Now Archive: March 2020

  • 3rd Mar 2020
    •  • 
  • 5 min read

This is my Now page and here’s what’s up for me as we march forth in to March 2020 (as posted on 03/03/2020). For my current Now page, go here.

Btw, today’s date is unusually fun to say, isn’t it? Oh-three-oh-three-two- oh-two-oh, oh-three-oh-three-two-oh-two-oh, oh-three-oh-three-two-oh-two-oh… Say it at about 120bpm and it’s like a freight train of rhythm! But I digress.

I’d like to tell you more about what’s really going on for me than I will be able to at the moment. Please check back in a week or so for some scary honesty about that. Here’s what I can say today:

I’m acting as if = Due to my own choices, I’ve been without paying work for about six months now. When making those brave/stupid choices (not sure which yet!), I had about a six month financial runway to make some new things happen. Now that has been used up. But rather than going into debt with credit cards or personal/business loans as I have in the past, this time I’ve decided to take a bridge loan out against my 401k. Soon I’ll be paying myself a monthly stipend from there to relieve the financial strain and bypass the fear/scarcity that has been mounting. Rather than hunting for work with increasing urgency as I have been doing, I’ve decided to prime the pump by just showing up and doing some for real. I’ve been helping some folks with their businesses for the last few months, but without the “all in” serious commitment or professionalism that I would if it was a paid engagement. It’s a bad practice that weakens my value and dependability. I’m working out some back-end revenue share deals that give me the ability to pay back my loan with interest over time for work that I’m doing today. This makes it easier for people who need help scaling up to do so without paying for it upfront. So now I’m:

  1. Acting Marketing Director for Energy Utility Group an energy broker startup in Austin
  2. Content Developer & Strategist for Lance Allred, TEDx star & author with a major new book coming out next week (also the first deaf player in NBA history)
  3. Business Consultant for Masaca Translations one of the world’s premiere Korean & Japanese translation companies
  4. Writer & Consultant for Cox eLearning Consultants, advising companies in the L&D industry and writing some blog/marketing content

I do still have some other projects that I’m juggling in, such as:

  • leading xAPI Cohort Team Podcast = We’re working toward creating a new xAPI profile to allow user-specific tracking of podcast behaviors for internal corporate podcasts. Right now our all-volunteer team is working behind the scenes to get proof of concept, but check in on PodcaXt.com for more info as it becomes availalble.
  • grantwriting for Tiffany Papageorge = There’s this book called My Yellow Balloon that has quietly been making a huge difference for tens of thousands of children and adults around the globe. It helps families come to terms with loss, grief, and letting go. I’ve been loosely affiliated with this effort since before the beginning, advising at several key moments of the publishing & marketing processes. Now the author would like to scale her institutional educational training curriculum nationally, and I’d like to see her succeed! So I’m helping a bit as I can, because this is something powerful that deserves to exist in the world.
  • applying for other jobs = I just got some bad news about a job I really wanted. Hiring freeze, nothing personal. I’m “top of the list” when they start hiring again, which kinda feels good but really doesn’t help me. I still haven’t stopped looking for more direct paying work, but after putting hundreds of applications out this year, I’m scaling back to only one per day and making them much more targeted.
  • taxes 2019 = It’s that time of year again, and 2019 was the year that I adopted the Profit First methodology and changed everything about my business & personal finances, including my team. Still some kinks to work out in that transition, but I’m happy to say that this new process is working out.
  • networking infrastructure improvements = I’m getting deeper in to being my own Network Administrator. Last month I got my DNS sinkhole working, deduplicated about 500GB of mess, further optimized my PC for stability. This month I continue by diving into BIOS edits on an old machine to in order to get my 10TB CentOS server up and running. Whee!

So as I look at all that, yeah I guess I’m pretty busy.

One thing I will not be doing is going to Orlando for Learning Solutions & Realities360 as planned for later this month. I’m very sorry, but I’ve had to cancel my workshop, sessions, panel discussions, and the whole trip. I really, really hate having to cancel anything. Why did I? A couple reasons that you can probably extrapolate from the current news headlines.