The Teacher Show

Episode Summary: A behind-the-scenes, story-driven episode about Mike’s journey to make a living as an online educator — and the moment, at 48, he first identified with the word “teacher.”

What You’ll Learn

• A lifelong love of learning, traced back to childhood curiosity and college-town energy
• What Mike wants to teach, and to whom: content creation, for creatives and go-getters
• The concrete steps taken to position himself as an online educator by 2018
• Why Murphy Concierge doubles as both income and in-person teaching practice

I’m 48 years old, and when I grow up I want to be a teacher.

A Perfect World for Mike Murphy LLC

Mike’s tagline — Learn. Create. Move Forward. — traces back to childhood, feeding a curious mind on anything that sparked interest: trivia, geography facts, conversations with his mom over cards and books. The Pythagorean theorem never landed, but knowing the Grand Canyon was 18 miles wide in places did. College brought no clear direction (a recurring theme), but the energy of a college town — bookstores, curious people, a hunger for more — was enough, and it’s stuck ever since. Travel works the same way: wake up early, grab a camera, walk, absorb, repeat. Learn. Create. Move Forward. — three constants that show up daily: taking in a tutorial as a student, creating something, making the business a little better. Never stopping.

The perfect world: making tutorials and being recognized as someone who genuinely knows their craft because they work hard at it and care — and getting paid to do exactly that.

What to Teach, and Who to Teach It To

Trendiness doesn’t matter much, but recognizing trends and behaviors comes naturally — paying attention to what quietly catches the eye rather than chasing noise. The pull is toward simplicity and good intentions: tools and products built with genuine care, not just marketing. In practical terms, content creation in new media — video, podcasting, eBooks, articles — is the zone. The direct answer: teach content creation, to creatives and go-getters willing to get their hands dirty and try.

Steps Toward Becoming an Online Educator

365 videos in 2017. Over 900 consecutive days of daily content. Never missing a day on Instagram Stories. Relentless, deliberately so — daily tutorials made with the only real expectation being that tomorrow’s is a little better than today’s.

Writing this episode marked the first time in 48 years Mike identified with a career title he’d apparently been seeking his whole life: teacher. There’s a specific joy in taking a topic that would typically need ten minutes to explain and compressing it into 60 seconds.

A less obvious step: Murphy Concierge, the local tech handyman business — getting paid to help people figure things out, in person, which is really just teaching with a different name. Started mainly out of financial necessity, it ended up modeled around the same Learn, Create, Move Forward philosophy, feeding content ideas back into the online work in a genuine win-win cycle.

Conclusion

Sometimes you need to pick your head up, do a self-audit, and say out loud what you actually want. When Mike started making things online, he had no real plan — just a memorable piece of advice from a TED Talk: keep making things when you don’t know what to do, and you’ll naturally start eliminating what you don’t want and getting good at what remains. About two weeks before this episode, Mike acknowledged to himself that he genuinely wants to teach simple things — the quick-tip format he loves making. After 10+ years studying Adobe Creative Cloud, he’s ready to say out loud that he’s qualified to teach at a high level, including for platforms like LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) or Adobe directly — something he’d once quietly hoped for but never quite believed he’d earned.

Nothing external changed to make that true. Just self-awareness, and owning it. Creative educators, as technology keeps disrupting the status quo, are only going to be more in demand — and Mike’s all in. Nobody can read your mind. If you want something, say it out loud, even if you’re not sure anyone’s listening.