In 2016, I left my job to start a company. I still vividly remember an exchange with an older guy shortly thereafter.
OLD GUY
Oh. So you started your own company?
TROY
Yeah. I’m a little nervous but more excited.
OLD GUY
Sure. Fun stuff. Being your own boss is great. Want to know the best thing about having your own company?
TROY
Sure. What is it?
OLD GUY
You get to choose what eighty hours a week you work.
I chuckled at the time but soon learned he wasn't joking. What makes that most accurate is that even when you aren’t working on some hands-on functional need to make the company survive, you are worrying/obsessing about what you are missing so your company can survive. For seven years, the first thought that passed through my mind upon waking every morning dealt with the health and future of the company.
In those early days, as I worked on anything not company-related, I would think, wouldn’t it be terrible if this company failed because I spent four hours doing this. A surprising number of things fell into that “distraction” camp. So, one by one, I cut them out until virtually all of my mental cycles were pointing in a single direction.
It wasn’t until the company’s seventh year of operation that I felt the heft of the jack-boot on my neck lessen. And with this, so did the constancy of worry. I suddenly found myself thinking about other things, doing other things, and doing them guilt-free.
In my non-business-savvy mind, here is how a company life-cycle plays out. I give everything I have to build a company until one of two things happens:
- Someone says we want to buy your company, here’s a bunch of money, and I walk away, never having to work for money again.
- Or we make enough money we can pay people to do what we do, and I walk away (well, mostly, in that I would trade a 60-hour work week for a 4-hour one).
Both of those outcomes have a clean delineation in my mind where one day, like Friday, I am doing ofCourse things, and then the next day, like Monday, I am done with that and am now doing Troy things. I have come to realize that something as big and complex as a profit-making company might not have that sort of crisp breaking point.
Sigh.
So, what to do? How to live? Because I've concluded continuing this single-threaded life is not indefinitely sustainable. So I did what I always do when life deals me a new kind of card—broke out my sharbo pen and grid tablet, put my phone in airplane-mode, and started writing. Version one was to split my time. Give four days to ofCourse and two days to me—yes, my work week is six days long—remember, I get to pick my hours. After seven years, that did not seem like a completely unreasonable request. So, after our busy season, I tried that. And it lasted about five weeks before ofCourse started bucking.
Sigh.
So, while I can’t quite dig into all of the post ofCourse capital projects I have planned, it doesn’t mean I can’t do more than I have been. So, what is happening now, like right now as I type these words, is the start of a gradual re-emergence. First, I will return to writing with a bit more frequency than has been happening over the last several years. As you would imagine, many of those muscles have atrophied so there will be a bit of easy stretching and shorter walks at first, but they are the early steps to a larger campaign.
For example, for the past few years, I have been doing the bare minimum here. For this site, that means twelve posts a year to fill the annual gallery slots. Those have been hastily penned at year’s end where I tried to recount the year’s high points for the family. Most folks with blogs from the oughts have retired them fully, deeming them something done in the past but with no home in the future. I’m sure many have surmised that is precisely what happened here. But it is not. This pause is temporary, and these writings mark the beginning of the return.
Firstly, instead of doing a rushed dozen at year’s end, I’m spreading out a little more and will be doing one week of posts for the last four months of the year. So that’s a week in September, October, November and December. And for the first time in years, you will see a few TroyScripts and family gallery entries.
As for the “capital” projects I mentioned above, here are the top few on the shortlist:
dearmitt.com restoration
I have already made some ground on this work and am so, so eager to finish it as it is a marked upgrade to what is going on now. This will involve a refresh of the design, fixing all the broke pages/functions, better access to past content, as well as introducing a few new sections and features.
dearmitt.com revitalization
I wouldn’t redesign something if I didn’t have plans on using it. I’m getting it ready for its next chapter. With young children about, the most one could reliably hope for was to scratch a few moments down between naps and parenting. Without the child-rearing machine-gun dotting the dirt around my feet, I reckon more thoughtful reflection should be possible. To this end, I intend to move to more serialized and long-form content.
ofCourse memoir
Changing the type of writing I do is meant to help me with my next few projects. The first will be documenting the ofCourse story. This endeavor was definitely one of the more unique (and I’m told impressive) things I’ve done in my life, and I’m eager to take some time to reflect on the experience while it is all still fresh in my mind.
Troy DeArmitt memoir
I will also be writing a personal memoir. This is for my children, but as with all things in my life, I will make it available for all to look in on.
Everyman Photo Contest Revival
I have plans for a new photo contest. This will be reasonably different than the last, and I’m not going to share the model just yet so someone doesn’t take it to press before I have time to stand it up. But I’m excited to push the old everyman-machine out of the barn and get it back on the road.
The list goes on, but I’m reasonably committed to those first things, and I expect they will account for the next three to five years.
So, be advised, warned, whatever you’d like to call it. We’ve seen the low point here. Fulfillment and success are marked by consistent progress, and consistent progress is what is about to start taking place again at this web property.
