An Elegy for a Former Travel Blogger (Welcome to My New Site)

Welcoming a reader to your new personal site is a bit like thanking someone for coming to a party they didn’t want to attend: It’s a nice courtesy, but they’re probably more interested in where the bar is than exchanging pleasantries with the host.

Nevertheless, rather than jumping right into the purpose of my new site and telling you about the various topics that I hope to write about going forward, I figured I’d get an introductory article together to at least introduce myself, tell you about why I decided to start this new site, show you where the bathroom is, where to put your jacket, etc . . . , and yes, to answer your question, the booze in the kitchen.

The first question that arises is of course: Why did I decide to start a (new) website? For most of you that don’t know me, I actually spent the ten years after I graduated from law school in 2006 dedicated to building out a travel blog called The Expeditioner. The blog began as a means for me to catalog my burgeoning travel lifestyle, or at least one I was hoping to burgeon.

I had been in school for seven straight years at that point (UConn followed by Penn State Law School), and one of the first goals I had in life after graduating was to make up for lost time and see as much of the world as I could afford in as little time possible. I taught myself basic coding, began to get a few trips under my belt, and started writing -- furiously. But given my day job as a lawyer that limited the amount I could travel, I quickly realized that getting two trips abroad a year wasn’t going to produce nearly the amount of content I needed to populate a travel blog, so I decided to start blogging about travel in general -- a lot. 

At my peak, I was churning out two full blog posts a day on topics ranging from travel deals to discussing my favorite New York Times article from the most recent Sunday edition. It was somewhat of a grind, especially given the fact that at the time, I was also working full-time as a litigation attorney, attending travel-related networking events at night and generally enjoying New York City as much as one can in their late 20’s/early 30’s.

For non-bloggers out there, two articles a day may not seem like a lot, but if you ask any writer, you’ll know the time, effort and mental strain it can take to even write one or two paragraphs, let alone fully thought-out compositions. But I didn’t mind, in fact I loved it. Travel had become what I loved to do, and when I wasn’t doing it, it was something I loved to think about in the form of writing. (Never mind Elvis Costello’s oft-quoted dismissal on writing about a topic that should only be enjoyed by doing it -- “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” -- I actually loved writing about travel.) 

For many years, my weekday nights from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. were set aside to the sole purpose of sitting in front of my computer writing, editing and performing general maintenance of the website.

What I also realized at the time was that I generally enjoyed the act of writing, at least the type of writing I was doing when I was writing about a topic I loved — travel — rather than the topics I was spending the rest of my day writing about (legal briefs, motions, discovery responses, etc . . .). 

I felt like I was a pretty good writer, and the more I did, the more I felt like I was getting better. Not that I shouldn’t have had some skill for it. if there was one very, very -- did I mention very? -- expensive takeaway from attending law school, it was that it certainly whips one’s writing ability into shape. But even then I think that I must have had some innate skill for it. So much so that despite my position squarely in the middle of my class in terms of grades, I was one of two first-year law students to write their way onto Law Review via an end-of-the-year essay contest. 

Very quickly the site began to grow and some real opportunities started to crop up. I began to get invited to press trips. I was being asked to speak at conferences and meetups. I even won an award or two along the way. I traveled Japan with a local host, visited Sri Lanka with an international group of journalists, and filmed my adventures in Maui as part of a vlogging trip of YouTubers. I was asked to sit on a panel every year at the New York Times Travel Show, and a trip to San Francisco resulted in an award ceremony where I was honored for a video I created during a trip to Quebec. The site was reaching hundreds of thousands of people a year, resulting in over 7 million total visits to date.

I started to get into video, creating a YouTube page where I documented my travels. Not to be that guy, but I began creating video around 2008, a time when the idea of someone walking down the street talking to a camera seemed strange (not to mention watching a video of someone doing so). I certainly wasn’t the first, but I was early on the bandwagon of the self-documentation trend that YouTube has descended into. All told, my videos have racked up 3.7 million views and over 217,000 hours of video have been watched by the general public -- small potatoes when it comes to YouTube, but not bad for a part-time blogger, full-time lawyer.

I was having a lot of fun and certainly achieving success with it, but something was missing.

A funny thing happened after about 7 years of running the site. As each year passed on, the site became less and less of a passion project and more of an albatross around my neck. Launched during a time that MySpace was a thing and the idea of social media was simply Facebook, blogging was easier, more fun and less all-encompassing. The formula was easy: do, write, publish, rinse and repeat. Then Twitter crept in, followed by YouTube’s progression into daily vlogging, followed by Facebook’s march into content creation and curation, then Instagram, and on and on and on. 

Writing began to be more than just writing. It was sharing, commenting, platform promotion, monetization; a constant churn of content production meant to feed a beast that was always hungry. To complain that social media and the internet ruined my love of blogging is like a drummer complaining about tinnitus -- you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for the drum lessons. 

Luckily, about that time my career had shifted. The husband of someone I knew from the travel world introduced me to someone that had the idea to start a technical recruiting firm here in New York City. It was to be bootstrapped, we would work out of a WeWork space, and I would be supplying my own computer, coffee mug, etc . . . It was a startup in the truest sense of the word. It would allow me to finally move away from the law, and would allow me to get heavily involved in the world of technology, an industry that was starting to explode and that I was starting to become involved with via my site. 

