TheKeeth.com

Many, if not all, corporations, schools, and organizations have mission statements. Most of them are downright horrible, and they include nothing but corny, hallmark card bullshit that is simply there to kiss consumer ass. Google “mission statement” for yourself, and read as many as you can in fifteen minutes. I don’t know about anybody else, but I didn’t know corporate America cared about me and the environment so much. With the economy going the way it is right now in October 2008, I have to say that I am not feeling the love. Who do these corporations think they are kidding?

I don’t want to be left behind though, so I’m going to give you MY mission statement right now. This isn’t my corporate mission statement, and it doesn’t represent any larger organization. This is MY PERSONAL mission statement. I’m not gonna hide anything, or try and deceive people at all. There won’t be any big, flowery statements about how I “Care” so much about this and that. I’m gonna tell you exactly what I, Keith A. Earickson, am trying to do with my website, and in a wider perspective, my life. Nothing more, nothing less. I have a severe allergy to bullshit. If you know me personally then you probably already know that, but I need to make that clear for the strangers out there who may find TheKeeth.com. John McCain rolls around the country on what he calls, “The Straight Talk Express,” but I don’t recall ever giving that man a piggy back ride. I Am The Straight Talk Express!

I started TheKeeth.com in April of 2007, and at the time I was focused on trying to write humorous, satirical, and cynical, short essays. I picked a blog platform to display my writing because as we all know, Blogs Are Fucking Awesome. Maybe blogs are the next step in human evolution, I don’t know, but I had to try it out and it looked pretty fucking cool too. What I was doing, or trying to do, was not a blog really. While it may have looked like blogging to someone else, it never felt like I was blogging. I wasn’t reporting on any particular subject. I wasn’t covering any events, or trying to review a certain sector of commercial products, like clothing or cars. Humor was the “end all, be all” of my so called blog. I was just trying to be funny. Whatever I felt I could use for a humorous premise was fair game to me.

It hadn’t been that long since April 2007 when I quickly realized how easy it was to lose focus of what my original purpose for my website was if I didn’t have something down in writing. I’ve always known how to formulate personal goals, so I took the time to put mine down on paper. Now I had something tangible to keep me focused, and if I ever found myself slipping away from my goals I could just go back to that goal statement.

I feel very strongly that I have a solid set of goals for myself. Truth be told, my goals have not changed in a very long time, not my core goals in life. That doesn’t mean that I don’t get distracted from my goals, hardly the case. It really helps to have your goals in writing. In fact, when I was taught how to formulate personal goals, writing them down was mandatory. I do think that I lost my way in the time between April 2007 and March 2008 because I got too damn busy to realize what I was doing some of the time. I remember being focused so much on how much I wrote, and how often I posted new content, that the quality of the content suffered as a result. At least, that’s how I saw things.

Not too long after launching the site in April 2007, I decided that I would stick to a schedule of posting a new essay/article, (whatever you want to call them), three days a week. One each on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. After running myself ragged trying to keep up with that schedule, and slowly coming to realize that that schedule was taking up way too much of my time, I decided to take a step back and reassess my goals, and to use those goals as a stimulant to form my mission statement. I was also tired of looking at my site and seeing something that I was merely “happy” with, but deep down inside I knew wasn’t even close to my original vision. I was never in love with the look of my site, and I didn’t like how it was focused completely on the written word. I wanted to include so much more. The writing was taking up all of my time, and I was left with no time left to develop any other kind of content for the site. It took a lot of time to write that much. I have a full time job, and I do all of my writing on the side, so this first incarnation of TheKeeth.com was really, really time consuming for me, and I was left feeling like I still didn’t produce as much high quality content as I had originally planned.

I announced in early March 2008 that I was going to take some time off from posting new material on my site, and I would redesign it’s appearance and structural layout. This would make it possible for me to include all of the different elements that I had originally envisioned. Things like photographs, videos, illustrations, merchandise, links, etc. I finished the “remodeling” in September 2008, and I’ve just been fine tuning little things here and there ever since.

In my time away from posting new essays to my site I was able to modify and clarify my mission, as well as create lots of new content for the site. I refocused myself mentally to be more on point with accomplishing my goals. As I was redesigning the look and layout of the website I read some of my original material that I had produced between October 2006 and March 2008. Wow, there was some really bad writing in there. I was almost embarrassed by some of it, but in the end I know that I made an honest effort to do what I set out to do at the time, so I don’t feel guilty or ashamed at all. Obviously there was going to be winners and losers in all of the dozens of essays I had written, and I found this to be very true. I’m not planning to rebuild the original version of TheKeeth.com, and I can’t say for sure right now if I will make any of those essays available again. I will go back through them and pick out the promising ones, make revisions as necessary, and put them up under the “Articles” section of the new site.

Now that the site is visually more to my liking I can focus more on the quality of the content. I am not going to be stuck to a schedule for posting new content. As soon as I finish something, and I am sure that it is ready for public consumption, then I will put it up on the site. I’m going to focus on Quality over Quantity. Explicitly stated, my mission involves three main goals.
1.   Make people laugh.
2.   Make people think.
3.   Make people ask questions.
I don’t place those in any set, prioritized order. They are all equally important to me. Depending on the project, the goals will be emphasized in differing strengths and accomplished in a variety of ways. Some things I put on my site might be primarily for humor purposes, but the other two goals, encouraging people the think and ask questions, will still be in there. Other times I may focus primarily on promoting thought on a particular topic, and the other two goals will be secondary, but I will never do anything without all three of those goals involved. I don’t even think it’s possible for me to do so.

I hope you enjoy what I have put together here at my site, and I appreciate all the feedback that I can get from you.

October 8, 2008,
Keith