What I'm thinking about in 2024

Each year at around this time, I like to create a summary of everything I’m thinking about. It’s one of those rituals that provides a lot more value than you might initially expect. I’ve found that in the years I send this email, more of my plans, goals and dreams come to fruition.

In that sense, I suppose sending it out is an entirely selfish enterprise! I’ve also noticed, however, that in the years I’ve sent this email it’s been one of the most popular, most replied-to messages of the year, so I’m guessing there must be value in the process for you too.

I really appreciate you taking the time to read my musings. Let’s have a look at what I’m thinking about in 2024:

1. The Solo Pro

I love the freedom of being a solopreneur. I love the freedom of being my own boss. I also love the freedom of not being anyone else’s boss! For the last ten years I’ve been teaching people how to run a successful solo business, and for the last couple of months I’ve been committing the accrued wisdom of that decade of experience into a book: The Solo Pro. How to make money meaningfully and freedomfully.

It’s currently at 27,548 words, and I think it’s my best work yet. It’s a super-practical guidebook unpacking the simplest and most effective strategies and tactics for growing a profitable solo business. I’m really excited to share it with you.

2. The Solo Process

At the heart of the book is a simple, five-step process to follow to grow a profitable and sustainable business. I’m keen to make this process as accessible and useful for as diverse an audience as possible.

Reading is one way of learning, but there are many others too. As a companion to the book, I’m planning to create an online course with a variety of videos, frameworks, exercises and more to help solopreneurs put it all into practice and unlock their next level of possibility.

3. The Solo Program

A few months ago, a friend asked me a super-useful question. She said “If there was a gun to your head and you had to help someone succeed as a solo pro, no matter what, what would you do?”

My initial answer, while convoluted, contained four critical supports that I think people need to help them succeed:

A textbook with a process to follow, a distillation of the best practices from leading solopreneurs around the world for you to emulate.

A teacher to accelerate your learning and help you avoid the most common mistakes, to provide a learned set of eyes and ears and help guide your path.

A tribe to belong to, a group of humans who inspire you and influence you to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

And finally, a team to support you and hold you accountable, a group of people who help you create alignment and congruence between your intentions and your actions.

Launching on February the 16th, 2024, The Solo Program is designed to deliver exactly that. No-one is actually holding a gun to my head, thankfully, but I’m driven by an equivalent level of commitment! I’ll leave no stone unturned in seeking to help you succeed.

The first 12 people are locked in and ready to rock and roll, and they’re 12 of the coolest peeps on earth. If you’re ready to tackle 2024 with renewed vigour (and you’re keen to be an early adopter of a whole new program and a whole new community), this might be for you. Launch pricing is still available. Send me a message in LinkedIn if you’re keen, I’d love to discuss the possibility with you.

4. How to become broadly popular (and whether I need to)

My friend Cory Muscara has 537,000 followers on Instagram. It’s a mind-bogglingly large number of people. It gives him a platform for influence (and income!) that is two orders of magnitude larger than mine.

He and I have discussed a number of times what it takes to cultivate an audience of that size. It always seems strategically achievable, and energetically overwhelming. I’ve dabbled with the idea of getting started but never truly committed to it. (And as I have written before, 99% committed to something isn’t committed enough).

I always managed to find an excuse not to try (my current one is that Twitter is a dumpster-fire and Threads seems inscrutable to me at the moment), but I’m sure they’re just excuses and that Marianne Williamson would tell me I’m more afraid of success than of failure.

The potentially valid opposing view, however, is that half-a-million followers is a vanity metric rather than a commercial necessity, and that given how well my business performs with an audience of ~5000, any more than 10-20K might be motivated more by my ego than by the needs of my business. As a person with an ego which is naturally very strong, I’m always wary of unintentionally following it to dark places.

Then again, Cory is a meditation teacher and one of the least egotistic people I’ve ever met, so…

I guess all I can say for now is, “I’m really not sure”.

5. AI is about to eat the internet

For a long while, Google has been pretty shit, don’t you think? I think they’ve finally stopped pretending that their motto is “don’t be evil”, since the first 5 results on any google search are actually paid links deliberately camouflaged as organic results (an absolutely craven strategy designed to do nothing but enrich Google at the expense of everyone else), and the rest of the page is filled with websites designed by SEO experts to do nothing but get traffic by ranking well on the Google algorithm (also an absolutely craven strategy designed to do nothing but enrich those site owners at the expense of everyone else).

