The two tracks in my mind

There seem to be two tracks in my mind.

Both pertain to running Pocket Revolutions and having a stable income.

One track pertains to what I want to be doing. Let's call this the Fuzzy Ideal. It has to do with doing a lot intellectual work. Synthesizing new ideas and sharing them. I imagine making money by getting paid consulting gigs in combination with some money from my indie products. Is that a pipe dream? I don't know, neither of those sources exist right now.

The coaching sessions I did with indie hackers recently goes in this direction. So does giving the online Wardley mapping workshop I did for a local meetup. So does figuring out Twitter and reading up on note taking.

It's not clear how I'm going to make money on this track, but I've got an intuition that it's ultimately the right track for me.

The other track is what makes sense on paper. It's what others expect of me. Let's call it the Swiss track.

My business partner probably sees me as someone that makes apps and does digitalization. And there are a lot of companies that probabl need help with the latter right now. The company name, Pocket Revolutions, on the other hand, sounds like a company that makes apps.

My girlfriend is also thinking in a similar direction. She is thinking in terms of me getting out of the office and talking to people. People like Axova's CEO that landed me the Axova app project. Swiss business owners.

This reminds me of the conversation I had on a mastermind call recently. We had a guest expert on and the guy said that sometimes it makes sense to think of yourself as two versions. You've got this version of yourself of who you want to be, but sometimes you've got to put that aside for the moment and work on who you are here and now.

Maybe you want an internet business and you want to be known for X, but right now you need to put in the effort and make something happen locally.

That advice would point to investing in the Swiss track.

Where is the problem? Where is the tension?

The problem is that the second track, the Swiss track, doesn't really resonate with me.

That statement, however, raises suspicions with me.

Does it not resonate because it's uncomfortable? It involves talking to people in real life and probably speaking German. Those are things I typically don't do as someone that works behind his computer. Those are things that are, however slightly, outside my comfort zone.

On the one hand my mind tells me it's good to avoid those things because they are not my strengths, and you should invest in your strengths.

On the other hand my mind knows that it's often by pushing through the difficult things, by seeking out the edge of your comfort zone, that you truly learn and grow.

I said a couple of days ago to my girlfriend that this Swiss track should be my focus. But then yesterday I spent 4 hours reading up on Zettelkasten and Andy Matuschok's note taking philosophy. In doing that I could not be further removed from this Swiss track.

I think, at least for the time being, it's worth investing on an all-in experiment on the Swiss track. At the least I'll be investing in a track that the people close to me think has the most potential for me. I'll also be pushing myself as there's a lot of discomfort there. Maybe it will offer insights that will help me find my way onto the main track.

Update: 30 minutes later

The above thoughts were heartfelt, but also a bit silly when put next to the previous post about focusing my efforts on status trackers (opens in a new tab).

Why, because a big reason why this strategy made so much sense was because it addressed the short-term (~the Swiss Track) with the long-term (~the Fuzzy Ideal).

It feels like I had this problem, found a good solution I could sink my teeth in, forgot about the solution and wrote a blog post about the initial problem again.

For my own future reference, here is the key insight once again.

I need to find new clients and make money short-term. To do this I will showcase what I've done with Axova. This is best described as a status tracker for a service provider, and this can be seen as a digitalization strategy. I might find companies that are interested in this directly (which makes me appear as the expert) or interested in digitalization more broadly (which still gives me something behind my name). This is my strategy for the Swiss track.

The Fuzzy Ideal track is longer term, but my Swiss track lays the foundation for this. It could be that more service providers will be interested in keeping their customers in the loop and to offer transparency into their processes. This could start off as a play in the local market (Swiss track) but then later evolve into the international market as a productized service, or even an automated service (e.g. SaaS). This would put me in the position of inventing, driving forward a new SaaS product, which pretty much fits with the Fuzzy Ideal track.