1,000 blog posts: A reflection

This is the 1,000th blog post I’ve published on this site. At this milestone, I look back and reflect on where I started and what’s to come.

On November 12th, 2012, I launched a site entitled “Unlikely Radical: Practical Strategies for Sticking It To The Man“. The site captured many of my disparate interests: financial wellness, but also travel and living life authentically and with intention.

It was born out of a kind of restlessness, a need to have a new creative output after my previous outputs had fizzled out, combined with wide-eyed optimism from the World Domination Summit, and its related motto that “you don’t have to live the life that’s expected of you”.

The title of the post that day was “Ex-Velleitiers Unite“. It was a bit of a mouthful, but basically it was a call to action with people who were no longer content to just have wishes and not put them into action. This was a site for doers, for people who didn’t give up. Because I wasn’t about to give up.

And that has a certain poignancy for me today, because the post you’re reading today is my 1,000 post. What started on Unlikely Radical continued on to its successor: Empathic Finance.

In celebration of that rather staggering milestone, I thought I’d do a little reflection on it, to see if I can figure out what it all means.

Join me?

2012: The goal

The goal at first was to post twice a week: Monday and Thursday. I would write about whatever felt in line with the ideal of “Sticking It To The Man”, ways to live a good life despite the system we live in.

And I would not stop. That was what really bothered me about so many blogs. They started out full of content, and then the frequency of posting would slowly drop off, until the last post, which typically started out by saying, “I know it’s been way too long since I posted here. I promise I’ll start to post more often.”

And then you look at the date stamp and that was four years ago.

I wouldn’t be like that. I was going to do a Seinfeld “don’t break the chain” plan. Every Monday and Thursday, without fail.

This led to some crazy situations, like blogging in strange places in faraway lands and in some cases, staying up very late to make my deadline. But I always made my deadline.

2018: A change in direction

My original vision was that Unlikely Radical was a parent site, and I would create sub-sites. I wanted to start a business doing financial coaching, and to this end I started a site called Radical Finances (or radfinances.com).

But very gradually, I realized that having a blog and having a business site, and trying to link the two together, didn’t really work. It was confusing to me, so it must have been confusing to others.

And as financial coaching was by far the strongest plan I had, I decided to make a change. I would rebrand my site to focus solely on financial matters, and let other topics mostly go.

After a lot of back and forth with my designer, we came up with Empathic Finance. It had a nice ring to it: The heart and the wallet. And after all, I didn’t just want to do financial coaching, I wanted to focus on the emotional side of money, since that was where the breakthroughs happened.

So at the beginning of 2018, I rebranded and relaunched.

More to the point, I decided to alter my posting frequency to once a week on Mondays. This would allow me to make better content, and also gave me time to pursue other writing if I so chose. (The Smartphone Free Life was an offshoot of this idea, but I abandoned that fairly quickly as I was dividing my energies too much.)

With a renewed focus on money, I more clearly opened my doors up for business.

2020: A business really starts

Things didn’t really pick up on the business side until 2020, when I hired a business coach to help me actually build the business as opposed to just saying that I had one. I started to get clients: some from word of mouth, others who just stumbled across me from Google.

And all the meanwhile, I published a blog post every Monday, without fail. Like The U.S. Post Office, or Horton the Elephant. Tenacity was my superpower.

And onward to today

The business grew. I started a group coaching class. I started teaching continuing education classes to therapists. I got more clients. I did Instagram for a little while, but I didn’t like how it made me feel, so I abandoned it. Most people found—and still find—me through word of mouth or through Google.

And I kept blogging.

Once you get in a habit, it becomes sustainable. Blogging on a Saturday afternoon has become so much a part of my life that I can barely imagine not doing it.

Would I run out of ideas? I wondered that at first. Maybe if I had to do too many posts in a week, I might run out of ideas. But maybe not. All I know is that having a deadline of a single post idea each week has been doable. Not all of my posts have been the most inspired, but that isn’t the point.

But, uh, what is the point?

The point

That brings us to the present moment. My blog post spreadsheet, with a number so long in the triple digits, has now adds a fourth number. I’ve been at this for about 14 years.

Has it been worth it? Have I gotten out of this what I wanted?

Those are thorny questions, and I’m not sure I have an answer. I’m leery of trying to put a fine point on a “why”. Why did Van Gogh do his paintings? Why do musicians form bands? For some, it might be the promise of money and fame, but what about those artists who do their work in secret? What’s their point?

My goal was always to build a business and a community. I have built a business, though not yet on the scale that I had envisioned, and with a ways to go. My community building has been a little less successful. My dreams of a few dozen comments on each blog post, and robust conversation on each, has thus far gone unrealized. I see the numbers and I know you’re out there, but most of you are fairly shy about making your presence known.

Do I judge myself on how much money I make now? Or how many views I get on my site?

I don’t think so. Metrics like that aren’t really helpful. Why judge myself a success or a failure? Why bother?

I am proud of my tenacity, as Pyrrhic as it might seem sometimes. I am proud that every Monday for the past 14 years, you could come to my site and read a new blog post from me.

Perhaps it doesn’t need to be any more than that.

Fixing a hole

I’ve sometimes asked myself: what would I do if I stopped running this site?

I’ve always felt like I’ve needed to know the answer to that question before I were to stop it, and if there was no answer, then that was its own answer.

I do wonder if filling up so much of my time with this site and this business has prevented me from having the space and expansiveness to try new things and explore new opportunities. Then again, my fear is that if I were to move on from this (in the great multipotentialite tradition) I might fill it with nothing much. And that doesn’t feel acceptable.

I do have a few ideas on changing things up. With 1,000 blog posts—which is upwards of 1,000,000 words written—I certainly have enough content to publish a book. The idea of distilling those million words into something digestible that can sit on a shelf is pretty compelling. And perhaps, if I chose to devote time to that, I might reduce my posting frequency again, maybe down to once every other week.

Ultimately, everything has an opportunity cost: by saying yes to one thing, you say no to other things, and vice versa. There’s no way around it, and nothing you can do other than to try and make the best possible decisions in the moment that you can. That’s what I’m trying to do at least.

Onward

When it comes down to it, I have a need to create, to build, to make something from nothing. I did this back when I wrote and played music, and I do this now with my blog. I wouldn’t want to stop this unless I could find that creative energy elsewhere.

At the end of the day, I do love blogging. I love coming up with ideas, and teasing out an idea into a article that makes a point (and makes sense). Many times over the years I’ve looked at a post I’ve read and been surprised (and gratified) that I wrote it. That feels pretty good.

So for right now, I’m keeping things exactly as-is, but still with plans to grow my business and be able to help more people, and in different ways. I’ll still be posting new content every week, without fail, just like I have since 2012. And I hope you’ll keep on this journey with me.

I don’t know what the future holds, but one thing is for certain: When I finally stop writing, it won’t be a post that starts with, “I know it’s been way too long since I posted here. I promise I’ll start to post more often.”

Stop by next week for post 1,001. Thanks.