Happy New Year!
I know everyone is saying it, but what a year 2020 was! I am very grateful that it was a pretty good year for me, despite everything bad that happened. I started my business, Hawthorne Interactive, which did pretty well. I wrote more articles this year than I have in any year prior. I also turned 30.
Of the I did this year, let's focus on two: writing and business.
Writing
I wrote 16 articles this year, which is way more than I ever have before. My writing spanned a good number of topics, from JavaScript array methods, learning, and productivity for developers.
The most popular article I wrote this past year was Implementing Zettelkasten in Roam: A Practical Guide, which was published on RoamBrain.com. It actually ended up being the most popular article published on RoamBrain for the year and helped a lot of people implement the lessons in How to Take Smart Notes.
Oddly enough, the article that I'm most proud of is on the same topic (Roam Research) but was my least popular article of the year! Getting to Philosophy with Roam Research. It did get a direct shout out from the founder of Roam, but otherwise didn't get much attention. That's okay though. It's the article that I'm most proud of because it's the one that I think is best written.
Here are some of the other articles that seemed to resonate with a lot of people this past year:
Landing My First Freelance Development Projects - Struggling to land freelance work? Here's how I landed my first few web development projects and eventually left my job to freelance full-time.
Reflections on Earning $100,000 Freelancing in 6 Months - In June, I quit my job and set out on my own. By December, I had earned over $100,000 freelancing. Here are six reflections on the past six months.
The Real Reason Everyone Should Learn to Code - You don't put "Excel" or "Typing" on your resume. Soon, the same will be true of programming.
Don't Learn Another Framework. Do This Instead. - Too many developers spend their nights and weekends learning a new programming language or the latest framework when they would be better off learning something else.
Learning to Lead: Avoid Incompetence By Reading A Lot - Leadership is all about literacy. The more you've read, the less you'll be caught off guard.
Wise Management - How to balance being a manager who gets results with a manager who cares for their team.
What is Gatbsy.js, Really? - Gatsby.js is often described as a static site generator, but it's really so much more than that.
Hawthorne Interactive
Hawthorne did far better than I expected - I pulled in over $100,000 in revenue in about 6 months, all while mostly working part-time.
It feels absolutely crazy to say that.
You'd think being there the whole time and watching it all happen would make it feel less crazy, but the opposite is true. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't do any sales or marketing. I also didn't really have a goal or direction, other than to get by and work on interesting projects while I recovered from being burned out.
2021 will be the year I start to formalize the operation of Hawthorne. The nice thing about starting the business this way (read: without f***ing any idea what I was doing) is that I got exposure to a lot of different kinds of companies that needed different kinds of work. Going forward into the New Year, I can see three possible directions for Hawthorne that are all really big - like, scary big - and all completely based on opportunities that came after I left my full-time job.
There's a lesson here: at some point you just have to make your move. You can only see a few moves a head, which is scary, but if you're confident in the first move, then just make it.
2021 and How to Set New Years Resolutions
That brings us to the New Year. I have two goals for 2021: to become a publisher and an indie-founder.
That framing probably seems a little weird to you, so let me explain:
I've never had much success with New Year's resolutions. What has worked for me instead is to think about who I want to become and how I want to become that.
I think this works better than Resolutions for a couple of reasons. First, my time scale is longer than one year. Second, my goal is rooted in something resilient. Third, I can leverage the fact that I'm a human.
To give you an example, in 2018 I set the goal of becoming someone who works out regularly. I could have set the goal of running a marathon, but what would I do when I finished the race? I could have also set the goal of running 4 times per week, but what would happen when I got injured? Instead, I set the goal this way: to become someone who exercises regularly.
I started off by joining a CrossFit gym and ended up going 3-4 times per week for almost two years! I did get injured during that time and because my goal wasn't to "do CrossFit", I just pivoted until I recovered. When gyms closed because of COVID, I bought a kettlebell and a jump rope and pivoted again. That goal has lasted three years now, which is great, but what I’m more excited about is the fact that it lasted through an injury and a global pandemic.
My time frame is infinite: I want to exercise regularly for the rest of my life. It's not a S.M.A.R.T. goal, but it's way more resilient because it's rooted in my identity: I want to be someone who exercises. Finally, it recognizes that I'm a human in both positive and negative ways. If I get injured (as humans tend to do), then I can just start doing something else until I recover. If something really unpredictable happens, then I can adapt (also as humans tend to do).
So in 2021, I want to become someone who publishes a lot and someone who runs their own SaaS product.
I wrote a lot in 2020 - probably over a million words. But I only published 16 articles. This year, I want to write a lot more articles and a book and I want to do this by becoming someone who publishes a lot.
I also built a lot of software and have spent most of my career doing so for other people. I want to run my own SaaS product and I want to do this by becoming someone who builds and launches software (i.e. an indie-founder).
Going back to the lesson above: this is my first move. I will figuring out the others as I go.
To the Year Ahead
I'd like to end by saying thank you! If you're reading this, then you played a part in making 2020 a good year for me, despite all the bad things that happened, and I am extremely grateful. I started writing as a way of replacing my itch to teach, so I hope in some small way, I’ve done the same for you.
For auld lang syne 🥂