This week was meant to be about my ongoing outreach efforts, but I instead want to cover mindset management, since it's something anyone taking the non-traditional route will need, and is something I should have focussed on much sooner. Get this right, and that sense of grand adventure that you started out with will stay with you most days. Get it wrong, and you might find yourself like I am, questioning your own abilities despite overwhelming evidence on the contrary. Lets get into it.
Working for yourself, whether that's as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, freelancer, or any other variation, means that your motivation is intrinsic rather than extrinsic. There is nobody between you and your source of income, which means you are the only one accountable when thing go wrong (or go well). This also means that there is no reason other than your own motivation to do things. If you spend an entire morning taking no action towards generating more income, then it's not a surprise that nothing will happen.
Now, if you've played your cards right that's not the end of the world, but it does mean that you're effectively in debt to your future self - future you will need to spend one more day doing the daily grind that you could have just done yourself.
One other thing to be aware of is that some tasks require your daily attention. Things like posting on social media, engaging in different communities online, etc, like watering plants. If for whatever reason you are unable to create posts/reply to others/engage meaningfully, then you can be disproportionately punished (algorithmically) in comparison to your earlier engagement. For example, many in the 'growth marketing' community that I've seen share stories of posting consistently for say 30 days and then taking a three day break, only to restart their posting strategy to crickets as their account has lost favour to the algorithm gods.
This type of setback can be demoralizing, but it's also important to remember that growth at all costs isn't the goal. Sustainable growth in the context of the life you choose to lead, is the goal.
Another strange phenomenon you may experience is the lack of feedback on your work affecting your mindset. In the corporate world and in (late stage) academia, if you produce something great then people will notice. In a previous role I wrote (with substantial help from experts in the firm), a user guide for a core technology. Not to toot my own horn but outside of my doctoral thesis this was one of the best pieces of writing I'd ever produced. To my surprise, almost every week after it was published someone would comment that it helped them or that it was useful in their work, which was naturally a great motivator.
Fast forward to now, and there is no feedback. My current focus is learning and solving problems for myself, which understandably nobody really cares about. As I'm writing this I'm realizing it was never about the recognition. It was about doing something cool and then sharing it. So as much as this is a newsletter for you about what I'm doing, it can also be a reminder to myself: just do something cool.
The final thing I wanted to mention about managing ones mindset is understanding the role that emotion plays in this whole adventure. Many of you reading know me personally, and will also know that I am not a very emotional person. However, I'm not fully a robot either, and these feelings about missing daily targets, typing into the void, and general feelings of technical inadequacy are based in emotion, not logic, but knowing that doesn't help.
For example, I know that in a group of around 100 of the best engineers in London, I'm probably somewhere around the middle in terms of my technical ability. But the middle of the top is a great spot to be! Yet I find myself configuring infrastructure or writing code and feeling like it's not enough or that it's going to break, despite years working on software which explicitly should not break for 9+ hours a day. Add to this that I'm yet to identify a core 'product' to offer the world and it's no wonder that the 'grand adventure' is starting to feel like just another treadmill.
I'm not sure where to go from here, but writing this all out has been useful so thank you for indulging me if you've read this far. This coming week I'll be continuing the search for problems to solve, learning more tech tools on the road to revenue, and taking a more serious dip into the world of AI. If any of these feelings resonate with you in or out of corporate employment then feel free to let me know - but then again, what feedback could I give that you couldn't give yourself 😉
Thanks, all the best, and see you next week!
Oliver
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