My Illumination Introduction

My path to Medium

Writing my introduction article for Illumination was on the back of my mind for weeks. I want to thank Dr Mehmet Yildiz for creating the publication which is very impressive as a relatively new publication on Medium. Without his team, the site wouldn’t be where it is today and I want to thank them as well.

Who is Tom Handy?

I’ll get right to the point and not waste your time. This is something I picked up from the Army.

I grew up in Philadelphia and then went to college in Vermont at Norwich University. Norwich is the oldest private military college in the United States. After five years, a change in majors, a semester abroad in Korea, I graduated with a Political Science degree and minors in English and History.

The education sounds interesting but these only lead you to three possible directions.

• First, you can go to grad school or law school.
• Second, you could work for a political campaign and be a starving college grad.
• Lastly, you could join the Army travel and the world, which is what I did.

If you don’t know, a lot of my decisions are based on money. While deciding where to go work, I pick the Army who paid for my school loans. I needed someone to pay for my school loans and give me some spending money.

Thus, I have top writer credentials for Bitcoin, Investing, and Finance. I had a top writer badge for Writing but recently lost that.

When you snooze, you lose.

Entrepreneur at heart

Growing up, my mom had various businesses — a dry cleaners, pizza shop, a food stand before the food trucks we have today, and a grocery store. So you know, my mom didn’t own all of these at once but she got a fair share of manual labor from me.

If you haven’t guessed, that’s where my heart is. Business. I didn’t want to be like my mom and work 80+ hours a week running a store.

Somewhere along the way, I found my way investing in stocks, real estate, silver, and cryptocurrencies all from my home. I wanted to run a business but not be in a business.

I have a couple of property managers who manage the rentals and that’s less headache for me.

After working some crazy hours in the Army, I prefer to sit back now and be a stay at home dad with my two kids as my wife works.

As for investing, I self-taught myself to invest and monitor the movement of the investments. Basically, I’m a long term investor and rarely day/swing trade but do if the occasion requires it.

My future goals

Quora. Before I came to Medium, I was a paid writer on Quora with over 6 million views. Many people don’t know that Quora pays but they pay their writers, the people who create questions on the website.

Freelance writing. A year ago, I wrote for an international company creating pages for a travel site. It was a very interesting experience and I may do more work for them on a different topic in the near future.

Medium. This year I was looking for another home to write and remember I created a page for Medium a few years ago. I decided to try it again since I was tired of Quora.

Other than writing on Illumination, I write for 2 Minute Madness, Better Marketing, The Capital, Publishing Well, Crypto Spotlight, Noteworthy, Freelance Filter, Data Driven Investor, Ascent, and Invisible Pillar.

Medium helped me work on my writing a little as my experience writing about cryptocurrencies, helped me land a job writing for a cryptocurrency trading company. I’m currently waiting for my first assignment from them.

As far as Medium, I’m writing every day (100+ days so far), learning new tips, and meeting some very good writers, a few who have helped me write the Medium way. I enjoy writing here and have some big plans for my future.

There’s a method to my madness.

Tom Handy is a top Finance, Investment, and Bitcoin writer on Medium, and the father of two kids. He retired from the Army and sits on several non-profit boards. You can find him on Twitter @tomhandy1.