In my old bedroom at my parents place, there’s an article on motivation hanging on one of the walls. The ink is fading a bit and the parts where I’ve used a marker are harder to read now. The piece was published on A List Apart and written by Kevin Cornell. This article, which is now almost 8 years old, still makes my heart jump. It is so well written and to the point.

I keep coming back to the website, because they hand out great articles which continue to help me grow in all kinds of areas. Today I’m proud to join the list of A List Apart authors.

On February 1st, I wrote the first post of what would be in total 30 posts outlining the onboarding processes of popular and less popular websites. After that, I compiled it into a spreadsheet and started working on a post that would contain my learnings. As I was outlining the content for it, a thought popped up: this could be valuable for so many people, would it be possible to find a bigger platform that was interested to publish my findings?

A List Apart came to mind. I found it hard to expect them to accept it, but this felt like a good opportunity to see if I could pull it off. So I locked myself up for some nights, refined my proposal and pressed send. They accepted the idea of the article. Lots of emails and four almost complete rewrites was what it took to get this thing ready for publication. Today it is finally there, as part of issue #424:

The Risky Business of Onboarding

I couldn’t have done it without the help of a fantastic team of editors I’ve worked with over the last couple of months. They had to put up with a non-native writer and they handled me gracefully.

Each time I’m sleeping in my old bedroom, I can’t keep myself from glancing at the article. It reminds me of who I was back then and how much I’ve grown since then. Biggest lesson learned? Don’t be afraid to aim for unrealistic goals. You’ll be glad you did.