What 4 Years of Writing on the Internet Alongside My Day Job Taught Me About Business (and Life)
Trust in your problem, hold time for negativity, treat yourself like the product
Hey Part-Time Creator,
This week I reflect on the biggest lessons over the last 4 years. This is the 2nd last free newsletter on the Part-Time Creator Club before it goes paid.
Each week, I’ll write about what holds you back at work and building a profitable business —like working with people, building products, and getting things done.
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Read time: 5.3 minutes
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In 2020, I remember saying to myself “I’m going to write every day for 10 minutes”. At 25, I was the saddest I’d ever been and writing was the only thing that made me feel anything. I’m not sure what the date was, I didn’t know it was going to change my life, I never thought much of it.*
Back then I was a 20-something with little self-confidence, self-awareness, and a whole load of disappointment. A lot of life has happened in the last 4 years —dog-mumming, renovations, and a new job but amongst it all, I’ve written pretty much every day. Since coming back from the holidays, I’ve been reflecting on the last few years of writing and realized I should share those lessons with anyone else wanting to start a new habit that lasts. Maybe in some small way, these lessons will help you.
*I think, in reality, that’s how most impactful things start — they just do, when we don’t overthink them too much. Later we put a red bow on them.
Trust in your problem
More and more people want to create their own thing, find their freedom, and build something they are proud of. Most of the time, I think they’re really saying they want creative control to build their own thing.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve realized the core to actually doing that is not only to find a problem you care about but critically you must keep reminding yourself of it — when things get tough, to circle back to where it all started and why you cared so much in the first place — often this means defining and refining your problem because you likely won’t have the fully formed problem right away.
This line by Sam Altman nails it:
“Nine years ago, we really had no idea what we were eventually going to become; even now, we only sort of know.”
You must build a connection with your problem by thinking about it a lot—chewing it over on dog walks, thinking about it as you read, and ruminating when you go shopping. You need to be swirling your problem around, throwing it up and down, shaking it around.
When you do that, you create a bond with it, you start to trust in it and build reliance for it. It almost becomes your duty to commit and recommit to it because you care so much about it. It then, over time, becomes your duty to solve it. It gets to the point where you can’t, not.
Don’t solve problems that you don’t care about. It sounds obvious but I found out the hard way that it’s nearly impossible to have the staying power to make it work. The first filtering process between winning and losing is sticking around long enough.
How do you find a problem you care about?
Assess your emotions. If you feel emotional (and that doesn’t just mean sad) about a thing, it’s a good sign you care about it. Apathy is the enemy of finding your problem. Figure out what things, ideas, and problems make you feel something.
Believing you can solve it. Part of finding your problem is having some self-belief that you can solve it. Autonomy and accountability will be high motivating factors later on — you must feel like you can solve this thing.
50% right. When you start you’ll probably have 50% of a problem. Not all the pieces will be in place, in some cases you’ll just have a general feel of what you want to solve, and that’s okay. You know your problem (half) by finding it.
Over-index on self-belief — Self-belief has a knock-on effect on almost everything else in your life and most people have way too little self-belief. Indulge yourself in more self-belief, and do what you can to make it grow. More on self-belief here (Sam Altman talking about Elon Musk sending rockets to Mars).
TLDR: Find a problem you can wrap your world around.
‘Not wanting to’ is enough of a reason
If you’re going to work outside of work hours on your own thing, you get to choose what that work is — exercise that right to its fullest. Of course, in your day job, you probably have some choice on the stuff you want to work on but there is an element of a ‘jump — how high?’ mentality. It’s a job, that’s part of the rules.
But when it comes to working on your own stuff — you get to pick (especially when you work full-time and are doing this thing on the side). Along the way in my journey, I’ve been offered opportunities that on the surface, would be a decent amount of money and be easy enough but for one reason or another, I ended up not doing the thing. Mostly because I didn’t want to.
