I can’t tell whether it’s the season for introspection or simply that time of life for me.

But I’ve been preoccupied, thinking about my career as a marketer and free associating anecdotes about projects and product launches, surprising successes and some very painful duds.

Musing about the why of what I do and where it all started for me.

I’ve been thinking about how I grew up in a pre-web world, an English and philosophy major who ended up being the brand and community builder for such a broad array of tech companies.

How my natural comfort zone is at the intersection of technology and consumer behavior with new platforms for delivery and commerce but I was already a very young adult when I played my first video game on a trs-80.

I’ve wanted a big aha, like the successful salesperson who can point to themselves always hustling as a kid, or the CFO thanking their biz school professor.

It’s not that simple for me.

For years now when asked about how I came to define marketing as I practice it, I’ve used the story about my first job in tech, walking into the server room at Atari Corp, to manage their massive BBS enthusiast community.

How community as the core of how people act commercially just clicked for me.

It’s a true story but like most things of import, the backstory turns out to be a lot more nuanced and less poetic.

Very early on, I was a writer and freelance radio commentor for hire.

One of these gigs was ghostwriting early childhood education textbooks and grants for a prominent behavioral psychologist at U of W in Seattle.

I ended up managing a grant for the professor, whose funded mission was to aggregate groups of parents who were writing very early educational software programs for their special needs kids.

I created support groups for them, wrote documentation then published the software through Library of Congress.

I was a community manager of sorts, traveling around engaging with small groups of passionate parents, sharing early publishing tools, creating community platforms.

I fed organic growth for the project by marketing the very software products that I published back to their own local communities. Creating local heroes of the developers (the parents) and an interest group in schools to support the kids.

Most everything I do today was there in a very embryonic and analog state.

I was using community as both supply and demand.  Letting the innate dynamics and formlessness of these small groups gel into its own variant of a self sustaining market.

I was tapping into collective human behavior as the true essence of community.

And that marketing both internally and externally was the organizing and communications bridge between individual ideas and market connection.

This was a long time ago.

As I dug through old resumes tracking this down, I also realized that in most every brand and product I’ve built since, some nascent bit of tech was leveraged to coax out and platform developing behavior, community formation and market change.

For this instance, it was software tools but I can easily list out every data type from then to projects I’m considering right now.

It’s my definition of what ties the tech world together.

Constantly changing waves of tech but a dynamics of adoption that carries through them all.

That’s marketing as I practice it.

Professor Haring, all academic and convivial as I remember him, gave me a chance, and I fell into something about myself that still drives me today.

Not with a big bang.

Not with the buzz of first love or instantaneous attraction, but with some uncanny muscle memory when you find what you are good at.

When that tool or musical instrument or the organizing principle feels just perfect in your hand. When you stand up in front of a group and feel perfectly at ease and exactly where you should be.

To the professor a lifetime ago.

To every board I’ve ever worked with.

Every CEO and VC, every entrepreneur that’s put their faith in me to lead them to make it happen anew, in a unique way.

To the people and teams I am planning on working with in the new year.

All I can say is Thank You!

It’s going to be a great new year.