I was talking to one of my best friends last night.
His name is Josh and he knows me very well. He knows my strengths, my flaws, my quirks, my background, my insecurities... all the things that a best friend would know.
I was on my walk and we were catching up about life. He is a new father, and I am soon to be one, and it was a great chat. The two of us have come so far.
He has been reading my blog for years. At the end of the conversation, he asked…
“Why did you change your blog to Timothy Grant? I almost unsubscribed I didn’t know it was you.”
I told him it’s because “I want to create separation from the professional me, and the writer me, and that I thought it would be cool to keep my blog semi anonymous.”
I didn’t expect this response, but he said he was really proud of me for that and for good reason.
I’ve worked very hard the last 10 years to “build my brand.” To create a name for myself, to get recognition and notoriety. For a while, I got obsessed with it. I turned into one of those “gurus”, constantly posting shit on social media, constantly checking my stats, making YouTube videos with click bait titles, and feeling like my identity was integrated with my online persona. It was very consuming.
About two years ago, I got so fed up with it that I deleted my Instagram and my Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still 100% committed to building an online following. It’s the best thing anyone can do to future proof their income, however, I feel a much better balance between the work and the results.
These days, I understand that if I focus on the quality of the work, the audience will follow. In the past, my biggest priority was to create content that would go viral and get the most attention, because my priority wasn’t the quality of the work, but rather the recognition it would bring me.
Like Josh said, changing the name of my blog is a big step for me. The new subscribers who have signed up over the last ten days don’t know anything about “Tim Stodz”, the super cool online entrepreneur who is awesome and successful is all the ways he can be.
Instead, these people get to learn what I know. I get to teach them from my experience without clouding the message with attention grabbing.
Truth be told, I hadn’t put a lot of thought into it until Josh had mentioned it. Like I said, he knows me well and so it was a good feeling to have someone I trust tell me honest feedback about progress.