An update on life and work

I've gone a lot of hard and scary experiences that's made me deeply value stability. After enduring varied traumas, I really turned on the afterburners to make up for being ripped away from my own life and to rebuild a sense of forward momentum. That translated into a real drive to earn money to feed my family, which I'm sure is an instinct that we all share.

I've been head down grinding for over 13 years, and I've been able to reflect and came to a realization.

My goal is to be in a place where I can give as much of myself away as possible. I want to make things, help people, collaborate, learn new things, help people learn new things, collaborate, build community, riff, share, create, and help people live more creative, fulfilling lives. And have a good time while doing it. That's what I'm here for.

I've always had a hard time taking a compliment, and would awkwardly bristle when people would describe me as inspiring. But ya know what? Fuck it. I'm now embracing it. If I'm decent at inspiring people to do creative things, to live better lives, I realized I want to do that as much as humanly possible.

Ian and I have been grinding hard to put the financial floor in place in order to take care of our families. If we can do that with the courses we're building, that's amazing.

A hard realization about client work

I'm doing a client consulting gig right now, and it's been super rewarding.  I've been working with heroes of mine and people that I really admire. The work's interesting and we're helping them and we're doing a lot of good and meaningful work. I feel appreciated and confident in my own abilities to make a difference.

Which is why it's bizarre to say this: I've come to the hard realization that I can't do client work anymore.

It's certainly not for lack of wanting. But as much as I love it, client work is very laborious and time consuming. You're up close and personal, intimately getting to know how an organization operates at a human level, at a technology level, at all sorts of things. That's what makes it meaningful. That's also what makes it consuming.

The fact of the matter is I've been hard at work building this whole other thing now: courses, workshops, teaching, videos, creating, producing, publishing, mentoring, community building and more. I've got a whole freaking THING going!

I have full awareness of how lucky I am that technology companies call me asking how they should do technology. It's crazy. I'm very privileged and I'm very honored.

As much as love helping one company do things better, I want everybody to be helped by what I'm putting out into the world. I want to connect with people from all over the world and teach them things and learn from them, and to create the conditions for people to connect and learn from each other.

So after 19 years of client work — my entire professional career — I think I need to commit to that instead.

Building community

Our courses aren't just some cluster of videos; we're truly putting all of ourselves into them. They've grown well beyond our initial vision and have become a living, breathing organism. We're increasingly bringing everybody together into a vibrant, collaborative community — scheming with friends, building a center of gravity around learning cool and relevant stuff, having fun, treating each other well.

So yeah, that's where I'm going! Building community. Giving things away. Teaching, connecting, learning from people. That's what I want to commit my life to. That's why I've been fighting so hard for: to put the financial foundation in place so I'm finally free to do this mission.

So here we go. Let's see where this goes!

Thank you for coming along for the ride

I've met a lot of people from a lot of places now. We have these strange relationships that are 15+ years old because we said a thing to each other on the internet once.  But even if that isn't the case, if you're reading this at all, thank you so much. It really means the world to me, and I truly want to connect with you.

"I want to connect with you" feels so weird and disingenuous to say. I feel like the landscape has gotten so polluted where everything feels transactional or grifty. But fuck all that influencer noise that's been built up around social media and the web.

At its core, the web still just people connecting. I want to demonstrate that you can (still!) really wield the ideals of the web, connect with people, do that authentically, and to point it at good things.

So that's what I'm here to do. It's still a strange phenomenon talking through pixels and time and space, but I love connecting with people and knowing that there's some people out there that are on the same wavelength as me. That makes me feel really good. I want to do more of that.

This has been a freaking journey, and I'm excited for what's to come. Thanks.