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If you’ve ever tried to write a blog -- or launch a YouTube channel or a podcast or anything similar -- you’ve probably heard the question: “What’s the end game?” It’s often posed by a friend or family member, and it’s usually genuine. People naturally want to know how these things work and whether one could ever expect to see a payoff, either monetary or professional, someday. I grappled with a variation of the same question from younger bloggers at last summer’s TBEX conference. They wanted to know if I thought blogging, or indeed any of this stuff, was financially viable.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know the question always irritates me a little and I’m not sure exactly why. I guess it’s partly because the underlying assumption seems to be that something needs to make money in order to succeed. Or maybe it feels like an inversion of the goals. The first order of business should be to do something well and not necessarily to make money from it. If I dig a little deeper, though, another reason might be that it touches on something I still haven’t completely resolved for myself. Why am I doing this? What’s my own end game? In this post, I’ll tell a little of my blog’s origin story and explore some of my motivations for writing.