Matt: Creed Update

This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.

Is now.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint; no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other every day.

As I wrote earlier in our internal P2s, “Always great to bury a gerund.” And now we have a semicolon! It’s all quite exciting. For the backstory, please read Why Your Company Should Have a Creed. I said in 2011 “I’m sure that it will evolve in the future” but I didn’t expect it to be 14 years before the first revision.

Internally at Automattic we’ve debated updating the Creed in dozens of conversations and blog posts, usually in the context of adding a sentence, which I still hope will happen in a future version. But this is a minor update. We’ll see when Creed 2.0 happens.

The private Automattic intranet is one of the most delightful things about working there, which you may consider as well.