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Behind The Firm List Blog
Happy New Years!
2004. Wow. It's still hard to believe another year has passed. When I look down and
notice the 1998-2004 copyright notice, I start to wonder what I've done. 6 calendar years.
What was I thinking?
I can still picture where it all started. Down in the basement level of the offices for
Conduit Communications in Boston. It's no longer in business, swallowed up whole in the
dotcom boom (Conduit > iCube > Razorfish > SBI). I didn't have a computer at home yet, it
was sitting in a box in California growing more and more outdated. So I spent a lot of
evenings at work, using the company machine to build web projects. A great deal of the
sites on electricalsocket.com started out at that
time. Many are still up, frozen in time. Some, like The Firm List grew from humble
beginnings to become the mammoth sites they are now.
I don't know that I would have attempted to build this site if I knew all the work it would
entail over the years. Sure, I have loved almost every moment. I quite love how it's
brought me into contact with talented & interesting people from all over the world. But
it's a shitload of work (pardon my language) and often has been a strain on my life and
my relationships.
But at the same time, it's kept me sane during so many periods. Around midnight I came
upon the realization that this is the first New Years in a long time that I've had a
day job/salary. I was laid off in October 2001 and started working fulltime again in
June 2003. So that was 3 new years rung in without a job. That was hard. Harder perhaps
then other major life shifts (such as separation/divorce) that have happened in that
time as well.
Americans in general are probably too tied to our careers/jobs as part of our selfworth
than is probably healthy, and I am probably one of the more extreme cases. It's a
result of choosing to make your hobby your career. It's like being an artist, where
you are relying on works of passion to pay the bills. So, instead of just the pressures
of identifying your selfworth by how big your paycheck is, it's also a matter of measuring
what I've accomplished in my career as a measure of my abilities.
I don't really do this for money, etc. I do it because I am driven by my ideas and my
imagination. I've probably written about this hear a million times by now. Well, it's
true and that's why I keep talking about it.
So, what new do I have to add? Probably not much. This is just one of those sappy,
end-of-the-year recaps of my life and what I've done. One more year has passed. I've
now been working on this site for 6 years instead of 5. I've been doing web stuff for
nearly 10 years instead of just 9.
Well, anyways, this isn't going to be any more enlightening than it already has been, so
I'll just wrap this up and move on to other things.
Here's to hoping 2004 is an amazing year for us all.