Amongst those offers on a handful of occasions, I’ve been asked if I would like to write freelance for a bunch of folks. The answer has always been a polite, no. The truth is, as much as I’d like to, I don’t like writing for other people — and that’s okay because I don’t have to.
Paul Graham wrote in a great write-up here:
“All other things being equal, why wouldn’t you work on what interests you the most?”
In this case, if you work full-time and are doing something on the side, all things are equal (you’re not relying on this thing to pay your mortgage) so work on the stuff you love.
I’m not a huge fan of the whole ‘hell yes or it’s a no’ thinking but here’s something that I do find useful that I’ve worked on lately.
Tldr: don’t do the work you don’t want to do.
Basics first, tweaking later
I’ve long been a fan of getting the basics right. I’ve seen it 101 times, we’re busy spending time tweaking tiny things when there are gaping holes that need addressing. I’ve started articulating like this:
“Don’t paint the kitchen if the ceiling is leaking.”
What I mean is, often it’s easy to start trying to tweak the tiniest of things, like changing the font on your digital product, choosing a new color for your buttons, and messing about with your logo — but none of those things really matter if you have no customers.
When you start, you have no house. It’s the equivalent of painting the proverbial kitchen — it doesn’t exist yet. In the beginning, you won’t be good enough for anybody to care. In the beginning, you just have to start. You have to build a thing. Spend your effort making the thing good enough and acquiring customers. Of course, it needs to be half good — if it’s not, you’ll get zero customers, but don’t exhaust yourself pumping up the tyres on a car that doesn’t start.
Tdlr: Get the basics right.
Hold time for negativity
Suppressed negativity is no good for anybody. In the beginning, maybe 6 months or so into my creator career, I used to tell myself that it was no good to indulge in negativity. That I wouldn’t get anywhere if I was to think negatively — I must think positively I thought.
But after a while, I was exhausted by trying to smile when inside I felt like a complete mess. Over the years, I’ve learned that holding time for negativity, allowing it to take up some space, and sitting in it is no bad thing. Because that way, it doesn’t fester.
These days, I let myself feel down in the dumps if that’s how I feel. I’ll write it down to try and explore my feelings but the one thing I don’t do is shy away from how I’m feeling — in fact, some of my best content has come from my worst days.
Write through your feelings. Whether you do that publicly or privately it doesn’t matter. If you want to make sense of what you are feeling and thinking — write about it.
Main takeaway: Suppressing your feelings makes them worse.
Treat yourself like the product
Let’s say for a second you’re a product manager in charge of this new product. You’ve got to figure out what customers like, what features they find valuable, how to scale the thing, and how to build a thing that makes money.
You get to decide what stays and what goes. So you experiment — you set clear parameters of what works and what doesn’t. You have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what experiment you want to run — so you run those experiments, test what works and what doesn’t work, and then keep what works and bin what doesn’t.
Now let’s pretend that product is you. You’re in charge of scaling and developing you as a person. So you run experiments, here are some of the experiments I’ve run:
Waking up at 5 am
Taking 2-week break
Writing on X and Medium
Journal before starting writing
My general approach is to test what works for me, run it as an experiment for a few weeks, look at the findings, and adapt as appropriate. Learn what works for you. Take the lessons from the world, apply them to your life but only keep the stuff that works. Disregard the rest.
This isn’t about applying general laws to your life, it’s about figuring out what you need to succeed. The ‘secret’ to your success is the realization that your success is personal and therefore you need to personalize your approach. It’s not one-size-fits-all. General rules work but they all have limitations.
Largely popularised by Eric Ries, not only can you experiment in business, you can experiment on your career, there’s a good write-up here. The sentiment is quite straightforward, have an idea of how something works, test it works in that way and if it does, apply it.
Tldr: Experiment with what makes you the most productive and apply once tested appropriately.
