Stubbing out this week’s content, I was looking back at the previous years. My first deliberate post was December 10, 2019. That means that I just passed two years this last Friday. Now that I know that, I will pay more attention in the future.  I have talked about it, but today I will talk about the origin story.

If you look back in the archives, there are two posts from 2016.  For those of you that do not know, you can create a free WordPress site.  There are definitely some limitations but that is where I worked in the first year (2019).  But I am going to go deeper today.  

It all started back in 2014.  I was coming off of a blistering travel schedule.  My company was working on the biggest project that we had ever won and I was one of the key players in the project’s success.  The owner’s of my company had decided that they had reached the pinnacle of what they could do alone and decided to try and get the company positioned as a larger company.  Our 30 person operation suddenly became a 200 person company.

As a result of the new company operations, they decided to shuffle people around and consequently, I got put on another project that was in bad shape.  It was described to me that they needed a ‘strong person to re-energize and change the course of the project’.  That was the beginning of the end for me.  Maybe I will talk about this period some more later but to keep a looong story short, I was miserable.

Because it is ultimately germane, I will add a little more.  The problem with my new project was not the people working on the project, it was the owners and management of the new company.  The project was undersold to win the job.  Then, they kept insisting that I recover the money to which the customer kept saying no.  I looked like an ass on the project and the management kept insisting that I keep sending change orders.  This caused major conflict on multiple sides.

After working for three different companies, I realized that my best chance on happiness was going to be working for myself.  I needed the ability to run things the way that I wanted to do it.  I have mentioned this before but I have listened to ‘The Survival Podcast’ since 2008.  It was probably the first podcast that I subscribed to.  In the early days, it was all about hard skills and items.  Over the years, it has morphed into more of a lifestyle podcast.

One of the lifestyle items was career and income.  The host, Jack Spirko made the transition himself into podcast host from a career in a technical industry.  He was heavily influenced by Gary Vanderchuck’s 1000 true fans model.  The summary of that model is that you need 1000 people that believe in your work to the point where they would give you one day’s wages to support it.  If you have that, then you have enough to survive.

I started the site on WordPress in 2016 as an attempt to get started.  Things got better in late 2015 but I knew in my heart of hearts I was kind of dead inside from the whole experience of 2014.  My hope was that I was going to grow an entity to the point where I would simply be able to leave my job.  What I didn’t count on was that I was mentally checked out and shortly after starting the site I abandoned it.

After I quit my job in 2019, I needed six months of downtime before I could think about the future.  I started my job search and I figured I could parallelly develop my content business since I was on the computer anyway.  I started writing daily to build discipline in priority and also to see if I would actually like doing it as a career.  Quickly, I prioritized writing over the job search and I started doing it daily.

After writing on WordPress for nearly a year, I knew that I would have to take the next step with a proper domain and site.  First of all, when I picked my blog name, I misspelled Resurrection.  My original idea was that it would related to my career change.  I thought about keeping it but then I didn’t want to repeat how to spell the actual site name all of the time, specifically on podcasts.  Plus, I didn’t want to answer why it was spelled that way, which was a hasty mistake.

I took a major step in late 2020 with the transition to AltF4.co.  I now had the freedom to make this what I wanted to be.  I could build ecommerce, I could directly embed content without going through a third party like YouTube, I could collect mailing list data and all the things that are necessary for a content business.  The down side to all of that was that at the same time, I started working again.   All that free time I had for a year and half was gone without me really turning it into a business.

End Your Programming Routine: From time to time, I bring up the Toolbox Fallacy.  I clearly have the desire and the discipline to post but I haven’t actually made it to a business.  As much as I enjoy this part of it, I don’t know if I will have the drive to actually convert.  I don’t exactly know why.  I am going to investigate podcasting into the new year.  That comes with it’s own set of challenges but it is time to take the next step.