I’ve been building websites since around 2010.
I say “building” now, but for a long time I called it tinkering because I didn’t think I had the right to call myself a website guy.
I’d learn enough to build whatever my ADHD wanted me to build, break half of it, figure out why I broke it, usually, and know a little more the next time.
Website guy?
Nah, I didn’t have a computer science degree.
Writer?
Nah, self-publishing didn’t really count.
Coach?
Who the hell was I to tell somebody else what to do when I was still trying to figure myself out?
AI consultant?
That sounded like a pretty big title for a guy sitting at his desk building websites and automations because he likes learning by doing. And also shiny new things.
You get the idea.
The funny but not so funny part is that I’ve done this with pretty much every part of my life.
I’ll spend years learning something through real work, get pretty damn good at it, and still hesitate to call myself the thing because I didn’t take the clean, official route to get there.
That’s part of why building a personal brand with multiple interests can mess with your head.
Because most personal brand advice tells you to simplify yourself.
Pick your niche. Own one problem. Say the one sentence people remember you for.
And look, I get why that advice exists. If nobody can figure out what the hell you do, they’re probably not going to hire you to do it.
But guess what else?
When you’re 52 years old, you’ve either learned a few different things or you haven’t been paying attention.
Trying to squeeze decades of work, failure, curiosity, careers, side projects, false starts, obsessions, and hard-earned skills into one clean label starts to feel like bullshit real fast.
When I originally built PaulLinehan.co, I built it mostly as a coaching website.
The focus was guys in their 40s and 50s who felt stuck but not done. Guys who’d built a decent life but could feel themselves getting restless inside it.
That was real. It still is.
I’ve definitely lived that problem. In a lot of ways, I’m still living it.
But after the site was built, something started feeling off.
The writing was there. The coaching was there. The midlife stuff was there.
But the guy behind the site was building websites, creating automation workflows, working on local business projects, developing content systems, experimenting with YouTube channels, learning AI tools, and solving technical problems because apparently that’s what I do for fun now.
And none of that was really on the site.
That’s weird, right?
The public version of me was talking about identity and direction while the actual version of me was over here building systems at midnight.
Midlife Identity Crisis in Men: The Self You Never Chose
I operated satellite systems in the Air Force back in the mid-1990s.
Later, I became a nurse.
One world involved equipment, procedures, signals, and figuring out what went wrong. The other involved people, fear, pain, behavior, and figuring out what was really going on underneath what someone was telling you.
Then came websites, online businesses, writing, coaching, content, automation, and now AI.
For years, I treated those as separate parts of my life.
Technical stuff over here. Coaching and writing over there. Business projects somewhere else. Personal development as the serious work, while building some strange little digital system at midnight was apparently just me screwing around again.
And you know what I think now?
They were never separate.
I’ve always been drawn to things that aren’t working quite as well as they could be.
Sometimes that’s a guy who knows he needs to change but can’t see the next move.
Sometimes it’s a website that’s not doing its job.
Sometimes it’s a business being held together by spreadsheets, repeated manual steps, scattered prompts, and one person who’s now the single point of failure.
I want to understand what’s happening under the surface, find the friction, and build a better solution.
That’s been the pattern the whole time.
AI didn’t suddenly turn me into a technical guy. It just gave me a much bigger toolkit for shit I’d already been doing for years.
David Epstein’s book Range makes the case that broad experience matters, especially when the problem is complex and unpredictable. That hit home for me because a personal brand with multiple interests doesn’t always mean you’re scattered.
Sometimes it means the through-line took longer to see.
People Time Forgot is a good example.
I started that YouTube channel because I love stories about real people whose lives sound almost unbelievable.
But making the videos meant research, writing, fact-checking, visual development, narration, editing, captions, music, publishing, quality control, and a lot of other little shit that had to get done.
So I started building FrameStak.
That’s my in-house video production system. It grew out of all the places where the process got repetitive or too dependent on me remembering exactly what I did last time.
It wasn’t some grand startup idea I dreamed up on a whiteboard.
I needed something, so I built it.
That’s how most of this has worked.
And at some point, I finally realized none of that work had to sit outside my personal brand.
It was all part of it.
So PaulLinehan.co is changing.
It still has the writing and coaching. But now it also shows the projects, the experiments, the systems, the stuff I’m building, and what I’m working on right now.
Some of it’s polished.
Most of it’s still rough as hell.
Some projects will grow. Some will stall. Some will probably disappear because that’s just part of being a serial starter.
I’m ok with that now.
You know who doesn’t get as much anxiety about failing?
Someone who’s started and failed a million times.
This site is becoming the most accurate public version of me I’ve ever put online.
I’m sure it’ll change again because I’m sure I’ll change again.
That doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.
At this point, I’m done making one part of my life prove it deserves to count more than the others.
I’m letting all of it count.
What part of yourself have you kept out of view because it made you harder to explain?
The reason I ask is because the part you keep editing out might be the part that finally makes the whole thing real.
Chew on that for a minute.
Then hit reply and tell me.
I read them all.