EPTI think a good starting point would be the end of TI last year. I was exhausted but also super happy, going there really was like a pilgrimage for me and even though people call the EG ice blast + dunk combo overrated, it still gives me chills. Not because of the play itself, or Tobi's voice craking up, but rather due to me remembering the crowd. Everyone just went insane and the volume in the arena was fucking insane. Fun fact though: the loudest I heard the arena was still the Dendi reveal. Not gonna lie. As someone who started playing Dota due to Dendi, I fanboyed "a little bit".
So I returned home and thought I was more motivated than ever to run the site. Instead I felt the opposite. I was sick of everything and for a while there I let things slip. We had some trials over TI who we lost because of this and our post TI coverage wasn't what I wanted it to be. Luckily I had started seeing a therapist a few months before TI, due to some real life issues I don't really want to discuss online. So I discussed this with him, my lack of motivation and this feeling of always wanting to sleep. I have been depressed in periods but this wasn't it. After talking to him, and basically ruling out depression, he asked me to describe an average day. My own answer surprised me a little bit. Now this conversation took place something like a year ago, so this is an approximation of what I said:
"I get up at 5:20 to go to work and on my way there I usually check my phone for messages I missed during the night, I check the lastest Dota scores, sometimes I even write recaps if needed. I get to work and do my 8 hours, commute home and repeat what I do in the mornings. As I get home I make dinner, eat it infront of the computer and watch/play some Dota while trying to set up our next feature. Then I go to bed at around 1am. Sometimes later."
We both then realized that I was simply burned out. Now I want to make one thing clear here: I don't write this looking for sympathy. I don't write this because I want to brag about how hard I worked, or say that I worked harder than anyone else. And I definitely don't write this to, in any way, excuse the sites shortcoming.
The upcoming months were hard for me in more ways than one. I had to deal with being constantly tired, something that doesn't go away over night, but the real struggle was to let go of things. I had gotten into this mindset of "Nah, I'll just do it myself. I know what I'll get and the result should be decent.". But I had to adapt, there was no way around it. Luckily enough TheEmulator said he wanted to do more, so we agreed that he would take over the featured writing, while I would focus more on tournament coverage. But I was set on getting out of this self-centered mindset and managed to get a tournamnet coverage team together. We started off with me, ShiaoPi, OmniEulogy, and DoctorHeckle. A small team, but everyone was motivated and together we wrote some great stuff, in my opinion. If you just read the name of the author on a tournamnet preview, you might think there's one man doing most of the work. But have a look at the footer and you'll see that its almost always a team effort.
Thanks to this I was able to take a step back and reduce my work weeks, but also transition away from writing (this is a good thing, ask our editors) and I could instead start focusing on the bigger picture, come up with new ideas, and help people grow. Something I've always been better at than... actually doing stuff. I still, sometimes, do some writing, but that's mostly to cover for someone who's away. Hopefully this will have a positive impact on the site and I hope to, one day, take on the more classical EIC role of news papers and act more of a mentor work towards my vision of what LiquidDota should be.
So this became much more "work focused" than I had initially planned for, but LiquidDota has been such a huge part of my life the last year and I do love working for the site. This year at TI we have some events planned, and if you're around please show up. Our only ulterior motive behind having the meetups is to get the community together, outside of the site and Bluemoon has really put down everything he has into making this an awesome experiance for everyone.
So that's it. Julmust signing off. In in 14 hours my flight takes off from Dublin, and 15½ hours after that I'll land in Seattle, jetlagged like never before!
