The Semi-Official Heath Gordon biography!
I was born sometime in the 1980's and I'm glad I didn't gain sentience until we got the heck out of that decade! I grew up in Onancock, Virginia which is on the Delmarva Peninsula. Look it up. Seriously, it's a place that exists. Most of my time was spent learning as much about science as possible, hitting things with sticks and reading. At this point in my life I wanted to be a herpetologist because reptiles are awesome. I spent every waking hour of my life barefoot and exploring the great outdoors at this point. My parents also forced me to take piano lessons which definitely defined me as a person until I went to college. Somewhere in here I witnessed an ant battle in my backyard and I was never the same. Seriously, I'm in love with ants.
No way in heck am I talking about my early teenage years.
My life in high school was defined by girls, crew, science and piano. My scholastic life was preparing for my inevitable career in either of the latter two fields. My final year of high school was all AP. I somehow made it out and attended Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. Yes, it is a place that exists. It has been referred to as 'Harvard of the Midwest.' It has also been referred to by Playboy as 'the homeliest college in America.' So you have that to go on.
Here is where my life took a drastic turn. See up until this point I had been all about music and science. There was no way I was going to be able to do both music and sports so I haphazardly got on the varsity crew team (kudos to my Dad for this one). On top of that, I quickly found that I HATED most of the bio and chem faculty so I settled into my life as an English major. On a whim, I took a Linguistics course and I seriously had an epiphany. You know how in movie there are two bet friends who all of a sudden look at each other and realize that they have been in love forever and ever? That was me and words.
At some point I quit crew, realized that having weekends was seriously awesome and joined a fraternity. Pro move. Then I graduated and worked on a farm for a while. For you kids graduating, seriously do this. I got in shape, made same money and wanted to not work on a farm REALLY BAD. Then I moved to Alexandria. For a while I had a gig working for a door to door sales job that basically ate my soul. I quit that and went and worked for my friends' mom at a non-profit. I was a temp and they let me go.
However I was relieved. Why, you ask? Because just the day before I read a thread on a forum about someone who made a living as a freelance writer. I realized that not only was I good at writing but I liked it too. It was rough for a while. It's still rough, actually. But here's where we get to the meat of it.
A lot of people are great at their jobs but they are just awful at writing. And here's the thing, people are judged so harshly on the quality of writing. Think about how people get employed now. If you make a mistake on your cover letter, you're screwed.
So I do two things. First is I take writing out of people's hands. Managers and business persons spend so much time out of their week writing and not doing their jobs. Well, I can do it quicker and better. Second is I increase sales. I have literally dedicated the past 6 years of my life to understanding how words impact people and I have learned how to use them to be very persuasive.
That's a brief overview and I hope you enjoyed it.