A Look Around
By Michael Hedgpeth · December 8, 2014
A Look Around

It’s been about six months since I started this blog and I thought it’s time for a retrospective. I’ve enjoyed talking about issues and ideas that have really helped me find new insight and motivation for where I’d like to go.

If you haven’t noticed, I have had a bit of a content categorization problem that I’ve finally found the answer to. Let me explain.

The motivation of starting my blog was pretty clear to me from the beginning:

  • Michael Hyatt convinced me in a podcast that by not having a platform for my ideas I was not going to be an effective influencer. The path to scaling influence is through creating a platform. The easiest way to begin building a platform is through a blog
  • I wanted to find a way to find like-minded people who could influence me, and who I could influence
  • I wanted to solidify a lot of what I was learning by writing about it and explaining it

I started out early by writing about a lot of professional topics, then some financial management topics. I saw very quickly that it would not be easy to build a professional oriented platform; the interest wasn’t there. The interest appeared to be there for the more personal oriented topics, so I went in that direction.

Over the past few months, I’ve written more and more about the ideas and experiences that I have found useful to accomplish my goals, and my readership has gone down and down. For example in July the readership numbers spiked at

50or so sessions per day. At the moment the spike is more like 20 per day when I publish something.

It’s not bad that 20 or so people are reading the blog, but the problem is that a good portion of that are my extended family that I could easily (and more persuasively) share a personal conversation. So it’s clear right now that I need a change in strategy.

I continue to work on deployment both for our hosted and our store products at my company. I’m learning a lot of lessons, both through management and through learning new products. In fact, I’ve spent more time learning in the past eight weeks than I had in the past three years combined. I’m really excited about where these ideas will take us, and want to share it with you.

If you’re one of my readers who won’t care about that topic, I want to tell you two things. First, thanks for reading and for sticking with me. Second, I’d love to have lunch with you and talk about these topics further. I have a passion for living life well and think that in order to do that one must get off of the normal path set by us by our culture.

For everyone else, welcome to the new hedge-ops, which asks: how can we operate most efficiently with management in technology. I’m looking forward to writing about it.