The school bus rolled down the muddy dirt road and came to a stop in front of my house.
It was a big day in 3rd grade for me.
I was one of a few kids in our small Michigan town to win “Young Authors” for an essay I wrote.
I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember my parents and teachers being impressed by me.
That felt strange, because in my mind, I was just writing down what was going through my head.
It was natural to me.
And as life went on, I’d grow to learn that not everything comes naturally.
But when it does, it’s important to take note.
Several years later, I discovered something truly magical.
A piece of wood with four wheels.
A skateboard!
This was the most fascinating thing I’d ever experienced.
Little did I know, this little wooden toy would go on to engulf thousands of hours of my life.
Progression was made through consistency.
Trying, failing, trying, failing, and then finally succeeding.
These aspects triggered something in my brain that made me feel like I was absolutely wired for this.
My obsession with this piece of wood led me to win two state championships. And now, later in life, four major knee surgeries.
What it’s never stopped doing is teaching me things about life, myself, and even providing unexpected opportunities.
One of the biggest opportunities skateboarding ever brought me was a job in Germany after college.
In my early 20s, I moved to Münster to become a German translator at Europe’s biggest skate retailer.
A job so niche it was hard to believe it existed, but the ultimate dream for me at the time.
The catch: I couldn’t really even speak German yet, but the drive was certainly there.
This was the era of learning my first foreign language.
Again, something clicked in my brain.
Words, consistent practice, small improvements over time that eventually lead to becoming great.
I was starting to recognize a pattern in how my brain worked.
My job at the skate company introduced me to working on and growing websites.
This is where I first heard about three special letters that make people find you online: SEO.
“It’s like online real estate!” I thought. “You just write stuff, and with consistent effort over a long period of time, you become the best and everyone clicks on you!”
I started learning everything I could about SEO and made a profile on the freelance platform Fiverr to write “SEO articles about skateboarding.”
My first sale came just a few days later: 5 bucks to write a blog post about how to clean skate bearings.
This was my first taste of remote work.
I found the work actually interesting, and I could see there was a real career hiding somewhere in this “SEO” thing.
Around that time, my dream of building a life in Germany was also beginning to change.
I needed to take my career to the next level and knew I needed to head back to the US to do so.
So, after a couple years in Germany, I headed back to Michigan.
That decision meant trading in my German dream for moving back in with my parents, having little to my name besides a laptop and a stack of SEO books.
But a new dream was alive.
I went on to spend most of my 20’s honing the craft of search engine optimization.
About a year and a half into freelancing, I got my first “career” SEO job at an award-winning agency called Fractl out of Delray Beach, Florida.
I couldn’t believe it.
A salary for doing something I thought was fun!
This was a long way from working for a trucking company like my degree in Supply Chain Management would have led me to believe.
This SEO job was also fully remote, which sparked a new set of ideas.
“If I can work from anywhere, what’s stopping me from going someplace else?!” I thought.
That question led me to join a now-defunct travel program called Remote Year.
In Remote Year, you live in 12 countries over 12 months with a group of other people who also work remotely.
By the end, I had lived in countries across South America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Each month, I’d write in a journal about what I liked and disliked about each location.
The point of the journal was to understand what kind of environment truly suited me and the life I wanted to build.
In the end, there was a “winner”.
The city of eternal spring.
Medellín, Colombia.
Around 5 years after leaving my life abroad in Germany, I decided to try again, this time heading south.
I started learning Spanish and figuring out how life works in Colombia.
In short, it’s difficult.
Things are unorganized, local connections matter, and my hair color makes it pretty obvious I’m not from here.
For some, it’s confusing why I would intentionally choose to make life harder than it needs to be.
But for me, building a life abroad feels aligned with the same things that have drawn me to most of what I love.
Challenge, learning, trial and error, and the satisfaction of building something great over time.
Those same things are probably why SEO has felt like such a natural fit to me for the past 8+ years.
These days, I especially enjoy using my experience to help marketing agencies sell, lead, and deliver SEO work with more confidence.
If you run a marketing agency and think I could help with your SEO or GEO work, I’d be happy to talk.
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