’t you the guy with the animated resume - referring to my richhecker.com site. I was flabbergasted, never before has anyone recognized me from my site. That was cool and now he’s a friend.
Way back when I was younger, I used PR a lot, well maybe not a lot, we did like 4 releases at ClickZen but got quite a bit of notoriety because I was probably the youngest guy out there running an ad network and interactive agency. Fast forward a few years and I ended up talking to the founder of a pretty large online ad company and him saying how he remembered my old press releases and asked if one of the stories was real. (We had done a post saying my old partner retired at the ripe old age of 18 to “enjoy the beauties of life’. It was dated April 1 of whatever year it was and it was awesome. We got such great press and it propelled our business). After that for a few years, I shunned all public mention and did not ever do a single press release at my next company.
Finally a few weeks ago, I was walking in my office and one of the guys in the office stopped me and asked if I was the Richie Hecker from bootstrapper. That was friggin cool. He wasn’t sure it was me but was a big fan. It’s funny, he’s office was 5 feet away from mine and he wasn’t sure it was me. I told him it was and he said he was a big fan. What an amazing feeling.
So while I’ve forgotten the purpose of this post I figure i’d like to thank everyone out there for reading it since it makes me feel good to know people out there care enough to read what I write.