It’s about to get much, much worse. Those search-optimised pages used to be written by people, at least. The people were exploited low-paid workers in third world countries smashing out hundreds of pages a day, obviously, but there was a least some natural limit to the amount of useless tripe they could generate.

Not any more.

The internet is about to become somewhere between 99% and 99.999999% computer generated content.

The signal-to-noise ratio is about to get really bad.

This will initially be bad news for everyone, but I think it might be great news in the long term for people like me (and you?) who don’t actually love online marketing that much. I think poisoning the well of the internet will lead people to revert to the IRL research that served them so well in the past: trusted networks, word-of-mouth referrals, etc.

I also think it means there’s never been a more important time to have a memorable and powerful personal brand, because content isn’t going get cut-through.

6. AI is excellent, but not for the reasons most people say

When I see business advisors talking about AI on the internet, by far the most common use-case I see discussed is “here’s how to get AI to write your marketing content for you”.

As a strategy, this is utterly moronic. I can’t possibly imagine a stupider thing to do with AI than to make it your public voice.

Large Language Models are incredibly sophisticated tools, but the fact is they produce verbiage which is decidedly ‘average’. Average in the sense that mathematically they predict which word is most likely to come next in the sentence, which is learned by reading (in effect) the entire internet.

It’s astonishing how effectively this process produces content that parses logically, but unsurprising how utterly vanilla that content sounds. Vanilla is not how you want your public-facing messages to sound. I will never, ever use AI to write something that I want anyone else to read… but that doesn’t mean AI text-generation tools aren’t incredibly useful.

I don’t (by any stretch!) consider myself an expert in the use of AI. I do find it incredibly useful to help me explore ideas, accelerate research, or even just remind me of a word I’ve temporarily forgotten. Here’s some examples of prompts I’ve used recently:

• What's a word for someone who is both sceptical and pessimistic. Give me 5-10 options please.
• Please restate this idea 5 ways: “The most prominent people in any given field are rarely the best in their field at their job, they're simply good enough at their job, and the best at self-promotion.”
• What prompts should I give you that will help me find new angles and ideas around the topic of public speaking?
• What's a word that means "doing something in a way that produces multiple useful outputs”? Can you list 10-20 more words that might fit the description. I don't need them to tightly fit the definition.
• Tim Urban, Sam Harris, and Malcolm Gladwell are all authors/public-intellectuals who simply follow their curiosity, and make a living from what they create. Can you give me some examples of women who have a similar business model?

If you find AI a useful companion to running your business, I’d love to hear about how you use it. Comment and let me know!

7. Becoming a public intellectual

I don’t know about you, but my life feels like it breaks into chapters of roughly 7-10 years each. My careers thus far have been CAD software sales, kart racing, thought leadership, and I’m now in a transition phase.

The Solo Pro feels likely to represent the bulk of the next ten years of my life (which I’m absolutely thrilled about), but mine is a mind that exists mostly in the future so I can’t help but start ideating already about what might come after that.

I think the career I would like to take me to retirement is something akin to a public intellectual. I look at people like Tim Urban, Sam Harris, and Malcolm Gladwell* and see a business model I’d love to emulate. From what I can see, those three guys simply follow their curiosity into any topic that interests them, and share what they find in a way that’s compelling and engaging enough to make a very good living from it.

That sounds really fun to me, and I think I might have the ability to pull it off.

Based on the prompt above, ChatGPT suggested Roxane Gay, Esther Perel and Mary Roach among others as women who pursue a similar model. Perel is the only one of those with whom I’m already familiar, so now I have some peeps to learn more about!

8. Julius Fink

This combines two topics already addressed: personal brand, and becoming a public intellectual.

Broadly speaking, my curiosities fall into two categories: how to run a good business, and how to live a good life. Most of my career to date has focused on work in the first category, largely because it’s easier to monetise that expertise.

If I was to build a profile as a public intellectual, it would likely be through topics in the second category. I want to share ideas about communal living, second-order effects, paradox, complex systems, and the myth that we are 'an individual'.

Building a following that would enable that to work is a very long project, and would complicate the existing profile I have as an expert for solopreneurs, and potentially complicate the way that existing profile successfully feeds my business (a website is a lot easier to design, for example, if it’s only trying to serve one kind of visitor, and to direct that visitor to only one or two things).

If I was a corporate entity with an existing successful brand now considering a long push into a substantially different market, I would probably consider creating a different brand for that new strategy.

This, combined with my curiosity about the true meaning of words like ