Yes, it’s true that after 10+ years of various entrepreneurial endeavors and solo consulting I once again have a job. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like a job.

I’ve been unofficially working with Pagely since mid-July assisting with their sales and marketing efforts. Pagely pioneered the space of scalable managed WordPress hosting and developed a PaaS offering that allows any business ability to defer IT concerns and focus on using WordPress. It’s similar to how a service like Heroku enables developers to be free of IT worries and focus on the application. Anyways I’m happy to announce today that I’m officially on board with them as their new Director of Sales & Marketing.

At PressNomics 2013 I heard the founder of iThemes speak and give a simple bit of advice from the stage. It was so seemingly inert and obvious that I’m guessing it went right by many people. But it’s something that has stayed with me. The advice he gave was this:

Do something you enjoy
for people you like
with people you love.

That’s it. That was his grand wisdom for finding happiness in daily work. And while it sounds obvious to the point of being silly, it’s proved to be a profoundly-useful lens through which to evaluate decisions.

I have no less than one metric crapton of things I’m planning to write about over the coming months. I have knotted feelings and lessons from the rise & fall (and resurrection) of JumpBox and then slogging it out as a lone wolf consulting as Grid7. I’ll leave all that for later. For now I’ll try to relay wisdom I’ve come to in the past months.

Like that famous MC Escher painting where the hand is sketching the hand, that sketches itself, we are all in this recursive dance of authoring our own story while simultaneously becoming a character in that story who can become captive to the role and feel compelled to live up to the character. I didn’t know if I was employable after having worked for myself for so many years. I consider entrepreneurship to be core to my identity and as an entrepreneur admittedly had internal strife about the notion of going back to work and having a boss again. But like just about every fear, this has proven to be completely unfounded. We get knotted up by our fears and crises of identity but in the end growth comes from leaning in and unraveling the knot.

Anyways, I’m stoked to be working with Josh, Sally and the rest of the elite Pagely team. Going to battle for someone requires ultimate faith that he/she has your back. When your General & CEO thinks (and more importantly acts) this way I’m all in.

As Grammie would say, “more anon.”