I just feel I get tricked a lot. By myself. Mostly, I solve the wrong problem.
Or I get seduced by something, like a kiddo in a candy store.
Facebook or youtube stuff that looks interesting. Fashion, endless rows of clothes or moisturisers with the promise of younger skin. As if I was getting any younger.
Books, or stories. Truth tellers can be seducing in themselves, it’s as if being under an all protecting bell of knowledge. I feel safe in there, but in lasts very little. I get distracted.
Or by plans to do something, someday.
One day I will take the whole day just to figure out what I want.
It will never happen.
And if it does, you’ll have to confront, for the first 30 minutes at least, if you can endure that long, that only stupid cliches come to mind and there’s no clarity to speak of.
A coffee addict without the daily dose, rambling on for the magic button.
There isn’t one.
In the meantime, obviously, there’s no joy.
It’s just meaningless trajectories to consume, spend, conjure dreams of spending some more.
Wouldn’t it be nice to go to Cannes, buy expensive shoes and go on a yacht? It would. Sort of. But not much.
The adrenaline of something new, really new, the zero to one kind of new, will always beat that.
If you have the bug, that is.
If you don’t, then Cannes is it. Or whatever else is in the same industry as Cannes.
But if you’ve got it, if you are after something new, then nothing will appease. Not shoes, not moisturisers, not yachts.
Here’s what has a chance, or so I think: ideas and people that produce them. Nerds like you. Or me. Putting puzzles together with them. That does it.
Because sooner or later, something will pop. Most times it won’t. But you can take it. You don’t do it for the most times.
And you are fine doing it for the most times and not getting much out of it.
I mean you should allow for it. Plan for it. Plan for something you want bad enough so the frustration doesn’t wear you off and turn you bitter or worse, ready to go into the world mixer of me toos.
Because, you know, you may have to.
There are bills to pay and life is short etc. And you may have people depending on you, and that’s hard. Everyone understands that.
Except you, if you have the bug.
Deep down, you know that’s selling short. And you know it takes so much courage to not go against you. The boring kind, the one you have to materialise every day, when there’s no money for bills or there is, but you’d also like to go on vacation and how will that happen?
It’s not easy.
Mostly, if you had one wish, it was actually to solve the correct problem.
Not the one that brings the most money now, not the one that brings peace now, the one that’s THE problem, the real battle, that’s the one you want to pick.
Are you creating value? Are you also retaining it?
Or are you just wasting time and neurones creating something that gets sold, even in large quantities, at little profits?
That’s called living for yesterday. Or like there’s no tomorrow, because literally, there is no future to that. It’s called the slavery of consumption.
No spark. No future. The future will happen after you abandon all that and actually give it a go at creating something new.
If you have the bug. If you don’t, it’s fine, Cannes is nice. Especially in the summer, or so I remember. Occasionally it’s even glam.
But that’s not you and, hell, it’s definitely not me.
So what’s there to do?
I don’t have it, I have no formula. For things like these, the best you can hope for is principles and questions. And the people to bounce them at and play ball with.
Otherwise, you’re back on the wheel, building offerings and pitching around for clients. You may even get them. And that’s going to keep you arrested until you collide with something of purpose.
It could even come disguised in agony or catastrophe. Here’s a small one: the budgeting season’s coming and you have no new website.
That’s not what you should worry about.
“Do I create any real value?” is what should stop your game.
And until you have the answer to that, you can put off the offering and start answering.
Make it quick, though.
I can help.
Give me a call.