The walls of the room
First, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who wrote in about our latest text, and to everyone who subscribed in response to it. I never plan which text will be paywalled, and it feels a little weird to paywall the thing that is entirely about financial stuff, but them’s the breaks.
Things are hard out there right now! About half of my friends are fundraising just to survive. Most people don’t have jobs; many don’t want jobs. People keep getting the stupid virus. In the pantheon of possible problems, my feeling burnout & heartbreak while my business is in financial free-fall is not bad. My body is safe & healthy; I’m still eating good food; I have shelter. This is more than I can say for the literal majority of people I know. I’m deeply grateful to be alive and a force for good in my community.
So I have five months of runway, about two hours of real work obligation a week, and a lot of plans. I’m sitting down to a blank page and figuring out what this all is. I’m taking stock of what I’ve written over the past 15 years and trying to understand how people respond to my work. I often don’t work with enough critical distance to get a clear sense of how I am helping. I definitely don’t receive enough verbal validation from anyone to understand what I should be doing more of.
At a very high level, I am thinking about what I’ve become in the past two years, wondering what really nourishes me and can help others, and how I can work going forward. I have, perhaps unshockingly, undergone massive personal transformation since 2020, from truly staggering quantities of loss to a strong redefinition of what it is to even show up in remote work.
Ultimately, we’re all interconnected, and so at its purest I view one’s work practice as an opportunity to fit into the human experiment in a way that we all mutually value. This involves accountability (I have to make something others value) as well as inner reflection (I should do stuff I like). The Venn overlap is, ideally, Draft at any given point.
We have done this sort of self-examination thrice before. We did it when I founded Draft at the beginning of 2012, when I launched Draft Revise in 2013, and when we repositioned towards serving online stores in 2016. I think it’s okay – and, given that we’re in the tech industry, entirely healthy to shut the whole thing down every so often and restructure. It’s the opposite of a bugfix release. Sometimes you need a new architecture. Most people don’t work more than a couple of years at any one job in the tech industry, anyway. The only thing that connects my 2012 work and now is the business I’ve built for myself.
Plus, I can become a victim of my own habits. I agree to a framework for myself, something that can guide my days, and I follow that more or less blindly for months at a time. I do this to create work for my membership community, to write text, to help my clients. I do almost all of this during specific times of the day. In short, I come up with a room I can psychically live in, and then I psychically decorate it, and sometimes I invite pals like you into the room and show you around. The room has walls. Walls mean limitation, yes, but also structure. The whole thing should make legible sense, and it should be re-evaluated in a fractal sense, with the overall re-examination continuously repeating at all levels of the creative practice.
So, I am this close to setting the whole stupid room on fire and starting over. Gut rehab. I looked around one day and decided that none of this was enough, none of this was helping people or me, and gosh, why force it? And then I got fired by the source of 85% of Draft’s revenue and threw up my hands, ragestroked for two weeks, and now here we are.
Having a “whale” client is a classic blunder in consulting, yes, but I’ve also tried and failed to hire more clients for the past two years. This is a structural, systemic problem with the business. The only reason you know about it now is because the one thread connecting me to the old practice finally snapped.
So with all of that in mind, I’m trying to find more structurally nourishing pastures. Here are some things I’ve realized thus far:
- I have moved too far away from teaching. This is truly hilarious to say when I’m halfway through writing my fourth book, but it’s the honest truth. I suspect any reorganization of Draft will focus significantly more on new public work around teaching value-based design to others.
- I like working in the background. Despite literally two decades of precedent, I have never felt terribly comfortable being a public person. I like working in the margins, helping others help others.
- I am growing tired of the masculinity problems in my role in ecommerce. Yes, there are non-dudes in ecommerce, but the vast majority of people who value the kind of work we do are bean-countery dudes who think their stores are some sort of video game. I have also had a handful of profoundly transformational experiences over the past couple of years that have made my own feminist allyship incompatible with the values of the people I have come to serve. Tech is a sausage festival, yes, but there are definitely worse-off parts of it than others. I should not have to exist in professional spaces where people come to be shocked that I’m non-binary, voted for Bernie in the primary, or find cryptocurrency to be distasteful. I also should not have to exist in professional spaces where growth hacker bros get more centered than those who know that value-based design is slow, patient work.
None of this is particularly helpful in terms of what I should do, but it pours a new foundation and puts up some superstructure. You need all of that before you build your walls. I know what comes next.