About
I'm Paul Linehan.
I'm a husband, a dad and a stepdad. I did command and control for the GPS satellites in the Air Force, ran retail stores, worked in sales, and went to nursing school at 43. Somewhere in there I started building websites, although for years I called it tinkering.
I didn't start any of this because I had a plan. I started because I hit a wall.
Years ago I hit what most people would call rock bottom. I won't romanticize it. I wasn't heroic and I wasn't enlightened. I was drifting.
After that came what I call my waking coma years. I showed up, paid my bills and kept moving, and I wasn't really there for any of it.
Then I went to nursing school. I sat in the parking lot wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. To this day I'm still not sure exactly what made me do it. I think I just wasn't done yet.
That's where I met my wife, Beth. She had a way of asking questions that made my usual answers fall apart.
Why do you believe that?
Who decided that about you?
How long are you gonna keep using that excuse?
It was uncomfortable as hell. My excuses had been running unopposed for years.
How a satellite guy ended up making history videos.
Air Force
Where showing up got drilled into me.
The waking coma years
I functioned. That's about all I can say for them.
Nursing school, at 43
The story about what I was allowed to become stopped holding up.
Started writing in public
I wanted to find out if the ceiling was real.
Building and drafting now
Websites, videos, and a memoir I'm still drafting.
Then I did something that scared the hell out of me. I started writing in public. I wasn't confident. I wanted to see if the ceiling I felt was real or just comfortable.
It wasn't real. It was a story I'd been telling myself for a long time.
I've also never been able to stay in one lane. I'll go from history to psychology to philosophy to some science video at midnight, and my music goes from classical to rap to chanting monks. So I build things around whatever's got hold of me.
CoreStak builds websites for service businesses. People Time Forgot started because I wanted to tell stories about people you probably didn't hear about in history class. Making those videos kept turning up things I wanted more control over, so I built my own system and called it FrameStak. Now I use it on my own channel too.
And the memoir's where I write the whole thing down straight.
I kept writing because stopping felt like agreeing with the story.
From Don't Put Your Pen Down (draft)This site used to sell coaching.
I built the offers and the program, and I said it out loud in public. Then a coach sent me the exact kind of referral I'd been wanting, and I kept not answering.
I wasn't afraid I couldn't help the guy. I was afraid I could. Because then what? More sessions, more scheduling, and a calendar slowly filling up with everything I said I wanted.
You can spend a long time building something you don't actually want, and sometimes the only way to find out is to almost get it. So I wrote about it and walked away, in front of everybody who'd watched me build it.
I still love helping people see something they couldn't see before. I just do it by making things now. The stuff you can use on your own stayed up, and everything else I was already doing finally got to be on here too.
You can read the essays, see the projects, or try something I've built.