I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
A useful business model has a few attributes:
- It gets easier over time. Past success makes future success more likely.
- It’s a welcome contribution to the lives and projects of the people who are paying (in time or money) for the work.
- It’s resilient. When the world changes, the model adjusts and persists or even thrives.
The tools of the Internet have encouraged people to try to turn hobbies into jobs. We invest our heart and soul into a podcast or a movement, and hope that one day, it’ll turn into a business. The journey to a business model is an investment, it doesn’t work the first day. We find a strategy, and then spend time and money to go from an idea to a generative, persistent and scalable engine of growth.
While it doesn’t work the first day, it needs to work eventually. Time is the unseen driver of strategy.
Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community, & Life
There are a lot of interesting ideas smashed into that passage. I suppose Godin can get away with that as he was a bestselling author before he published this particular book I’m quoting from.
Or maybe the lesson is that a nonfiction book doesn’t have to be completely revised and perfected to make a difference to someone? Maybe I can write in such a winding, dense way and still help people find romance at midlife?
Is the solution to turn a hobby into a job? I couldn’t tell from that first quote. But Godin thinks not:
Pundits tell us to do what we’re passionate about and the work will take care of itself.
This is a brittle strategy. Some people get paid for their hobbies, but not many.
The alternative is to decide to be passionate about what you do.
The business model is our job. It’s the way we create value for others and get compensated for it–the work might be the change we seek to make, but our job is to be able to get paid to commit to it regularly. The business model is built on the traction of creating change. And change requires tension, scarcity and forward motion.
I practice my writing hobby here on my blog. I write here because I love to do so each morning when I get up. I write here to process what’s going on in my life and what I’m reading and learning.
My writing that has a business model is indie publishing and indie authorship sharing a practical philosophy of midlife based on recklessness, first about romance and love, later reinvention, and even later other topics to include retirement, money, and family relationships.
Godin writes, “When we do our work as a professional, we show up to solve a problem for people who know they have a problem and who have the means to pay to solve it.”
You do a hobby for yourself; you run a business for other people.
In writing and then marketing my first book about midlife, I’m showing up to solve this problem: some people arrive at midlife without the romance, love, and intimacy they crave. Using conventional dating advice makes things worse not better. It leads them to prioritize connections with people who look good on paper (or in a profile) rather than with people who will bring them emotional sustenance and personal growth. It tempts them to throw away potentially good relationships because “I don’t want to settle,” or “this person has shown red flags,” or “I don’t want to be with someone who is an avoidant.” It turns looking for romance into a commoditized shopping expedition that flattens real people out and makes them just a sum of their metrics plus how good their online photos look.
The difficult challenge I face right now is just getting the damn book written. It has been slow going. I haven’t figured out the voice to use in writing the book. I haven’t totally settled on a structure, though I have an idea of what I want to aim for, something like Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and also like this Godin book I’m reading right now. This Is Strategy has no chapters, just 297 mini-reflections on the topic of making better plans. I suppose Godin might have just put together a bunch of blog posts for it, and that’s not what I want to do. But I like how in reading it you don’t get lost in a dense and overly long chapter. So even though my book will have chapters, I’m also dividing the chapters up into individual bite-sized sections that, for the most part, don’t build on each other, just give various perspectives on the chapter topic. That way you can dip in at any time and stop out at any time, feeling like you got some bit of perspective or epiphany.
I keep wishing I could bring the energy and flow I feel as I write here to my book manuscript, but I haven’t found the trick to that yet.