An Update Twelve Years in the Making

In 2013 I worked at an executive search firm for a short time. When I left, one of the people I worked with asked me to keep them in the loop about where life took me.

I did not do a good job of that. This week, twelve years late, I finally sent the update.

Writing it forced me to trace something backward, and that trace is worth sharing.

One of the searches they brought me onto was for a Director of Digital Marketing at a guitar company. I knew nothing about technology. Nothing. My job was to understand the role well enough to help find the right person for it. So I researched the latest tools and how people were actually using them. Marketing platforms, email systems, websites. I went further down the rabbit hole than the search needed, because the topic intrigued me in a way I didn’t expect.

The search ended. That job ended. The research never did.

When we started Doing Good Works in 2014, the first thing I did was open YouTube and teach myself to build a website and an email campaign using tools I first read about on that search. That thread has never stopped. It is the same one I pull today with every AI tool that comes out, looking for the ways it can make a positive impact.

The research you do for someone else's problem becomes your inventory.

I build tools with no immediate purpose all the time. When a real problem shows up, the solution is already loaded. Sending that email showed me the inventory started earlier than I thought. Not with tinkering. With a project at work about a topic I knew very little about at the time.

Recently the host of a podcast called Unspoken Lives, who also worked at the search firm, asked me to come on and tell that story: how someone with no technical background ended up running technology for a social enterprise for a living.

More about the show is at unspokenlives.com.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the person who built the door I walked through into DGW. This update reminded me there was another door at the same time, and the person who opened it had no idea what was on the other side. Neither did I. You do not get to know in advance which way in will matter. That is the whole argument for designing more of them.

What is in your inventory that started as someone else's problem? Reply and tell me. Those replies have a way of becoming issues.