I can make almost anything make sense.
Give me a business idea and my brain will immediately start building the case for it. I’ll find the relevant experience, connect the dots, spot the commercial opportunity and probably start thinking about the positioning before I’ve decided whether I even want to do it. 😂
For most of my career, that instinct served me extremely well. Give me a problem and I would work out how to make it work.
It became considerably less useful when the problem I was trying to solve was my own future.
Consulting? I could make the case. Advisory work? Absolutely. Building something around my leadership experience? Plenty of evidence for that too.
After thirty years of working, I wasn’t short of credible options. I was dangerously good at making each of them sound like the right one.
And that’s where I think experience can play a trick on us. We assume that because we can build a convincing case for something, we’ve found a good reason to choose it.
We haven’t.
Being Able to Make It Work Is the Problem
An idea appears and something rather impressive happens. Within minutes, the experienced brain starts assembling the evidence. I’ve done something similar before. People already ask me about this. I know the industry. There must be a market for it. I could see how the offer would work.
Before long, a possibility has acquired a business model and we’re three Google searches away from checking whether the domain is available. 😂
This is especially tempting when you don’t yet know exactly what you want. A sensible option feels much better than an unanswered question, and we’re much more comfortable working out how to execute something than sitting with uncertainty.
But Could I make this work? and Do I want to make this mine? are not variations of the same question.
The first plays directly to everything we’ve spent decades learning to do. Solve the problem. Assess the opportunity. Find a route through. Make the pieces fit.
The second asks something much less familiar.
Do I actually want this?
The more capable you are of making an idea work, the less useful “Could I make this work?” becomes as a filter.
That’s a distinction I wish I’d understood much earlier.
A Good Argument Can Hide a Bad Decision
I noticed this in my own thinking. Whenever I considered a possible direction, I could almost immediately find the reasons it made sense. My experience supported it. I had credibility. I could see the market. I understood how I might position it.
Before long, I wasn’t exploring the idea anymore. I was defending it.
That’s a subtle shift, but an important one. Once we start defending an idea, we naturally notice the evidence in its favour. The fact that people already ask us for something becomes validation. The years we’ve spent doing it become proof. The fact that we could probably earn good money from it makes the argument even stronger.
None of that makes the evidence wrong. It simply means we’re answering one question very convincingly while potentially ignoring another.
Is this a real opportunity?
And:
Do I want this opportunity?
I’ve become much more interested in keeping those two questions separate.
Because a commercially sound idea can still be a terrible answer to what you want your work to become.
If It Works, You Get More of It
This may be the simplest test I’ve found.
When we evaluate an idea, we naturally imagine it working. Clients arrive. Revenue grows. The business becomes established.
Lovely.
But success is not only more money. If the business works, you also get more of the work it creates. More of those clients. More of those conversations. More of that particular problem to solve. More of whatever delivery model you’ve chosen. More of the responsibilities that come attached to it.
Success doesn’t remove the parts you don’t particularly want. It scales them too.
So instead of only asking Could this work?, I’ve started asking:
If this works, do I want more of what it creates?
Not just the revenue. The Tuesday afternoon.
What am I actually doing at 2.30 when this business is successful? Who am I talking to? What problem am I solving for the fiftieth time? What has filled my calendar? What am I now responsible for?
That question has a rather efficient way of making some excellent business ideas considerably less attractive.
And I like that.
I’d rather discover it while the business is still an idea.
Someone Will Probably Pay You to Repeat Yourself
There is another complication when you have a long career behind you. The market already knows how to value some of what you do.
If you’ve spent twenty years becoming very good at something, there is a reasonable chance somebody will pay you to continue doing it. Sometimes extremely well.
That is useful information.
It is not an instruction.
The market can tell you that an opportunity exists. It cannot tell you whether you want the life attached to it.
And this is where I think accomplished women can be particularly vulnerable. We have spent a long time being useful. We know the satisfaction of being good at something, being relied upon and being well paid for it.
When all three are present, walking away from an opportunity can look irrational.
But perhaps the opportunity doesn’t need a reason for us to say no. Perhaps it simply doesn’t get an automatic yes because we’re qualified for it.
Now Remove Your CV From the Argument
There is a question I keep coming back to when an idea looks particularly sensible:
If I couldn’t use my CV to justify this, would I still be interested in it?
Take away the title for a moment. Take away the years of experience, the credibility and the reassuring fact that you’ve done something similar before.
What’s left?
Maybe there’s still a problem you’re genuinely fascinated by. People you want to work with. A way of working you want more of. Something you’ve been quietly curious about for years.
Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.
But perhaps the idea becomes strangely flat without the evidence of how qualified you are to do it.
That’s useful too.
I’m not suggesting we throw thirty years of experience out of the window. That would be a rather spectacular waste of thirty years.
I want mine with me.
I just don’t want my past to win the argument simply because it has more evidence. It gets a seat at the table. It doesn’t get every vote.
Stop Defending the Idea
This has changed the way I look at possibilities.
Before I start working out how to build something, I want to see what happens when I stop trying to convince myself that it’s sensible.
Am I drawn to this, or am I simply very good at explaining why I should be? Would I still want it if nobody was impressed by it? If it became successful, would I want more of the work that success created?
And perhaps most importantly, does the idea become more interesting when I question it, or does it need me to keep defending it?
I don’t expect those questions to produce instant certainty. In fact, they can make things considerably messier for a while.
That’s fine.
A possibility doesn’t need to become a decision immediately. It can become a conversation. A small offer. A piece of work. Something you test with an actual person rather than continuing the argument inside your own head.
Because eventually, an idea needs evidence that you didn’t manufacture yourself.
You Don’t Have to Win the Argument
I think many of us approach what comes next as though we’re standing in front of an invisible board waiting to have our proposal approved. We want the story to make sense. We want to explain why our experience qualifies us, why the move is rational and why the numbers could work.
Perhaps that’s partly because, after decades of making responsible decisions, I want this can feel like surprisingly flimsy evidence.
So we build a stronger case.
But this isn’t a board meeting.
You don’t have to win the argument for your own future. You do have to examine it properly.
There should be evidence. If you’re building a business, there should eventually be a market. The idea needs to survive contact with people other than you.
But somewhere underneath all of that, there also has to be something you haven’t reasoned yourself into wanting. Something that is still there when you stop making the case for it.
And if you’re thinking, Fine, but how exactly do I separate what I genuinely want from the twenty perfectly sensible things I could do?, that is precisely the problem I found myself trying to solve.
I had plenty of experience. Plenty of possible directions. And, as we’ve established, absolutely no shortage of arguments for why any one of them could work. 😂
What I needed was a way to get underneath the obvious answers. To look at what I’d accumulated, notice the patterns I’d stopped seeing, separate what I was good at from what I wanted to keep doing, and begin testing what might actually be worth taking further.
Eventually, that work became The Second Act Blueprint.
I created it for the woman who knows there is something else she wants to do, has enough experience to come up with twenty perfectly sensible possibilities, and needs a way to work out which ones are actually hers.
It’s not going to hand you the answer. I don’t believe a workbook, coach or clever business framework can do that.
But it will help you stop arguing for every sensible possibility long enough to hear what else is there.
The Second Act Blueprint is $59. If you’ve recognised yourself anywhere in this article, I’d start here.
