Almost five years ago (which is wild to think about) I set out on a journey. That journey has resulted in amazing times, times of tragedy, incredibly depression, and months where there didn’t appear to be any way to come up for air (or any reason to want to).
During this time, I grew a lot from the help of some absolutely amazing people and really found a big part of myself.
I also found the part of myself that almost didn’t come back up out of the hole.
In this blog post, I took the time to share a lot about why I’ve made particular decisions and why I’m changing a lot of what I’m doing in 2025.
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Warning: I put some serious, serious stuff around my emotions in this blog post. It’s heavy, so just be cautious while reading it.
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Lite Backstory
Working for yourself means you’re working 9 days per week, and this lifestyle works for some people, and for others, it doesn’t. The key is to enjoy the work, what you do, and how you do it. Joy (or passion, whatever you’d like to call it) is the make or break between, well, you making it or breaking.
Five years working for yourself, by yourself, feels like 10-15 years. You’re doing every part of the business from the actual work to working with your finance people at the end of the year for taxes. I wanted the challenge though. I didn’t want to continue working in organizations where I wasn’t happy with duct tape solutions. I wanted to focus on quality engineering.
I still remember the last few days before I quit my full-time job years ago. I said to myself “no more duct tape. No more bad engineering. Engineers need to know the right way to do things and I want to help spread that knowledge”. I thought to myself that if I got popular enough and was able to spread enough knowledge, organizations would begin to do things the right way.
The way that I was able to kick this whole idea off was with content, and although that was great in the beginning, it wasn’t so great towards the end. Before I get into why, let’s chat about the “breaking point”.
The Realization
I made this sticky note on my Mac via the Sticky notepad app about 1.5 years ago and I pinned it to the top left of my screen. It acted as both a north star and a realization/slap-in-the-face for how things currently are.
The reality of anything is that you, as an engineer, or anyone else, are in sales. You’re always selling a product, and in many cases (during job interviews, with a resume, conversations, etc.) YOU are the product. You’re selling yourself.
That’s the stuff that I like. Having the ability to “get places” based on who you are as a person and how hard you work.
The realization that I had as time went on as a content creator working with vendors was that credibility didn’t mean as much as numbers.
With that being said – regardless of the money, the time, and how much I put into my business, I had to force myself to come to the realization that it wasn’t working for me mentally. I just didn’t like it anymore.
But why?
The Harsh Truth
I’ve always created content in some way, shape, or form since around 2016. This doesn’t seem like a long time ago, but since then, I’ve probably put out at least one blog post per week and one video every week or every two weeks along with:
- Countless podcasts
- Speaking at conferences
- 4 books
- Livestreams
And no, this isn’t to say “look at me”. It’s to set the stage for understanding that I’m… a bit of an overachiever, which is why The Harsh Truth crushed me more than I can explain. I don’t think there are words for it, and if there are, they’re under a mountain-sized barrel of bourbon (or scotch depending on your drink of choice).
I remember the first video I created (sometimes I go back and watch it if I want a good cry) and the first blog I wrote. I instantly loved it. I loved having the ability to share my knowledge with others who may need it. From a selfish perspective, I also very much wanted to become the “known SME” in a particular area (call it ego or whatever). Those two things really drove me to get better. Educating the audience with real-world knowledge and being the go-to person. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, but only if you do it in a particular way.
After years of working on this goal, I found the truth. The truth is that the more popular you get, the more followers you get, and the more your name is out there, the less vendors reach out to you for quality, engineering-focused content.
The conversations go from “you’re an SME in this space” to “how many likes/comments/impressions” will your content get.
I hated it. I still hate it. I will continue to hate it. There’s nothing genuine and authenticate about it. You’re selling your soul to be the face of someone else’s company.
Now look, I’m not saying this is inherently bad. There are a lot of content creators out there that have this goal and that’s totally fine, but it’s just not me. I didn’t want to get paid for likes and comments, I wanted to get paid for the knowledge I’ve obtained over the years. The countless nights of not being able to sleep due to thinking of an engineering problem. Waking up every morning at 5:00-6:00 AM and studying before the gym. Diving head first into things that are unknown. I wanted to get paid for my knowledge, not for sh**ty stats.
I needed to find a way out of it, which is why I wrote the note (from section The Realization) down. The problem is that it took longer than I thought.
The Peak
On the outside, the peak of everything looked great. I had months where I made more in one month than the national US average salary in a year. I drove a sick car, I lived where I wanted to live, I traveled, I wore nice clothes… EVERYTHING looked good on the outside.
Inside?
I was quickly deteriorating.
The Fall
It didn’t matter how much money I made. It didn’t matter what car I drove. It didn’t matter where I lived. None of it did. It took me a really long time to understand the obvious, and the absolute obvious was that money can’t buy happiness.