But above all else, it would be my opportunity to help start something from scratch in the business world. For all that I loved about travel blogging, the opportunities it had provided me and how much it helped define me for a period of my life, in the end, it proved minimally impactful financially, and was only going to be getting worse the longer I avoided going head-first into the cesspool of social media. No matter how hard I tried, it never became a real business. Maybe it could have -- maybe I could have monetized it more, or tried creating branded coffee mugs and curated Instagram pages with embedded ads -- but I had little interest in doing so. My biggest fear was turning something I loved into something I did just to earn a living. It was a blurred line that was only going to get blurrier the longer I did it. 

Fast forward seven years to the present. The company that grew out of that idea, Averity, now has a headcount in the double digits, I lead the country’s top performing Data Science and Engineering group, we work with some of the largest and best-known companies in the world, and most importantly, I’m still excited every day to be doing what I’m doing. As the company grew, less and less of the little free time I had was able to be devoted to travel blogging, but I was okay with that.

On top of all of that, throw in a few life changes like marriage and a dog, and The Expeditioner has essentially entered into maintenance mode. People still come to the site to read articles from the hundreds of stories that I and others published over the years, and the videos at last check are still getting roughly 7,000 views a week. Of course, I continue to travel, but now more often than not, I prefer to leave my camera at the hotel so I can enjoy being in the moment of wherever I happen to be, free of the pressure to document and record my experiences. 

But what I do miss from that time period was the writing. My writing now is what at best can be described as basic written communication: mostly emails, job ads and text messages -- hardly the stuff of legend. Necessary, yes, and I think my e-mail writing skills have been an asset in a job that requires it, but I’m not exactly winning over anyone with my prose when I’m speaking to someone about a job or emailing with a new client.

I miss having the space that is mine where I can say whatever I feel like saying. I miss having a forum where I can expound on different topics that happen to be on my mind that day (and a place where I can use the phrase “expound on different topics” with only the slightest bit of irony). I especially like the ability to have a place where I can write using a five dollar word when a fifty cent word will do. 

I also very much miss the interactions and opportunities presented to me as a result of my blog. I remember the anxious feeling I had every time I opened up my email in the morning knowing that I never knew what adventure may be in store for me that day. Some days I would wake up to an email inviting me to a trip to Asia, or other times it would be someone inviting me to speak at their conference about travel or travel writing, or both -- and I really miss that, especially the international travel part. 

But I’m not looking for trips anymore, per se, but the ability to get back out in the public. I really enjoy public speaking, and I fortunately had the opportunity to do a couple talks last year, back when humans used to get together in groups and interact, and I realized how much I missed that. Those talks involved topics relevant to my current life as a recruiter: helping people find jobs, tips on moving up in one’s career and how to network to find career opportunities. It’s different from talking about tips to find the best street food vendor in Saigon, but fun nonetheless. 

It’s rewarding in a way that was different than speaking, or writing, about travel. Yes, travel is fun and interesting and can be impactful, but helping someone land their dream job or achieve the next step in their career is truly life-changing. There’s a saying we have at Averity that finding a job is one of the most important life occurrences someone can go through, on par with getting married, having a child or buying a house. That’s a huge influence you can have on someone’s life, as well as a huge responsibility. 

This was all a very roundabout way of telling you what I hope to accomplish with this new site. 

First, as I said before, I would like to have more speaking engagements, whether it be conferences, meetups, podcasts or interviews. I’ve been doing them in various manners for years, but I would like to start it up again more seriously. This is why I decided to highlight public speaking on my new site, as well as to include a couple of videos from two engagements I did last year.

Second, I hope to attract more connections related to my role in technical recruiting. There is a lot of noise in this industry, and to have a site where I can hopefully cut through that clutter and speak directly to hiring managers and candidates in the Data Science, Data Engineering and Software Engineering space (our core specialties at Averity) would be a dream. I want to be more than a LinkedIn profile or an email address -- I want them to know me and what I do and the success my team and I are having every single day.

Lastly. I want a place where I can write freely and get into written form some of the various thoughts I have throughout the day. My core business is technical recruiting and helping people find their dream jobs, so I’m sure I will write on topics to that effect. My job inevitably provides me with a unique view into a lot of different aspects of the business world, so I have some topics I would like to write about there. I also read quite a bit, and I often come away with ideas or thoughts on a book or article I read, and I would imagine I will write about those as well. 

I’m sure other topics will arise as well. I’ve really gotten into golf recently, but I promise you wholeheartedly I will not write (much) about it. I speak with a lot of data scientists throughout the day, so I have some thoughts on machine learning and advanced analytics. Who knows, maybe I’ll get in a couple travelogues along the way? Whatever the topic may be, my goal will be to make it interesting, relatable and hopefully a bit entertaining for you the reader. 

Against my own wishes, I’ve started a few new social media channels to go along with the new site:

My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Matt-Stabile-Technical-Recruiter-and-Speaker-103476584796745/

My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstabile/

This is my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/mattstabile

And finally my YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/StabileMatt

However, don’t worry, I’m not starting a new newsletter or a podcast to subscribe to -- you need more of those to join like a fish needs a bicycle -- these outlets should suffice to keep you updated.

It should be a fun ride, and let’s see what happens during the next seven years. There will probably be a lot of changes and hopefully a lot of successes along the way, and more likely than not, at the end of it all, a new blog at that time, but let’s see how this one goes for now. 

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