It was the week of crushing rains. Something like 8 inches has fallen over the last 24 hours with more on the way. The trash guys still picked up this week, only to leave the bins with the lid open. By the time I retrieved the can it was half full of water – probably 15 gallons worth. Wild.
We’re all watching Helene crawl along the gulf. The slow moving train wreck set to ruin the low-lying marshes and beaches along the Florida panhandle. Well, ruin whatever’s left – whatever the oil man hasn’t destroyed. In Asheville, as the leaf-season is just starting, everyone’s social media is a parade of “we’re closing early.”
What do you want? What do you want this to be?
I still think there is a piece of me fully embedded on the couch, under the blankets, left in that odd space between Christmas and New Year’s when no one does much of anything, so why should I? I read so many damn books that week. Books, coffee, bourbon (depending on the time of day, but sometimes not). I spent some time laying out the projects for the next year, for OutWord, where I wanted the business to go and grow and promptly watched nothing happen in the first month of the year.
“Find your niche!” every blowhard marketing numbskull likes to say even though I can’t imagine anything more boring than a single-track focus. The last year has been reckoning with a far-too-late ADHD diagnosis. In a moment, everything was clear – no wonder I struggled with all of this (waves arms around) – but the clarity came through in too-high a definition. I wasn’t ready for it. The medicine helped but only when I could control it. Otherwise, I would get really into reading more books.
Maybe that’s what I need to stop fighting.
I resisted the niche until I eventually fell into it. That is, until the morning I woke up realizing that of all the things I could do, the stuff that I approached with skillful craftsmanship, I was applying it to the stuff I didn’t care much about.
Yes, I could write your copy for your brand. I’d do it all day. You’ll forgive me if the process doesn’t get my hair wild. For someone who isn’t much for the things that exploit humans, I sure do walk the tightrope of consumerism over the vastly infinite pit of capitalism. Maybe I am naive, but I’d like to think I’m sharing the right things, in the right way, to the right people.
Anything else is a waste of time.
And maybe that’s the wall I’m up against: the idea of wasting time. I turn 40 next year. Remember when we all thought “40” was old? And the old folks had their shit figured out?
I’ve spent a ton of time over the summer doing just enough to keep OutWord afloat and clients satisfied so I can give my head the space it needs to notice what comes next. A few of the big ideas:
- Backing away from the niche and into the general. I like the term “Generalist” – likely the HR-friendly version of the “jack of all trades.” Stepping back from the one thing you do with precision and into the world of stuff you managed to string together.
- Working in the digital garden. It lives here, at my primary domain, and exists as the proving ground to test out new ideas and build understanding in public. Right now, it’s a mess of weeds. Things need to be sorted and tagged. There’s a long way to go, but there’s also no deadline, no rush.
- I will never not write. Of all things, I need to write more. The key is to getting back to the place where writing is a creative act.
- Whatever comes next likely involves a lens.
On this path I’ve come across loads of people who have the solution I need: here’s what you can do to build your business in the next six months! Every one of these folks works with the same templates of stuff I’ve heard before in one capacity or another. On the other end, there are people who take an inspired and unusual approach of how they run their business (or, in some cases, how they’d LIKE to run it).
All of this leaves me on the precarious what nextness? that usually leaves me in paralysis and drags me down the hole of number puzzles and bad TV. I know I need accountability – I need to know someone is watching, otherwise I’ll never do anything different. The digital garden is a mess and I don’t expect anyone to crawl around in it with me, but the grander writing projects are so few and far between. So there is this, these short-term missives of what I’m working on and reading and loving and despising. I don’t want to write them feeling like I have to put more content out. I’d rather let it burn than subject people who care to something that doesn’t serve them.
Or, as it has been made redundantly clear to me as of late: I’d rather this was valuable to you. You, the reader who has been here all along waiting with love and interest to see what happens next.