Focus on what will still be true ten years from now.
You may only ever know the next step.
Okay. That’s not precisely true. If you want to publish a book, you can predict with accuracy the path from research to query letters to agents to proposals to negotiations to a sale. Then, the actual writing begins — at least, most of it.
Projects may follow a logical sequence of steps, but our lives often don’t.
We have no blueprint for major decisions that shape and define our lives. Chasing certainty in life is like chasing a red fox through briars.
- Should you walk down the aisle with this flawed human? Or should you find someone who is a better fit? Can you find someone else?
- Should you put in your two-week notice at a comfortable job because you spend every weekend dreading Monday? Or should you get over yourself and make the best of it?
- Should you start a new business venture when what you don’t know — sifted and measured — far outweighs what you do?
Ten months from now, you may wake up from the daydream, realize that full-time freelancing was a monumental mistake, and, with your tail between your legs, ring up your old boss and beg to get your old job back.
Job security is a mirage. The only people with job security are undertakers.
And certainty about the future is suspect too. Fear and anxiety distort one’s vision. You are looking through a telescope while a desperate man holds a knife to your throat. He says, “Tell me exactly what you see. Get it right, or you die.”
The problem is, our fear-riddled, anxiety-ridden perceptions are always wrong. Anxiety squeezes our minds until they produce only a single dire prediction: “Things will never get any better.”
Many good things that I never anticipated have happened, and most of the bad things I thought would happen never did.
That truth calls to mind Andrew Carnegie’s wry observation from “An American Four-in-Hand in Britain”: “I have been surrounded by troubles all my life long, but there is a curious thing about them — nine-tenths of them never happened.”
When you stop worrying about what could go wrong, you have more mental energy to invent, build, and innovate.
The question then becomes, “What should I build?” Or, for you naturalists, “Which acorn should I plant?”
I almost wrote the wrong book. I was all set to stitch together a manuscript from several hundred blog posts about freelancing.
However, the book’s loose concept — a business blueprint for people figuring out how to thrive in the new, post-2007 economy — wasn’t turning me on. I knew a primer on freelancing could help a lot of people, but that book has been done so many times before.
Did I need to buckle down or go an entirely different direction?
A single thought from Jeff Bezos brought clarity: Focus on what will still be true ten years from now. Now, I’m working on a book that will be relevant to freelancers even after all of the major platforms evolve or disappear.
Though I never could track down the original quote, I did find a much meatier excerpt from a Fireside Chat Bezos had with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels back in 2012 at re:Invent:
“I very frequently get the question, ‘What’s going to change in the next ten years?’ And that is an interesting question. It’s a very common one. I almost never get the question, ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two because you can build business strategy around the things that are stable in time…. In our retail business we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery. They want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up to me and says, ‘Jeff, I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher. Or, ‘I love Amazon. I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.’ Impossible. The effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying dividends for our customers ten years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long-term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
Do yourself a favor, and earmark that question: “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?
As you think through career transitions and knotty business challenges, that question can serve as guard rails.
- What about you will be the same in ten years? (Hint: What was true about you a decade ago?)
- What about business and commerce will be the same because human beings will still have the same basic needs and desires?
Disruptive technologies may change how we communicate and buy stuff, but ironically, disruption itself will remain a constant. You can count on change.
At the age of twenty-five, I wanted to publish books. At the age of thirty-five, I want to publish books. I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that at forty-five I will want to write and publish books.
But these days, I am more than a writer. At its most basic writing is content and thought leadership.
Every brand can be a publisher. The savants who master the medium, build a platform, and grow an audience will receive the most attention — not the subject matter experts who have accumulated decades of experts.
Because we disseminate and consume content in dozens of ways, writers must adapt or die. Writers must publish in new languages, including video, podcasting, course creation, product development, marketing strategy, sales, and personal branding.
Ten years from now, that will still be true.
Amazon launched in 1994 during the earliest days of the Internet. Jeff Bezos struggled to raise $1,000,000 in startup capital from investors who didn’t even know what the Internet was, let alone that it was “the future” and that it would irrevocably change how people make purchases.
Bezos pitched sixty people, and twenty-two of them gave him $50,000 each.
You don’t survive for twenty-three years and grow to $135.99 billion in gross revenue with a complete map, detailing every turn.
You don’t go from 0 to 117,300 employees by having all the answers all the time.
You go from zero to one and grow from one to one billion by asking the right questions.
If you’re in the middle of a transition or you’re stuck mid-project without a clear vision for where to take it, don’t pursue certainty in the near-term. Instead, try thinking long-term, ten years out:
“What’s not going to change in the next ten years?
Aim your life, projects, and business ventures at those immutable truths, habits, needs, and desires. Perhaps the very next step will then become crystal clear.
You may find you already have the fox by the tail.
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If you’re wanting to level up your freelance business, then this course is for you. Click on this link to share your name and email address, and I’ll be sure you get first right of refusal.
