Building a lifestyle business

Recently I've been fascinated by how others work.

For the longest time I thought I had to be an operator, someone who is always full steam ahead taking action, talking to people and getting sh*t done.

Partly because I felt like I had something to prove and partly because that had delivered the mild success I've seen in my career so far.

But every time I did this two things would happen:

1. I'd come to resent what I'm working on
2. I'd spend a lot of time working on the wrong things

Over the last few months I've come to realise that I had my approach all wrong. I was trying to force something that didn't align with who I am or the life I want to live.

When I map out my ideal day it involves a lot of reading, thinking, building and focused work done in solitude, the complete opposite of being an operator – someone who thrives on working with others and always taking action.

Once I started to accept I'm not an operator I could focus on figuring out how I work best and tailor my work around that.

It became obvious that I need a couple projects to work on that have synergy, that way I'm able to keep things fresh and always have a slightly different challenge to work on.

Each project needs to be something I can focus on intensely for a period then come back to in a few days or weeks time and repeat.

So I started ideating what that would look like and I realised, yet again that what I was envisioning was the Full Stack Creator business model.

A business where you focus on code (building products and tools) and media (writing, creating videos etc). This type of business enables you to work in sprints, as code and media have little to no marginal cost of production – meaning that the amount of effort put into creating them will not change whether it reaches 10 or 10,000 people.

This realisation brought me back to the idea that ultimately businesses are a vehicle for change.

They enable you to change your life and your customers lives.

If you run your own business you might as well optimise for the lifestyle you want to live.

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