Midlife MavericksIt’s 10:47 on a Tuesday night, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, this newsletter isn’t written.
Normally it’s done weeks ahead, already chopped into a month of posts. Tonight it’s a blank page and me, mildly annoyed at myself, deciding I’m not going to miss the rep.
So you’re getting the honest version instead of the polished one I meant to send. A few decisions I’ve made this past month about where my business goes next, and the one idea underneath all of them that matters more than any tactic I could hand you.
A couple of weeks ago I sat down with Justin Welsh for dinner, and that night has had a profound impact on me. I wrote about it at the time, here. I’d been circling a 1:1 coaching program, properly considering it, real money and real time. And somewhere in all that thinking about where I want to spend the next year, I noticed the thing I’d been avoiding. I’m full. Properly full, the kind no calendar reshuffle fixes.
Quote of the Week
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.
Steve Jobs
The thing I didn’t see coming
A few months ago I started writing properly on LinkedIn and Substack. I expected very little. It has gone better than almost anything I planned on purpose.
And that did something inconvenient. It made me look hard at everything else I was pouring hours into. Threads, for one. A lot of you read me there, and I mean it when I say thank you. But when I trace where the real opportunities are coming from, it’s LinkedIn. The platform I almost didn’t bother with.
You’ve probably done a version of this. Poured months into the channel everyone swore was the one, while the thing actually bringing you work sat in the corner getting none of your attention. We stay loyal to our effort long after the results have wandered off somewhere else. It took an accident, something going well that I hadn’t planned for, to make me look at the numbers honestly.
What I said no to, for now
The coaching program I wanted to invest in is on hold until later in the year. The coaching is good. It just collided with something that had a clock on it. Nathan May runs a newsletter cohort called The Newsletter Accelerator, and it was open now, not again. That program will still be there in three months. The cohort wouldn’t. So I chose.
I could have squeezed the coaching in too. I’m good at squeezing things in. Most of us here are, it’s how we got the corner office in the first place. That instinct is exactly what ends in a 10:47pm blank page and a woman wondering when she last had a free Sunday.
That’s the part nobody warns you about when you work for yourself. Good versus bad is easy. The calls that wreck you are good versus good, when you want both and can’t have both without quietly ruining yourself to try.
The other yes was podcasts, which sit a long way outside my comfort zone. I set a target in January to do five this year. I’m well past that and it’s still July. I keep saying yes because a podcast is the gift that keeps giving, as I always tell people. You record it once. Someone finds it four months later, hears how you actually think, and comes back ready to talk. It works while I sleep, in a way a post scrolling past at 8am never does. It has quietly become one of the best sources of the right people finding me.
Capacity is the whole game
The thing I care about most, and the reason all of this hangs together, is capacity.
There’s a Buffett idea I keep coming back to: dry powder. He sits on a mountain of cash on purpose, so that when a ridiculous opportunity shows up at a ridiculous price, he can move on it while everyone else is fully invested and stuck. Same logic runs through your time. If you’re full, you have no dry powder.
And this year I’ve clocked something uncomfortable: the writing, the visibility, all of it is starting to put ridiculous opportunities in front of me. Rooms I didn’t expect to be in. Conversations I couldn’t have engineered. The version of me that’s already committed to everything can’t take a single one of them.
Buffett again, on how he guards that room:
The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.
Warren Buffett
So, you cannot be all things to all people. I know that reads like a fridge magnet, so let me say it the way I mean it. Every yes you’re holding onto out of guilt or habit is starving the two or three things that are working, and the good thing that hasn’t shown up yet. Backing what works is the easy part. The brave part is cutting what doesn’t, while it still looks perfectly respectable, before it flattens you.
Then there’s the plain physical fact of it. I cannot speak at events and be on podcasts and write more and serve my clients properly and keep all my current commitments alive without losing my marbles, or my health, and at 49 I’m paying closer attention to that bill than I used to. Something has to give. So I’m choosing what, on purpose, before my body chooses for me.
I talked this through with Melanie Goodman yesterday, thinking about where my institutional newsletter goes next, and we arrived at the same place. Put more behind the things earning their keep. Quietly retire the rest. Retire it, don’t call it a failure. Something you stop because it stopped earning its place is a decision you made. Something you cling to until it collapses on top of you is just an accident with a longer runway.
I know why you don’t. Dropping something feels like admitting you couldn’t carry it. Maybe it’s a channel you spent a year building. Or the plan you announced out loud to people whose opinion you can still feel in your chest. Keeping every plate spinning looks like competence. Most of the time it’s fear with a full calendar.
This week, don’t add anything. That’s the entire assignment.
Look at everything you’re doing right now to grow your business or your career, and find the one thing quietly draining you while giving almost nothing back. You already know what it is. You thought of it before you finished reading this sentence.
Then tell me. What’s the thing you already pictured, what’s really stopping you from putting it down, and what would you finally have room to say yes to once it’s gone? Hit reply, I read every single one.
See you Wednesday,
C
