Top 7 Reasons I’m Moving to Bloomington, Indiana:
- Skin too dry.
- No idea what a Hoosier is. Decided to find out first-hand.
- Want to cheer for a historically mediocre college football team.
- Living near Sedona, AZ for 6 years is giving me vortex poisoning.
- Need to upgrade quality of locally grown corn.
- All these pine trees are starting to look the same.
- Arizona Diamondbacks are so bad, I’m taking my business elsewhere.
On The Road Again
If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, me and my family are somewhere between Albuquerque and Oklahoma City, with cars full of kids, the dog, the cat, the snake, the lizard, and 8 cases of wine. And my laptop. Everything else we own is somewhere behind us in a big truck.
We’ll be arriving in Bloomington, Indiana on Friday (August 13) to start our new lives there. I realize people move all the time, but for us it’s a big, scary deal. I’ve been in Arizona for 40 years (I moved to Lake Havasu City when I was just a baby). While I’ve lived all over AZ, I’ve never lived in another state.
But, thanks to the support of many amazing Convince & Convert clients, readers and supporters, I’m not really tied down to any particular location. I have customers all over, and I’ve decided to take advantage of that fact by instituting a dramatic change of scenery.
Arizona has been very, very, very good to us. We’ve been blessed beyond comprehension, and the list of family, mentors, clients, colleagues and pals who have helped us along the way are far too numerous to list. And it’s very difficult to leave our families and friends. But, looking into my crystal ball, I don’t see the next few years being the finest in Arizona’s history. Too big of a budget gap. Too narrow of an economic base. Too divisive politically. I could be entirely wrong, and eventually Arizona will come roaring back – as it always does. But for now, I want greener, quieter pastures with suffocating humidity.
The More Things Change
With regard to Convince & Convert, there will be no changes. I will continue to have the same clients, and perform the same social media strategic planning and coaching services that I do today. The blog will remain the same. I will, however, be on eastern time now, so you west coasters may find tweets from me waiting for you when you arise.
Many people have asked us “Why Bloomington?” It’s a fair question, as perhaps a more obvious switch – given my occupation – would have been to NYC, Austin, or some such. But, I grew up in a small town (as did my wife), and that’s the atmosphere we prefer. Not “there goes Cletus, everybody knows he’s faking that back injury” small, but certainly a manageable size where you know your neighbors and have a shared sense of purpose.
The Science of Cities
We used the online filtering tool Find Your Spot to narrow down our relocation options. We looked at criteria like size (under 100,000 people), college town, good schools, access to health care, cost of living, etc. and the site produced a list of candidate cities for our consideration.
There were some awesome possibilities, including Madison, Fort Collins, Eugene, and a few others I can’t recall. But Bloomington has by far the best combination of attributes for us. In addition to being a very cool town, it’s centrally located and within one hour of the Indianapolis airport. This is a major consideration for us, given how much I travel (and how much I’ll likely travel in the next couple years after The Now Revolution – my forthcoming book with Amber Naslund – is published in February).
It will also be nice to be near my friends (and clients) at ExactTarget and Compendium Blogware, in Indy.
So, Bloomington it is. Candidly, I’m scared to death. As a friend told me recently, “not many people would intentionally blow up a great situation in the hopes of finding a better one.” But, I’m excited by the possibilities, eager to get our kids set up in what I think will be a terrific situation, fired up about our new home, and eager to get integrated into the Indiana social media community.
Will there be bumps along the way? Definitely. Even getting this far has been a carnival ride of mortgage, insurance, real estate, movers and utilities drama. But ultimately, it’s going to be worth it.
In social media, and in life you have to embrace a simple concept: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained.
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