I’m Chris
CEO, CTO, CIO, CMO, CFO, C3PO, and underpaid coffee-fetcher here at The Zag.
My Story
My dreams of being a corporate big shot got shot down, so I “pretired” at 27.
Then I fantasized of birthing a unicorn business and galloping on it to greatness. Ten years, a few dozen tons of frozen blueberries, some bug guts, one “exit” for 0.0231% of $1 billion, and one travel blog later, I decided to zag.
Now here I am sitting on the floor of my apartment, poking away at the keyboard of my 2015 MacBook Pro.
But I have a great ocean view! I even see whales!
I wasn’t cut out for conventional success, but machete-ing my own path has been a blast and my life’s getting closer and closer to perpetual perfection.
These Days
I now consider myself the world’s greatest1And only, so worst, too. “comfort zone coach.”
My job?
To motivate you to develop a super fit, flexible, sexy comfort zone, then use it to do exciting things.
Outside of work, I eat lots of melted cheese, drink South African wine, play beach volleyball and basketball, rarely wear socks or sleeved shirts, and try to be a good role model to my son(s).
Here’s a recent “Unfollowables” interview I did of myself.
I also have a user manual.
What am I up to now?
March 2023
- 🤸🏻♂️ Enjoying: Summertime Cape Town, South Africa. This is Kim and my fifth straight year “snowbirding” down here. Aside from the rolling blackouts and unsafeness of walking alone in the dark, it’s a magical place: 5-star beaches, people, food, wine, and adventures for a 3-star budget.
- 👨💻 Working On: Fine-tuning this site you’re looking at. I just launched it in March! Previously, all the content here was in my other, now travel blog, The Unconventional Route.
- 📺 Watching: The Challenge and Physical: 100.
- 📚 Reading: Lots of biographies, so I don’t have to learn the hard way as often. I’m just about finished Sam Zell’s Am I Being Too Subtle?
- 🥵 Current Challenge: Twitter. Twitter could be a great place to connect with others, find new ideas, and get quick feedback on my own. But it’s also a time-sucking echo chamber. And I’m starting from scratch, so we’ll see how it goes. If you use Twitter, please connect with me, help me figure out how to use it better, and see my raw ideas before they get gussied up here on the blog. I’m @ChrisBlahoot.
Q&A
What, you mean my BCom from the University of Toronto isn’t enough to convince you that I’m qualified to poke around at your precious little comfort zone?
Then I don’t know what to tell you.
All I can say is Google trusts me enough to send over 150,000 visitors a month to my site and nearly 6,000 people have trusted me enough to let me into their inboxes.
Believe it or not, here’s a small sample of the nice things subscribers have written to me:
Most of my income comes from auctioning off real estate on this site to the highest bidding advertiser. So the longer you to scroll around this site, the more ugly ads you see (unless you have a good ad blocker), and the more moolah I make.
Some people think my content is valuable enough to give me their emails in exchange for a regular supply. And they sometimes pay me to help put those ideas into action via courses, coaching, and challenges.
Sooner than later, I will get so good and renowned for what I do that latter income stream will replace the former.
Technically, I can’t… yet.
Most months, I don’t make enough money from The Zag and my other blog, The Unconventional Route, to cover my family’s living expenses.
But I have enough well-invested pretirement savings to cover that deficit for many, many years. And my income (and potential income from growing my skills and audience) is growing faster than our expenses. Pretty soon, I’ll be flush enough to splurge on a new laptop.
First and foremost, it’s because the TheZag.com domain was affordable.
Also, I like the word “zag.”
Dictionaries say zag means “to make a sharp change in direction.”
Meh.
I say it means more than that:
To proactively adventure off of the boring straight lines of the status quo.
I’d be honored.
To make it harder for spam bots to scrape my email and degrade my inbox, you’ll have to puzzle this together:
It’s the first letter of my first name followed by @ and then thezag.com.
Let’s Pump Up Our Comfort Zones Together
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