I Need To Accept I Am Chaos
I took a few, tip-toed creeping steps towards thinking about my future business model, and immediately found myself between a rock and a hard place. This wasn’t even structured thinking; there were no tabs open that I was typing into, there was no planning spreadsheet. I was just starting to think, to daydream, to consider what it could be like – and I came up against my first problem. And the problem was with the very fundamentals of who I was and what I wanted.
The rock:
I often crave neatness. I like the idea of a business model with a clear and organised structure. Whenever I see someone with a a clear 3 part business model that they run year after year I think “oh that’s nice. That’s clean, that’s beautiful, that looks smooth and easeful”. I have somewhat always striven for this kind of business model, one where there are a few cogs that click together in a slick machine. A lower price product that gives people a taste, a mid-range deeper offering and then a signature payday product. I love the simplicity, I love that you would always know what you were doing, I love that you can be focused and that everything makes sense.
The hard place:
I often crave chaos. I want to follow the ideas that implant themselves into my body when I’m out for a walk, I want to have variety and expression in my work, I don’t want to be bored. Many of the people whose work I enjoy the most and who I follow most closely have businesses where they put out a class about a niche topic they’re really into on a random Wednesday and it works because of their energy about it. I don’t want to business model myself into a corner, I want to always have the space to evolve and transform, to pursue things I want to pursue without needing it to make sense with “the brand”.
(A quick side note – you may have, rightfully, clocked that in both those scenarios I spoke about looking at what other people are doing. I just want to clarify that when I say that, this is not me moping around on the internet comparing myself to people I think have got everything together. It is more taking an interest in what is happening in other people’s businesses, looking at options that I might not have thought were possible, and ultimately seeing whether there is something that can spark a version of something for me.)
I have lingered in the cold valley between the rock and the hard place for a long time. Sometimes I make strides over to the rock, my choice made, ready to outline a three tier business model and then something will catch my eye and I’ll turn and I’ll drift back in the direction of the hard place. When I think about it though, this isn’t a new problem for me. I have always, for my whole business, lived between this rock and this hard place, trying to have both of them – but I didn’t realise I was trying to have both of them. And because I didn’t realise, things got a bit messy and confusing and I kept having to set fire to everything to make it make sense.
Is the problem here indecisiveness? Is it not knowing what I want? I don’t think so. I think this problem shows me that I do know what I want. I want easeful structure and creative expression. I want safety and a business I can depend on like a job, and I also want spontaneity and a writerly practice I can devote to. And as much as they might sound like they don’t all go happily in hand, I can make it my work to figure out how they could. To figure out a way of doing business that can hold both safety and expression.
No, what the problem is that I am actually a hard place trying to be a rock. In my last call with the coach I’ve been working with this year I said, with a sigh, “I think I just need to accept that I am chaos”. A sigh because, of course. I’ve always known. I am chaotic and last minute and multi-passionate and have always tried to stuff that into the sleeping bag case of organisation but it bulges and stretches the seams and pokes out of the top. The problem is I’ve been trying to be someone I’m not instead of embracing where my magic comes from.
There’s also a secret second problem. I’ve been treating “coming up with the new business model” as The Answer. As a static entity, a problem-solver, a thing that I can (and must) get right and then everything else will just happen. When all a business model is is a structure within which you do stuff. It’s not what’s going to make everything easy, and actually, in all the different iterations where I have started with the business model, it’s made things harder.
So I think this is where I turn next on this journey. I know what I wanted out of the rock, out of the organised and slick style of business, and I am packing up that safety and boundaried-ness, and I am hiking up in the hard place. I am, for the first time, allowing myself to lean (almost) fully into the chaos. I am going to do things I feel excitement and energy around, and (try to) not worry about whether they make sense or whether they therefore mean something about my business. I’m leaning into fun, into expression, into chaos – and hopefully, into magic.
