Friends, I’ve been writing this blog for 10. Whole. Years. Actually, it is 10 years and 2 months. The exact date flew right by as I was busy pandemicking. This has been a long road.

The very first post I ever wrote, published May 3 in the before times of the year 2010, was on why you shouldn’t have a table of contents. (Hint: it means your report is too long.) It wasn’t terribly well-written. Didn’t even include pictures, yall.

Since then, I’ve published 263 posts. Holy crap, I didn’t even know I had that many ideas. Many evolved into sections of one of my books.

Here are some of my personal favorites from over the years, not necessarily because they are the most popular with my audience, but because they are posts that I point people to regularly, even today:

Looks like I most enjoy writing up ideas that bring delight and change lives. That’s really what it’s about, isn’t it?

Somewhere along the line, blogging stopped being fun. Yall almost lost me back there. Because my comments would get so full of mansplanations of my own blog content right back to me that I was spending my precious time replying with stuff like “yes, that’s exactly what I said in paragraph two” and it was dragging me down, making me dread publishing. So I broke the golden rule of Engage with Your Audience and I quit allowing comments and my blogging satisfaction significantly improved and that’s the only reason you are reading this today.

These days I engage with my readers when you all reply to my latest newsletter and share your own stories, frustrations, and triumphs (and thanks for focusing on social justice issues). You tell me how grateful you are for this totally no-cost, steady stream of (mostly) good ideas, because you haven’t been able to get into one of my workshops or someone “borrowed” your copy of one of my books and you never got it back or you are just starting to explore the world of data visualization and didn’t know it could be this cool or joyful.

Your joy is my joy, for we can only be joyful together (to lean on the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu). Thank you from the bottom of my heart for walking with me. Let’s round the corner and see what’s next.