May 2016 – Spencer Heckathorn

I sent this to my Hektech email subscribers and thought it was appropriate to post here. Enjoy! The title sounds a little worse than it truly is, but last night was hard. My wife, Sherece, was down, sick and in terrible pain but she fights on! I on the other hand, was struggling, not with sickness, but with the thoughts of what I really want to do. See for the last 5-6 weeks I have been meeting with a friend in Tulsa and we have both been stopping the rush of the day once a week for an hour or so to truly examine what we are doing day to day. For him, it has meant putting himself out there more to take larger risks in his businesses. For me, it has resulted in a lot of self-examination that seemed to lead to unclear paths until yesterday. However, once I had an "answer" the struggle began. I have always known at some point I wanted to write, be a blogger, or write a business book. I have hundreds of "blog" posts and other articles that I have started and I am willing to bet 50/50 ratio of finished to unfinished but compared to how much I write I only put a very small amount out into the world. The biggest struggle of this is centered around money. I have never seen a clear and "quick" path to making money writing things. I had always told myself that after one of my many business deals was successful then I would cash in and write about it or other things. I love researching, digging a little deeper and finding what is newer than the next guy. So it also came out that I had always seen myself as some sort of investigative blogger, and I love the idea of doing podcasts. But I think these things have given me a great strength and a weakness at the same time. Often I am too far ahead of the curve for my own good, and I can not learn the tools fast enough to use them. One great example is the WordPress Rest-API, which means great things for any business using WordPress. However, unless you have a team of developers or are willing to pay for custom development then you will be waiting 2-5 years for community versions of things that will really be useful. I know I don't have the budget for that. Do it public and do it loud. I think this is why I started doing the "Let's Build a Business" series. Secret goals have always been a part of this, first I saw it as a way to get rid of forever the need [want] I have had to do it right and make it work the way it was originally intended, but more to the point I saw as a way to get vital business skills and knowledge I don't have or shore up other issues I fail to recognize. Originally I saw this as a 1-year process that would just happen in my spare time, but now I see the only way to do it right is to just get it done! I have condensed the schedule for it down to about 1.5 months and I will try to shrink it much further. Here is the crazy part of it all. Every time that I think about doing any of these things I'm stopping myself short and putting on the breaks. I know I won't have any issues once I just start, but there is always that fear that sets in when something is new. And for me, the fear is always greater if perceive the possible change to be larger. I feel like these changes will be just that very large!