🌱 Two minutes and a piece of paper

For a good stretch of years, every time something did not work I went and bought the next thing. Another course, another system, another set of steps somebody swore by. I did not need complicated software. I did not need paid ads. I did not need twelve different tools. I just did not know that yet, so I kept buying the complicated version instead.

By the end of this, you will:

Here is a way to look at your year that I find clarifying, and slightly uncomfortable.

Whatever you have tried online, the part that counts is the short list of things you have done more than once. Everything else was a first attempt. A first attempt has real value. It is how you find out whether a thing suits you. But it is not a business, and it is not a skill yet. It is information.

In my experience, people who feel stuck online do not have too few ideas. They have a long list of first attempts and a very short list of second ones.

There is a finding on this that surprised me. Kiplinger reports that people launching a business at fifty are twice as likely to succeed as their thirty-year-old counterparts, and that the probability of being solidly profitable rises further with age after that.

I want to be careful with that number, because it is the sort of thing that gets waved around. It is a finding about people starting businesses in general, not a forecast about you, and not about anything you might start online. It does not say the money is easy, or fast, or likely for any one person.

What I think it points at is this. The advantage of age is not energy, and it is certainly not appetite for risk. You have already done a great many things more than once, in work and in life. So you know the difference between a thing that is hard at first and a thing that is wrong for you.

That is judgment, and it is the one thing that cannot be bought as a course.

Here is a small thing to do first, so that what follows has something to work on. Two minutes with a piece of paper.

That circled list is what you actually have. If it is empty, that is genuinely fine and quite common. It means this year was for looking, and looking is a legitimate stage.

If something is circled, the useful question is not "what should I add?" It is "what is the smallest improvement I could make to this same thing next time?" A second pass at something that already half works usually beats a first pass at something new. That has been true for me, and for most people I have watched try.

I am not going to pretend about the money, so let me be plain.

Kiplinger also says that income from this kind of thing is inconsistent, and that if you actually need the money to cover bills, a steady part-time job is the more sensible choice. I would rather tell you that than let you find out on your own. Nothing here is a promise, and I do not need you to believe otherwise.

What repetition buys you is not a faster payday. It is something that is still there next time you sit down.

So here is the one thing I am asking of you today, and it is the only thing.

Read Small tweaks beat starting over →

That issue went out three weeks ago, and it is about exactly what to do with whatever you circled. I am aware of the irony in pointing you at more reading on a day when the argument is to stop adding things. The difference is that this is not a new thing to take on. It is the same list you just made, with a way to work on it.

If you read it when it went out, reading it again with your circled list in front of you is a different experience. That is rather the point of today.

Reply with one number if you feel like it: how many things you circled. A zero this year is a perfectly reasonable place to be standing.

See You at the Bank 💰
Bob

A short story from my place about Bradley, ice cubes, and what actually holds a day together.