My buddy Stephen announced he was going independent today. Let me just take this internet armor off for a minute to say I’m so proud of Stephen. He’s poured himself into his writing and podcasting for years now as a side gig and he’s finally able to take it full time. I have immense respect for the amount of hard work and dedication I know Stephen put into getting himself prepared to sustain the independent career. It’s not easy to be steadfast in saying no to so many things so you can say yes to the the long term goal. Speaking as someone who has similar long term goals of going independent I’m proof that sticking with it is difficult [1]. Stephen joins Shawn Blanc, Myke Hurley, Marco Arment, Jason Snell and many others in proving that if you put in the effort and continually invest in your craft it is possible to live sustainably doing so.
As much as I enjoy Merlin Mann as a podcaster, this piece he published last night reminds me how I first fell in love with his writing.
And, even nine goddamned years after I’d left Ohio and improbably found myself in a pretty good college in Florida, I still craved the Reds cap that I thought was worthy of my childhood.
To pull the curtain back just a little, oftentimes the thing which most keeps me from writing is a fear of putting my own narcissism out on display for all to see. So often my first draft is little more than my own self-centered view of the world — a world where I sit at the center. This is not the world I am trying to build up, but when writing, how can any of us write about anything else but what we know and what we have heard? We write about what we know and what we feel. We write from our own soul and our own heart and we share what we’ve seen through our own eyes and what we’ve heard through our own ears. We write from the inside out.
Jason Snell recently left MacWorld and looks to be flying solo. I’m stoked for Jason and look forward to continuing to see his talents unfold upon the world in new and exciting ways. He’s porting the Clockwise podcast to Relay FM along with starting a new show with Myke Hurley called Upgrade for which episode one dropped today. Today Jason launched Six Colors, his new outlet for writing. Reading the about page of Six Colors I found myself locked in tandem with Jason’s simple explanation for his love of Apple.
Chris Gonzales just re-launched his site and wrote a bit about what prompted it. Being that this is timed right as I’m chipping away at planning Course Code’s direction I couldn’t be more in tune with what Chris’s goal is with The Spark Journal (RIP Unretrofied).