Become your own coach
Waking up at 5 am from now til the end of time is complete nonsense. It’s good in theory. It sounds impressive to say but in the real world, in real life, it’s mostly unsustainable. Why? Because life happens. You get sick. You don’t sleep well. Your mind is not in the place to wake up at 5 am.
This all happens. It happens to us all and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Have you tried to get up at 5 am every day for, well, forever and failed? Cool. Me too. The Queen of England famously rose at 7:30am and did okay, I’m sure we’re good.
The trick to long-term, sustainable, and therefore ‘good’ growth is to be your own coach. Part of that is having a level of realism, I’ve long been a fan of Oliver Burkeman’s approach to productivity, do things dailyish. It’s perhaps time we release the shackles of unobtainable productivity and not feel like total defeatists for doing so. You can be highly productive and not wake up at 5 am every single day. You can, in fact, be productive and just do things more often than not.
Learn how to work with your emotions — take note of what builds you up and what brings you down. Optimize for the former, minimize the latter.
Create a list of ‘go-tos’ — there is a short list of things that make me feel good about life when I’m feeling unmotivated and bored, I use them to get me back on track.
Signals — listen and document the signals that might mean you are on the verge of burnout and recognize when you need a break or a change of scenery.
Learn about yourself. Learn what motivates you and what builds your confidence and treat yourself like a coach. Be the coach and the coachee.
Tdlr: Become your own coach.
Don’t rip people down to make yourself feel better
It’s so natural to get frustrated by what you see on the internet. We live in a glorified, Instagram world where you can never be too sure what is clickbait, fake news, and all the rest of it. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past getting frustrated at what other people had.
I’d read articles, watch videos, and whatever else and find myself getting frustrated at the fact that people were getting ahead and were doing way better than me. There was little me doing all the things the world had taught me to do and yet I felt I wasn’t making progress and I was nowhere near as successful as other people who had seemingly skipped a load of steps.
If I am honest, I was envious. On a bad day, I’d find myself getting frustrated and worked up about their success but really, I was frustrated about my lack of success. It was a mirror to myself and I didn’t like what I saw in the reflection.
I’ve read many articles, posts, tweets whatever about various people ripping into others — It never ends well.
One thing I can be proud of though, is that I’ve never written anything ripping other people down. It’s so easy to do when you’re frustrated with where you are, it’s easy to look at the world and blame other people for your lack of progress. But I have never, and will never, write about what other people are doing in an attempt to discredit them.
Do I see things on the internet I disagree with? Yes of course. But instead of writing about them, I focus my attention on the things I’m doing and the things I can control. I’ve found that you never know what’s going on in other people’s lives and judging someone on a subset of information never leads anywhere good.
Life is too short and too precious to spend it on people you’ve never met. Take that energy and funnel it into you.
Tdlr: If you don’t like what someone is putting into the world, you don’t have to engage with it — you don’t even have to see it.
Other ideas worth commenting on…
Busy hands, quiet mind - most of the time, the answer to an overthinking mind is to get to work. Occupy yourself by doing the work that will move the needle.
Do the work you believe in - You can and should focus your energy on the stuff that makes you feel most alive.
Don’t let your ideas stop at the first iteration - Your first draft is rubbish, that’s the point. Good writing, life, and business are all about that. Remember, you're first idea isn’t the final product, it’s probably 15% of it.
Hold yourself to a higher standard - the way you do anything is the way you do everything. Hold yourself to a higher standard not for the success it might bring, but for you and for the work.
To recap:
Create trust in your problem by circling back to it and refining it over time.
‘Not wanting to’ is enough when you’re deciding where to spend your time.
First principles, basics first, tweak later.
Hold time for negativity.
Treat yourself like the product.
Become your own coach.
Avoid ripping people down, focus on yourself.
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Much love,
Eve 😊
I love your take on getting into a relationship with your problem - “Create trust in your problem by circling back to it and refining it over time.” I am beginning to see the shaping of and falling in love with the problem go hand in hand and when that starts to happen, then there is more flow in my life and around the topic.