Photo by Finde Zukunft on Unsplash

You don’t know it, but you’ve given me something I’ve been desperately searching for.

If you had asked me a handful of years ago what I’d be doing today, you would have gotten a blank stare and a flippant cliché like “Oh, you know me, I’ll be living the dream!” I didn’t know which dream I’d be living, but I was clear on what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to keep wrangling people and projects at work. There had to be something more interesting and fulfilling to do with my life. I was nearing retirement and concerned that I didn’t have a good grasp on what was to come.

I think as we age, we all consider how we’ll be remembered and what sort of enduring legacy we’ll leave. “Brian was a fine manager,” wasn’t the epitaph I wanted on my gravestone. As a retiree-wannabe five years ago, I was facing a nebulous future and it worried me. “Retire and relax,” they say. Leisure is great but “Brian leisured with the best of them,” still didn’t hit the target. So, I kept turning the crank, putting aside a few more dollars, and trying on different dreams to see which ones fit.

Today I’m retired, happy, and fulfilled. My epitaph is crystalized and I’m building a legacy.

Thanks to you.

Planting a seed

My entire life had been devoid of writing anything other than business reports and PowerPoint presentations. Yet sometime around 2010 I got this crazy notion that I could write the Great American Novel.

Armed with a fantastic idea and the excitement of a toddler I unleashed my fingers on the keyboard every night for a year. “Dickens and Dostoevsky never had formal training,” a friend of mine said, and that encouraged me to keep at it. No training, no matter. I can do this. In the end I managed to line up 50,000 words in a row, some of which made sense, but in totality they didn’t amount to a hill of beans. My nascent writing career fizzled.

A eureka moment

In 2017 I stumbled onto an article link posted on Facebook. It was written and published on a nifty little website created by a high school guy I knew. Just a regular guy. The article itself wasn’t the trigger (although it was a good article). What smacked me upside my head was the realization that an average person could build a website, write a story, and share it with you. Revolutionary, I thought.

Rather than writing a novel, I could write short stories and articles, a much quicker path to success or failure. I was already researching retirement and travel, so why not start dabbling there and see if you liked it? After all, successful retirement should be filled with hobbies and activities. Writing and sharing stories with you could be one of mine.

But first, I needed to build a website.

Since I was a closet geek in high school and had a long career in Internet technology, I figured I could do this. The challenge was that I was a manager of technical people, not one myself (as they say: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, manage). I had successfully “managed” my way deep into the sea of technology, but never learned how to build a website. Stupid, right?

Yet I was eager to scribble my thoughts down and see if you liked them, so with your gentle urging, I convinced myself I could do it. It took some time to get it right, but I finally did. Thanks for your patience.

Launch

My commitment to you was high, but my expectations were low, luckily. The first story you read was about my dream of traveling in early retirement. I was terrified of clicking the publish button, but it was wildly successful, with almost a dozen reads, all by family and friends. For the first time in my life, I had made a mark on the world, and you were there with me. My little story was a permanent fixture on the Internet.

Two years, immeasurable anxiety, and 25 articles later, I had over 100 subscribers, some who were complete strangers. It’s an embarrassingly low number as writers’ audiences go, I know, but the idea that people like you who didn’t even know me would read my writing was empowering, uplifting. Your feedback was positive, motivating, and I was truly enjoying myself.

Your support in the early days launched me from the “my friends like it, that’s nice” phase to the “strangers like it, it must be fairly good” phase.

I scuttled the first website and built another (I was getting better at it) called the “Life After Work Zone”. I rebranded and started more active promotion. You liked it, shared it, and more of your friends came to visit.

Then I stumbled across Medium.com, a gigantic website where a hundred million of your friends come to read stories. I joined and started posting there and you found me. You commented, complimented, and criticized. I didn’t care which, just the fact that you felt my work was worthy of your time was enough for me.

Thanks to you

Today, hundreds of my articles are floating around the Internet, inspiring you and thousands more. I’m a Top Writer on Medium, an editor of two publications, and I’ve submitted fictional short stories to global competitions. I have ambitions to write and publish a book of short stories, and perhaps even dust off that old novel and see if I can rearrange it.

How could this have happened?

Easy, YOU!

A writer with no readers is a pitiful soul, a shipless captain. You, my friend, give me the strength to press pen to paper when I fear I’ve had enough. You’re always waiting for me at the end of a long and lonesome road, eager to see what I’ve brought you, no matter its condition. Without you, my journey would have been over long ago. I’d be perfecting my leisurely skills instead of my vocabulary. You inspire me to write better, and even to be a better person. I’m forever indebted to you.

I now have that epitaph I’ve been searching for:

“Brian wrote because you read.”

Thank you.