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My Year of Being Deliberate (And How My Fight to Take Control Ended)
It turns out entropy has other ideas
I had chosen ‘deliberate’ as my guiding word for 2024. This lodestar was to provide the light, like a lantern in a coal mine. It would show me the way.
But why deliberate?
After reflecting on 2023, I realized I was too reactionary. Too quick to jump from one shiny new opportunity to another. My gambit was to offset this fluidity with more purpose.
If a single word could help me live with more control, purpose, and better outcomes, ‘deliberate’ was that word.
But as I was to discover, being deliberate was much harder than I realized.
I quickly realized I had far less control than I needed to be deliberate. I forgot I wasn’t the only fish in the goldfish tank. In truth, I was far from alone. I was one of the shoals, each of us harboring a stubborn belief that we could swim in any direction we chose.
Collisions in a small tank are inevitable.
In life, we know this as entropy…
“Your blog isn’t working”
For two years, I poured my heart into a blog designed to help people improve their decision-making. The visitor numbers grew steadily, but growth didn’t translate to sustainability. Despite my optimism, I couldn’t bridge the gap between audience and revenue.
My newsletter grew, but potential monetization routes — whether through advertising, digital products, or consulting — remained frustratingly theoretical. My wife’s pragmatic perspective cut through my entrepreneurial dreams: I was investing significant time and resources into a concept that wasn’t converting.
In June, just shy of three years of effort, I made the painful decision to close the blog. Letting go felt like abandoning a dream, but it was necessary.
From failure comes opportunity.
With time, I could deliberately reflect on what went wrong. Getting off the treadmill of production allowed me to see what wasn’t working.
The list was long…
