Welcome to Sly History
Allow me to introduce you to Sly History, a website and podcast working together to explore the history of those in my life through the lens of their interests and influences.
This project is a long time coming as I’ve been kicking around multiple ideas for years that have recently, through the inspiration and guidance of friends, come together into the singular product you see in front of you.
It all started practically a decade ago when I developed an interest in interviewing all the people in my life for posterity. However, I didn’t know what I wanted to talk to them about and the idea of recording any random conversation didn’t make much sense to me. Nor did it seem like something I would necessarily want to re-listen to later. It needed to be a conversation that had some sort of structure to it.
Furthermore, I recognized that I had a lack of knowledge and technology in how to make the idea happen in a way that I would be proud of. That damn perfectionism coming through, again.
However, over the last couple of years, I have solved all of those issues. Not only is technology more readily and financially accessible for me, but I have left the classroom for an audio/video role with the district.
Media production has literally become what I do.
However, a career change wasn’t enough to inspire me to look back at my past ideas. It took a friend coming to me for assistance with their own aspirations of streaming, and their subsequent encouragement, that lead me to this project.
During a brainstorm session for his channel, I dumped all of the variations of the above ideas that I had had over the years on him. Trying to encourage him to take something similar on with his friends and family, since I still didn’t feel like I was capable of doing it on my own.
He disagreed.
It was at this point that I started really considering it. I opened up to more people and gave them some ideas of what I was thinking. The feedback from everyone was exceptional and made me think about what I really wanted to accomplish. Furthermore, it forced me to consider how this would impact my writing that I’ve been doing for “Ptolemy’s Tales.”
It only made sense at this point that I sit down and put together a list of goals and ask myself some simple evaluative questions.
Goals:
1. Interview the people in my life
1. For posterity
2. As an excuse to reconnect
3. Express gratitude for any influence had on my life
2. Increase engagement for “Ptolemy’s Tales.” This would lead to:
1. Feeling more encouraged to dedicate time to writing
2. Put pressure on me to update the website more often
Questions:
1. Will Sly History accomplish each of these goals?
While it is too early to tell for sure, it definitely has the potential to do so. It will definitely accomplish everything under the first goal.
2. Will Sly History, in any way, hinder my dream of writing a book?
No. I won’t allow it. The point of the podcast and website is to raise interest and provide another path to my writing to build an audience.
3. Can you reasonably manage both without making major adjustments to your current life schedule?
Absolutely. I already set a couple of blocks of time aside each week for writing and playing video games. If I keep the writing blocks and switch the occasional video game block to podcasting I would barely see any difference. Furthermore, I have broken down managing Ptolemy and Sly into 4 separate tasks. Each one of those tasks has been assigned a week in which it shall be my focus, and every Saturday I get a reminder on my phone of which task I should be focusing on for the upcoming week.
Happy with the answers and my goals, I began opening up to more friends about my ideas and got some fantastic feedback. The original idea involved me performing these interviews while playing games and live streaming them. However, through the help of others, I believe that a podcast is a better medium for those that I wanted to talk to. Especially family.
There was also an early idea to talk more about global history, but I quickly kicked that aside as I found conversations led by others and their interests to be more captivating.
Through these conversations, a theme began to repeat itself. This theme then warped into somewhat of a sub-goal.
Like me, my friends are awful at self-promotion.
For example, my Dungeons & Dragons group has met almost every single week for the last few years. We communicate regularly about what is going on in our lives with work and family. And yet, it was this conversation about my podcast idea that one member learned that another has had a regularly updated website for the last few years, and multiple of us learned that another member had their own podcast.
I have other friends who have started their own businesses, are aspiring to be creators, who regularly work for non-profits, and while some do a decent job of self-promotion, not everyone does. Thus, I added another goal:
When possible, give others a platform to put their work out there.
Especially when so many of these endeavors are passion projects that they have taken on because of the events we are discussing. After all, Sly History is all about those seemingly small interests in our lives that have had a major impact on our own personal stories.
