The 3 Why's Behind My Pivot From Helping People Make To Helping Makers Get Their Message Out

You may have noticed a slight shift in the articles I've been writing lately.

In 2017, I started Making things and shortly after in 2018, I gave a half-hearted (IF that much) try at creating content about what I was Making. It went...okay. I will admit that I didn't give it everything I had and could have put significantly more effort into the projects and content about them.

This year, I started writing articles about Making things and shifted more to the business side of Making things earlier this month, but why?

Why 1: I'm Not The Best Person To Teach You To Make Things

My firm belief is still that everyone on the planet would benefit from learning to Make things, but I'm not the one who should teach them.

There are so many better creators out there like Bob from I Like To Make Stuff, Jimmy Diresta, James from The Hacksmith, Brain from The Smuggler's Room, and many, many, many more who have forgotten more about Making things than I have come close to learning so far. Some argue that will always be true and to learn from those ahead of you while bringing along those behind you. That may be true for many, but for me, I want to provide value to people now and that isn't by teaching the little I know about Making things.

To give the best value I can, I needed to shift from trying to get my own message about Making things out to helping others who are much better at that already get their message out to even more people.

Why 2: Shifting Aligns All My Goals

To my wife's chagrin, my project and content focus has been scattered to put it nicely (for years).

Even just over the past year, I bounced around projects from foam to microcontrollers to workshop to theming builds. Selfishly, I want to learn to do all of that, but it fragmented how I was thinking about everything together, where my "focus" was, and misaligned the message that would come through different platforms. Creating content about 1 type of thing on one platform, but something very different on another just causes confusion for everyone.

Once I decided that there needed to be 1 clear message across all platforms, I was able to identify what didn't belong anymore, what I still needed to figure out, and what needed to be added.

Why 3: Narrowing My Focus Brings More Of My Interests Together

You likely know that I geek out about Star Wars and how cool things work and are made, but I also love things like AI, coding, marketing, and business growth.

The same things that drew me into learning how things work, why they work, and how they are made are what draw me to learn why some YouTubers skyrocket and others plateau, what monetization options work well for creators, and how companies catering to the Maker community develop their products and market them for us to buy. My mind is a weird combo of logic and creativity that lends itself well to objectively seeing what is and isn't working for others. Yes, I want to be able to build things myself, but I also want to get more into the business side of things with more people at a deep level, bringing in tools like email marketing, social media strategy, and product launches.

It still sounds counterintuitive to me, but narrowing my focus to helping other Maker creators and businesses serving the Maker community brought all of those interests together in a way I'm excited about.

So, am I done being a Maker completely? Absolutely not!

My garage workshop is still in progress and will still transform into a Star Wars workshop. My home office is still going to be transformed into a Star Wars ship hull. I will still continue to tinker and build things for myself.

But building things won't be the main focus anymore. It will be all about helping other creators and makers grow their businesses and give them multipliers that will propel them to new levels of success.

While I'm still trying to figure out what the balance will be, I'll still have some building and making in my videos and on social media, but it will all be about helping others build their businesses.