Every year, I think it's important to pause and assess a few things about where I've been, where I'm at, and where I'm going. It's an opportunity to look over the goals that we, as a community, set and rate ourselves against them. This is also my chance to share some of the ideas I've got for the next year with The Everyday Marksman. The first time I did this was back in April 2021, with a bit of a fireside chat, if you will. I look back and snicker a bit, because that whole direction that I thought I was going to go didn't work out. I didn't have the time, patience, nor know-how to make the whole "investigative entertainment" angle work for me. Also, the whole idea around collecting peoples' stories never worked out much either. I had a few submissions, but I just never felt like I could do the format justice. At the start of 2022, Allison and I discussed our goals for the year. I would say that both of us were far more successful there, and I'll touch more on that in a moment. One of the important bits was balancing fun with seriousness. I want to start here. A Brief History of The Everyday Marksman I realize that most people reading and listening to this have probably not been around since the start. For that reason, I want to dive back into history a bit. I started the very first iteration of The Everyday Marksman early in 2014. I was still active duty and engaging with shooting mostly as a hobby. By all accounts, most of the blog was my own shooting logs and lessons learned as I applied things I picked up here and there to each practice session. The most popular articles, the ones that generated the bulk of my traffic at the time, were a series of technical pieces about selecting components of an AR-15. Those articles stemmed from documents I wrote for friends and coworkers asking my advice on what to buy during the 2013 gun-buying surge. Those article, which I've revised countless times at this point, are still among the most popular today. In 2018, I migrated from the old free Wordpress site to my own domain that you're now accustomed to. I ditched the shooting journals along the way and focused on the technical aspects. With that, I also expanded the scope of my writing to include fitness, survival skills, tactics, and other related things. It wasn't just about marksmanship anymore, but about the whole picture. But why do that? All of the advice in the internet content creator world says to focus on a particular niche. If you don't, then your energy becomes wasted and unfocused. 100 Days Did you know that the average lifespan of a blog is 100 days?  I'm sure that average has a lot to do with folks deciding one night to start a blog, signing up for a free WordPress site, publishing a few things, and then realizing it's actually a lot of work. Stretching beyond that a little bit, I think most solo blogs, especially in the firearms space, don't last more than 2-4 years. By that point, if the blog has not turned into a full on business with revenue streams, multiple writers, and other trappings, then it starts to fade away. The authors, as good as they may have been, eventually just run out of things to say and money to continue supporting it. The reason I expanded my scope beyond guns was chiefly out of a desire to not get bored. Along with that was a growing idea that I didn't want to cater to the hardcore gun enthusiast. Instead, I wanted to become a bridge for introducing normal people to shooting-related topics, provide them a map of the things they could learn,