a journal of small victories

What are you curious about?

What are you losing time learning about?

Where does your brain land if you catch yourself daydreaming?

I’ve been attempting to let myself dream again, and I didn’t realize I had squelched it. I was listening to Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding devs behind WordPress, on the Tim Ferris Podcast earlier this week. WordPress is the CMS that ultimately sparked my curiosity, sparked my entrepreneurial life, and got me to where I am in my career today. Happy birthday Matt 🙂

I was snooping around Ma.tt – Matt’s GLORIOUSLY DOMAIN’D website. I found myself on his bag post. It’s just simply a post that outlines the gear he carries around in his bag, and I found myself fascinated. He runs a company with a distributed workforce so he finds himself traveling frequently for work, and so he makes intentional and well thought-out decisions on what gets put in that bag.

However, this post isn’t about Matt’s bag. It’s about curiosity. Because that bag post awakened something inside of me.

All of a sudden I was going back down a rabbit whole of one bag travel. – It’s a simple thing where you…. you like travel. but only with one bag.

I was remembering post grad dreams of minimalism and a simple life that entailed longterm travel. Somewhere along the way that dream was buried figuratively under a mound of good intentions and literally under a mound of possessions in the form of owning a house and all the purchases that seem to follow.

So again. What are you curious about?

What’s hidden under those handcuffs of routine, busyness and obligation?

What’s the subject of your YouTube rabbit trails? Everyone is different, and honestly every one of us is unique and intriguing for those different interests

Right now, some of the things I find myself curious about include:

1. Electric guitars, and electric guitar tone. Guys. I can’t get enough of this stuff. it’s ridiculous. There’s something so magical about both the craftsmanship behind beautiful instruments, and the electrical wizardry that happens inside the metal boxes in the pedal world. This has been a 2 year deep dive at this point, and I want to start dipping my toe into the world of mods and effects myself.
2. Fitness: both strength training and endurance racing. My girlfriend and I are looking at doing at least a 10k in may, and I’d be lying to you if I said I could run a mile right now. But there’s a dream inside to do an ironman someday.
3. Minimalism and Simple Living. I am embarrassed to tell you how often I think about what my life would look like if I were a monk. Actually, one of my goals for 2024 is to take a silent retreat of some sort.
4. One bag travel and what a multi week or even months-long trip could look like.
5. Business / Investing and what my career trajectory looks since stepping away from freelance web work. Currently, my entrepreneurship is in the form of partnering with my friend Caleb to do a coffee catering business called Relation Coffee and I’m excited to see what the coming year will look like for us with that, but there might be something else on my horizon too, I just need to be ready to catch the wave as it comes.

So. what are we going to do with that curiosity?

One of the things that I’ve really noticed since logging off social media for the year is that it’s at lot easier to be in the mindset and mentality to create things: whether writing projects, business ideas, date ideas, songs, anything. With that time reclaimed, there’s time to explore new things… to be curious again. So if you haven’t made a decision about your social media use for this year, maybe I’ll gently encourage you to do the same.

So dating back to 2016, I remember getting to the end of the year and I found myself SO tired of the tenuous political discussion and anger that was being shot around on social media.

A society made up of algorithms, likes and comments, had started to create echo chambers that only seemed to make an intense shouting match that only served to de-humanize and villainize ‘the other.’

I wasn’t immune to it, it affected me deeply. and so I remember saying something along the lines of.

Yeah so totally, next election cycle I’m totally logging off social media in January and taking the year off.

Honestly, I thought I was relatively brilliant. Woke before woke was even a thing right?

However 2020 came and yeah we know about the mess that we found ourselves in during 2020. However, the reality is that I had found myself so addicted to the clutches of social media that I couldn’t actually take the break. I stayed in it, and again, at the end of 2020, I remember saying that there’s no way I’d be around social for 2024.

the last couple years, as social media companies have gotten increasingly good at monetizing their platforms, they’ve become more irresistible. Every idle moment we whip out our phones and quick check in on Facebook.

See who commented on that last post.

See what the DM from the cute girl said.

See who liked what.

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The last year I’ve felt like a dopamine junkie at times. I catch myself in idle moments – especially quiet nights to myself – constantly switching from one app, to another: searching for something. Something to tell to me that I’m ok. Something to tell me that I’m valuable. Something to tell me that I’m special .

Shallow right?? Well… that’s never what I’m explicitly searching for, but it’s the desperate questions hidden deep below under the other questions.

My free time, when unchecked, seems to devolve to one of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. Even in my own life, and my own experience, I’ve seen social media play into every single one of them.

I have a screen time limit on my phone for an hour a day on social media apps. And if I’m being honest with you, I see that your hour’s up buddy notification nearly every day. Often times before noon.

The last month and a half I’ve looked at the coming year and I can’t ignore the small voice inside, that it’s time to put my money where my mouth is, and log off for the year.

To regain some sanity.

To be less advertised to.

To be able to sit across the table from somebody and have a great conversation, and not be privy to what sorts of things are being screamed on the algorithms.

To find myself impulse buying less.

To find myself able to be still enough to hear that small voice of God with more consistency.

Yeah, I’ll probably be writing here more. however who knows. there’s a lot of life to live.

Strangely enough, it’s been almost two years since I’ve published a blog post. Yet, i’ll admit sitting down to write feels natural, like it’s certainly been missing for a long time. Logging back into this website and playing around and making some changes this morning felt vaguely like coming home.

I’ve been freelancing, or whatever we can call my experiments with this self employed life for more than 3 and a half years. But I have yet to really thrive in this, and I think it’s because I’ve allowed myself to repeatedly get disconnected with what really matters to me in this industry.

Business is personal, and many of the business owners I’ve worked with over the last 3 years are some of the best people I’ve met, and I want to do whatever I can to help them reach the level of success that they desire.

Right now, my greatest skillset for that is within the digital marketing space, and that’s what I’m looking to start rebuilding this freelance business around:

1. Websites focused around a larger sales funnel objective
2. Digital Marketing Services.

I want to create ongoing relationships with my clients, not just be very involved with them for a few months only to become acquaintances after launch, I don’t really do relationships like that.

I want to help business owners take their businesses confidently into the web and social media spaces thru beautiful websites, strategically curated social media campaigns, and being mindful of search visibility.

Starting a business isn’t without risk. This might not work, I might find out that I don’t have the stuff to really create a business that can exist beyond me, that can really create change in clients, that can become known for creating stellar results.

It’s possible it doesn’t work, and I’m going to try anyway. The last few years of not having a reliable boss have been a learning experience, yet I haven’t thrived up until this point. Ultimately I’ve been content with playing safe and small, and
I believe I was put here for more, and I’m going to step up to that proverbial plate, and I’m going to take my swing.

It’s going to be a lot of work, it’s going to be a lot of long hours, it’s going to be a lot of weekend work, I’ll never catch up on every show that every friend says I need to watch. But it’s worth it.

Let’s get after it.