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Pros & Cons of Moving To Atlanta
My family and I moved to Atlanta in February 2013 from Athens, GA. We have lived here ever since.
Like many Atlantans, we moved here for a job. And during the course of that job, we decided that Atlanta was the best long-term fit for our family.
When I left that job and started a business that I could run anywhere in the world, we decided to stay in Atlanta.
The decision had a lot to do with family and familiarity, but Atlanta had so much going for it – that it was less of a decision and more of a confirmation.
Here are the pros and cons of moving to Atlanta based on our experience in the past 5 years.
There’s an old adage that says “what gets measured gets managed” – ie, you can’t manage a problem until you measure it.
Today is my last day working for Nebo Agency. I’ve been with Nebo for over 2 years. It’s by far and away been the most intense period of professional growth in my entire career.
I came to Nebo in 2013 after running my own freelance consulting business for 2 years prior. At the time, I wanted to join an elite team at an elite agency to specialize in a single field of digital marketing. At that point in my career, I knew enough to be dangerous. I knew I could bring a lot to a team, and that I could grow 10x as part of a team. Thankfully Nebo thought the same thing and gave me a shot.
And for me in hindsight, that certainly turned out to be true. I’ve been able to work with, learn from, and build relationships with my teammates. I also got to be challenged by interesting & diverse clients. I got to be exposed to all the intangibles of working around ambitious, talented people in a diverse, growing city.
Big choices & events in life almost always set the stage for the vast majority of love, happiness, wealth and overall quality of life. But it’s also interesting to me how marginal, incremental improvements can compound over time to product extraordinary improvements as well – aka the snowball effect.
I started cataloging some of my small daily habits and actions to notice little changes that made a big difference in my quality of life…
The best career advice book I’ve ever read is How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). One of his core arguments is that every skill you acquire doubles your chance of success (ie, Bill Gates was an incredible developer AND incredible at business).
Hopefully that argument is true because by both necessity and planning, I’ve done a lot of stuff and acquired a lot of skills before hitting 30. Although I can’t compete with the likes of my friend Matt Moore went it comes to number of jobs had, I have a lot of people ask exactly how many projects/jobs I’ve done over my career.
So here’s the list of every job I’ve ever had, and every money-making project I’ve ever had a “solid go” at and what I’ve learned at each as of December 2014.
A few weeks ago, I started drastically paring back all the tools, feeds, news sites, and networks that I use. And the ones that I do use everyday – I started figuring out how to simplify, automate, and gain more control.
It started with reducing the number of task “gathering places” (Getting Things Done parlance) and snowballed into affecting pretty much my entire digital life, and has now become a full-fledged start-2013-off-right kind of deal (and apparently I’m not the only one).
Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned that you can apply to make your digital life a bit better…