• Thoughts on Motivation

    I just spent my entire day at a marketing summit in a small hotel conference room with a group of coworkers discussing the work we did in 2024 and plan to do in 2025. We have another full day tomorrow…

    I wouldn’t blame the reader for assuming my thoughts on motivation coming out of a day like today – and facing more of the same tomorrow – would be based solely around avoiding sitting through one of these things again. And in the past, they wouldn’t have been wrong.

    But today I observed something that I’d previously missed. I never realized the energy a group generates during a good conversation. You can feel it in the room. People get excited about their work and become more invested in it. And I realized I operate similarly as an individual, that I get energy and motivation from just talking about my ideas.

    So many ideas morph from their original form into almost unrecognizable versions of themselves when they become actual products or services. Getting from a simple idea to a customer-facing product or service could take you down a million different paths. But all those paths start in the same place. Somebody talking about their idea, bouncing it off someone, writing it down on a piece of paper lying around, just simply getting it out of their system in whatever way feels best. That’s what can provide the necessary spark. That’s what can give you a burst of motivation.

    What will I be doing in 2025? Talking about my ideas more. I’ll call up a friend. I’ll write about my idea for an hour. I’ll force my family to listen to my ideas more than I already do.

    Some say talk is cheap. Maybe. But it’s something, and it’s a start. And when you don’t know where to start, maybe that’s all you need to get moving.

    2025 Total Page Views: 35,863

  • One Billion Page Views

    One billion page views.

    My name is Max Carty and Five to Nine Startup will document my quest to surpass one billion annual page views across all of my digital projects.

    ‘All of my digital projects’ may be a generous way to describe my current portfolio. As of now, those projects include this website (zero total page views) and Power Rankings Guru (PRG), a site I built in 2014 as part of my effort to learn how to code. In 2024, PRG saw 463,755 page views. I’ve got a long way to go.

    I currently work nine to five as Frontend Engineer for a large electrical distributor in the New England area. Building up current and new digital projects will take place outside (5pm to 9am) of my company’s working hours.

    I hope the documentation that follows can serve as a helpful resource for those looking to build their own dreams instead of working to build other people’s.

    2025 Total Page Views: 0