If you looked at my working life from the outside, you’d be forgiven for thinking I never quite settled on anything.
I’ve written copy for some of the biggest companies in the world, and I wrote the first book about web copywriting. For twenty years I’ve been writing a website about coffee for people who just want a decent cup without a lecture. And, more recently, a sort of novel about a five-thousand-year-old secret society that almost nobody has read. I run a small brand agency for specialty coffee roasters. I write a newsletter about creativity for amateurs and misfits. And another site about coffee. There’s a science fiction novella in progress. And that’s just the projects I’m willing to admit to in public.
If you’re a freelancer or a solo business owner, there’s a fair chance you have your own version of this list. Projects that don’t quite match what you’re “meant” to be focused on. The newsletter on a topic that feels like a bit of a distraction. The book in the drawer. The three ideas you’re excited about this month, which are not the three ideas you were excited about last month.
And maybe you carry the same low-grade worry I’ve carried for most of my career, which is that this scattered attention means something is wrong with you. That serious people pick a lane. That the experts are right when they tell you to niche down, find your one thing, build your focused personal brand, and stop wandering off.
I’ve heard that advice for decades. I’ve probably even given it, in weak moments. And I’ve never once managed to follow it.
Recently I sat down and asked the question directly, with the whole untidy pile of my working life in front of me. Is there a center to all this? Or have I genuinely just been scattering my attention for forty-five years, held together by nothing more than curiosity and deadlines?
The answer surprised me. Because when I laid the projects out side by side, there was a common thread running through everything.
About twenty-five years ago, when I started teaching companies how to write for the web, my whole approach came down to one idea: Take the customer’s point of view. Not the company’s point of view. Not the marketing department’s. But the customer’s. The person on the other side of the screen, who didn’t ask for your clever headline and just wants to know if you can help them.
And more than once, sitting across the table from a large corporate client, I said something that probably should have got me fired. I told them I wasn’t on their side. I was on the side of their customers.
When I built my coffee site, I didn’t write it for coffee experts. I wrote it for regular coffee drinkers, the people the specialty coffee world tends to talk over, or down to. No jargon, no snobbery. Just honest answers for someone standing in the supermarket aisle wondering what to buy.
At the time, each of these approaches felt like a tactic. A way of writing better copy, or building a more useful website. It’s only now, looking back across the whole span of it, that I can see it was never really a tactic at all. It was a loyalty.
In every project, in every genre, on every website, I kept taking the same side. The side of the person the message was aimed at. The reader. The visitor. The customer. The person without the title, the budget, or the credentials, who was being written at, sold to, or talked past.
Even the odd projects fit. That novel nobody read is a fictional history of powerful people shaping what everyone else believes, without ever showing their faces. I thought I was taking a holiday from my real work when I wrote it. I wasn’t. I was writing about the same fight from the other side of the battlefield.
It wasn’t like I was on some kind of crusade. Mostly it has meant arguing with clients about their homepages, and telling coffee drinkers the truth about expensive beans. But it was consistent. For forty-five years, without ever writing it down or even quite knowing I was doing it, I kept choosing the same side.
Which brings me to the part of this that’s actually about you.
If you’re scattered, and slightly uncomfortable about it, I’d like to gently suggest that the experts may have sold you the wrong worry. The question was never whether you have too many projects. The question is whether your projects have something in common that you haven’t named yet. In my experience, they almost always do, because they all came out of the same person. Your curiosity isn’t random. It keeps going back to the same well. You just haven’t stood far enough back to see the shape of it.
So here’s an exercise for you to try. Write down everything you’ve done, or started, or abandoned. All of it, including the embarrassing or weird projects. Then ask: in every one of these projects, who was I speaking for? Whose side was I taking? What was I defending, or fighting?
You may find, as I did, that the thing you’ve been apologizing for all these years was never a lack of focus. It was a body of work, assembling itself quietly while you weren’t watching, held together by a conviction so natural to you that you never even noticed it.
For what it’s worth, I finally wrote down my own unifying statement. It took forty-five years and a very long conversation to find.
I’m on the side of regular people. And I’m for fearless voices, spoken out loud.
That’s what the coffee site is doing. That’s what the client arguments were about. That’s what the strange novel was circling, and the newsletter for amateurs, and every awkward moment when I chose the reader over the person paying the invoice. One loyalty, wearing forty-five years of different clothes.
This doesn’t explain why I keep wandering off and starting new projects. But I can now see I have an interior compass, always directing me in the same direction.
You probably have a unifying statement that describes your own work.
Go and have a look. Keep digging until you find it. And when you have it, say it out loud.
