Hey everyone,
Have you ever noticed how books come in your life exactly when you need them to?
Sometimes I’ll find that I’ve been thinking of a question and suddenly a book or a podcast or an article falls into my lap that answers exactly that question.
I even started testing this theory out by throwing random questions out into the void to see if I’d find the answers, but then I kept forgetting the questions, so it was kind of pointless.
Anyway, so, in December 2018, two books randomly entered my life. It had been a difficult year. I’d somehow managed to find myself trapped in scarcity mode (me! imagine!) and I stupidly kept dropping my prices lower and lower and lower, and no surprise, working harder and harder and harder. It was an endless loop but by July, I’d hired a business coach, she kicked my ass into gear, and I stopped the bleeding and started on an upward trajectory again.
This experience, however, really made me reevaluate how I wanted to live my life and run my business.
The biggest question I had was how to keep growing but without the trappings of traditional businesses, that is, employees, offices, dozens of contractors, etc. I received a copy of Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis from his publicist and read the book on a nine-hour flight, finishing it while on holiday. In it, Jarvis lays out a plan for creative businesses like mine (and perhaps yours?) to be able to play a bigger game, reaching multiple six and seven figures, but without the need to become a manager in the process.
The second book, Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike Michalowicz, was more of a challenge for me since it’s focused more around traditional ways of doing business, but the principles are solid and I tweaked the lessons for my own creative life. The idea is to make your business so smooth in its operations that you could walk away from it for a year and find, on your return, that it’s working really well without you, even growing.
Now, obviously, this doesn’t work for us as creatives and writers, but I found the concept intriguing. Because while I write pretty much all the time, including on holidays (because I want to), what if there were parts of my business that could keep ticking over without needing my constant attention? How could I automate certain parts so that I’m involved but not every second of every day?
What if I took a year off to just write novels without any impact on my business?
Hmm.
A lot of the answers I came up with were not practical. I’m involved in my communities, for instance, and that won’t change. I also love writing these posts and they’re a creative release for me. My journalism is entirely dependent on me doing it. So, it’s still a work in progress. But the idea was intriguing and it forced me to think outside the box and come up with ways to simplify my work life and make it easier.
I did manage to apply some of what I learned and had the opportunity to practice three times in the last year.
In October, I spent a week in Thailand. In December, I visited the UK for a month, moving between four different towns and cities. And in March, as many of you know, we had to leave Delhi with 72 hours notice and return to Brighton, where we spent two months in lockdown living out of suitcases, with no furniture, kitchen appliances, or day-to-day supplies.
Each time, even though I wasn’t able to push ahead on some new things, the business has remained stable and I was able to continue working on creative projects (novel, mostly). I would say my work time was cut to less than half.
Both books allowed me to see that one, what I want for my business is possible, and two, gave me strategies to make it so.
They also really reinforced, once again, something that I teach but often forget in my own life:
Your career should reflect you.
I don’t like managing people. But in the last few years, the more my business grew, the more I felt like I had to bring people in. Sure, I could hire people to help me grow my business endlessly, but what’s the point if that’s not the way in which I want to spend my days?
I cut all of it back. Automated a whole bunch of it. Kept the things I love doing (these emails, for instance) and got rid of anything that didn’t fit into my idea and ideals of what my business or my life should look like.
It’s nowhere near done and I’m sure I’ll change my mind along the way a hundred more times. But I continue to go back to the core principles I’ve been talking about in my last few emails:
How can I make this easy?
How can I make this fun?
The goal is to work on the things that you love and eliminate the rest. Make your career truly yours.
I’ve done it with my freelancing (which is why I’ve just been able to plug back into freelance journalism again this year effortlessly), and now I’m learning how to apply the same rules to my business.
I’d encourage you to try doing this, too.
Cheers,
Natasha