And yes, I do know it can’t because my childhood was nothing short of a nightmare. I can tell you exactly how many times I woke up with bites from bed bugs and the years I had to eat dinner out of vending machines. I did not have a good childhood. We were poor, broken, and there was what appeared to be no way out. I should’ve been a statistic. I shouldn’t been in jail or a drug addict like both of my parents.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, I found success. I made good money, lived where I wanted to live, drove the car I wanted to drive, stayed in shape/worked out 6 days per week, and always ensured to stay well put together (clothes, haircuts once per week, etc.).
The problem is that I also found that money and success don’t do anything if how you’re living your life isn’t right for you.
So, I tanked. I had a stroke from depression, I was eating crappy food every day, I could barely get out of bed, and looking back, I came incredibly close to ensuring that I wouldn’t wake up the next day. I was utterly and incredibly miserable.
Why, you may ask. Why after the success. Shouldn’t I have been happy? Shouldn’t I have said “look at all of the people in the world who don’t have it as good as I do? I’m lucky, stop bi***ing”.
Trust me, I tried. Every day I tried. The weird part about depression is that, spoiler alert, people who are depressed don’t want to feel that way.
Now, on the outside, everything looked fine. Everyone saw me at conferences, on live streams, on LinkedIn… and everything looked good. I looked fine. Because of how I grew up with two parents that were drug addicts, being incredibly poor, and not having anything (I was thinking about my bed frame before writing this post and remembered that until I moved out, my mattress was always on the floor… oh the luxuries we often forget), I got really good at masking my emotions. I had to. I literally had no choice.
You may be asking yourself “Why? Why did he feel this way?”. Well, it’s simple – I didn’t want my worth to come from likes/comments/impressions. I didn’t want my worth to come from stats that realistically (we’re seeing this with the fall of certain positions) don’t matter (and people are beginning to notice). I know that this may be hard for some people to believe, but please understand that my career is everything to me. It’s what I live for. I don’t know why, but it’s… I guess what I was born with. My super power is to push myself to the absolute limits within my career and it’s what brings me happiness, truly. Vacations, fancy cars, “stuff”, those things don’t bring me true happiness (which I found out the hard way). Working hard and pushing myself is what brings me true happiness… and that happiness was stabbed through the chest repeatedly every time I was judged based on likes/comments/impressions instead of what I truly bring to the table, which is my knowledge.
It was time for me to rip myself out of the hole I found myself in and figure out a way to move forward.
The Goal
I set out on a goal.
A goal to be happy.
A goal to do what I truly wanted to do even though it would go against what everyone else was doing and what everyone else cared about.
A goal to set boundaries.
A goal to truly, truly understand what it meant to live life the way I wanted to live, which was to have a career that I worked incredibly hard at and made a difference.
The same goal I set out on all of those years ago.
To get back to the original goal of implementing true quality engineering with no duct tape.
That goal, was formed. It is to move away from paid content and working with vendors/product owners that only care about likes/comments/impressions. I will still work with vendors, but ONLY with the understanding that I’m creating educational content and the stats don’t matter. It’s all about the quality.
And although that’s a goal, there’s a bigger goal.
In all of my years of business, my revenue looked something like this:
- 80% from content
- 20% from training
- A small percentage from consulting
What I mean by that is I’d take on maybe 1 consulting project per year to implement production workloads. These projects would take 3-4 months, so I was actually doing a lot of consulting, but I was bringing in way more revenue from content.
The goal (which I’ve successfully achieved as of January 2025), is to flip that statistic. 80% of revenue/time goes to consulting/advisory services where I work both hands-on with organizations to implement cloud-native solutions and if I’m not hands-on, act as an advisor to help engineers implement the solution (this probably falls under the architect category). 20% goes to training. With the few percentages left over, I’ll work on content for vendors.
NOW, this is VERYYYYYY important to point out. I’m not stopping the content I create on my blog, YouTube, livestreams, LinkedIn/X posts, conference talks, and podcasts. That’s all free educational content that I don’t get paid for. THAT is the content I want to create, so I will still focus hugely on that. When I say “I’m not creating vendor content anymore”, what I mean is getting paid to be a vendors mouth piece.
Looking Forward
The future is bright.
I’m excited.
And if you’re feeling like your career and/or life is not going in the direction that you want it to, reach out. Reach out to me, a friend, a family member, whoever you’re close to… but most importantly, which I learned from experience… you have to make the change. Talking about it and getting it off your chest is great, but those problems will still be there when you wake up in the morning. You have to be the change that you want to create.
We all have to live in a way that brings us happiness and fulfillment. I can’t explain just how short life can really be if you don’t work towards the things that make you, you.
I’d like to thank Eric Wright of GTM Delta and Jon Myer of Myer Media for being my two best friends. These are the only two people in the world who knew what was going on and without their support and friendship, there’s a huge chance I wouldn’t have been here to write this blog post.