This day started out like any other but little did I know at the time just how important this morning would be. I love to read business and technology stories in the morning, even if I don't have the time and sometimes it might be days before I read something that changes the course of my thinking, or inspires me to dig deeper into a subject or a person and learn something I didn't know before. But I keep reading, and this day I am glad I did.

I came across a story about a company called NoRedInk. And as I read the story I came to love their mission. I’ve been coaching and teaching for 25 years and I understand the impact of teaching people how to get better at something. In this case it was teaching kids to write. How an 11th grade teacher took his passion for teaching his students how to write and combined technology, his knowledge and cleverness and created an application that is inspiring kids to write stories about they are interested in, what they care about, and making writing fun. His name is Jeff Scheur and I had to learn more.

I read article after article about Jeff's mission, his company, himself and an entrepreneur's journey. I loved it. Then I found his Ted talk on YouTube. Jeff began his talk with a story about a student who had never turned in a paper before, it was one long run-on sentence with spelling and grammar mistakes and he could have ruined that kid's confidence in ever writing another story again if he would have done what a teacher does. There would have been red ink everywhere. But he didn't. If an 11^th grader could slip through the cracks and never turn in a paper before something is wrong, Jeff went on a mission to fix it.

I watched the rest of the Ted talk I couldn't stop thinking about myself in Jeff’s student. I am that student, 35 years later. I've never written a story and posted it publicly for anyone to read. I'm not writer, I'm not in marketing, I am a sales guy, I had every excuse and my biggest fear is what people will think about my story. What a joke, idiot, dumb sales guy. Then I thought about Jeff’s student and his courage to do something he has never done before and just go for it. There is a line from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Man in the Arena” that I have lived by since high school. “My place shall never be with those cold and timid souls that know neither victory nor defeat.” But I wasn’t living it. Sales has changed, social media marketing is all the rage and content is king. I was on the sideline.

I decided to write something. Something that I was interested in, excited about, and had an opinion on. A story about a cheeseburger and Bill Gates, you can read it here Cheeseburger Bill Gates story. I did it. I posted my story in LinkedIn and I woke up the next morning, alive. My world didn't come crashing down, I survived. People liked it and made comments. I did it. Then I wrote another one. Then something really interesting happened.

I received a connection request on LinkedIn by the editor in chief of Salesforce David Mann. Cool. We decided to set up a call. He read my stories and liked them. He liked them so much he asked me if I would be interested in writing stories for the Salesforce blog. Absolutely. Last week I submitted my first story and will have my first blog post in Salesforce this month. And I have more on the way.

If you're reading this and you've never posted a story, if I can do it you can do it. Go for it. If you're a pro forward my story to your friends and co-workers who have a story to tell but need a nudge. They can do it.