The answer that’s been staring you in the face the whole time

“Big boss man, can't you hear me when I call? Well, you ain't so big, you just tall, that's all.” - Dixon/Smith (Image by Mystic Art Design)

I thought I was starting an online school.

It seemed a logical pivot. In the fall of 2018 it began to occur to me that my sources of income consisted solely of two schools serving families in the same geographic area.

What if something were to happen in Atlanta to disrupt the education industry?

I never could have predicted that the worldwide educational system would be violently disrupted just over a year later. But that first pivot, to online education, did prove useful — just not in the way that I had thought. I didn’t realize that I’d be bringing the entire student body of both of my schools online in the spring of 2020. It was good that I had a head start.

But by that time, I had something else going: my work with business owners. That happened more or less by accident, since I wasn’t actively looking for it. But when people started approaching me for help, I said yes. And this happened far more easily and swiftly than the online school.

And then I thought that I had to come up with something big. Some kind of offer. I couldn’t just help the people who were coming to me. And I couldn’t just do the things they were asking for: I had to go forth and hang out my shingle with intention. I had to have a thing. A specific thing. For a specific type of person.

Cool, so then I spent two years trying to come up with that thing, following the advice of people who told me to do that.

And finally, this summer, I realized that my thing is, in fact, that I help the people who are coming to me with the things they are asking for.

Yeah, I’ve refined it a bit. But mostly, I’m doing exactly the thing that I started doing three years ago.

I certainly don’t need an online school. But I also don’t need a consulting practice dedicated to solving a specific business problem. I don’t need a bunch of productized services. I don’t need to find “big fish” clients with big teams and big, valuable problems.

I can just do what I’m already doing. I can go with the answer that’s been staring me in the face the whole time. And so can you.

It seems too easy. It seems too obvious. It seems like a way of hiding from the hard work. But looking past the easy answer to the elusive, supposedly more valuable hard one can cost literally years.

Whatever the easy and obvious solution to your problem is, it doesn’t have to be permanent.

But while you refine the idea for the book, you can write a book.

Even as you save up for your dream kitchen renovation, you can replace the broken dishwasher.

Instead of wasting hours searching for the vacation home of your dreams, you can book a rental for a week.

And instead of holding out for the perfect business concept, you can start serving customers right away, today, who need your help.

It’s hard to believe that I bought into the idea that what I already had wasn’t good enough. I thought that there was something wrong with me that I wasn’t doing the hard work — that I wasn’t reaching out to fifty people on LinkedIn the way was being instructed to. I thought I needed to build a business that could scale.

Well, maybe someday I will. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying earning a living doing something I truly enjoy. That is enough for right now — and it may be enough for forever. I’m open.

In the end, the business opportunity that would change my life was invisible to me. I’m so glad that my first few clients saw something in me and were bold enough to reach out. I was so close to it that I really couldn’t see it.

Like the protagonist of any one of a number of epic stories, I had what I was seeking all along. Is it possible that you do, too?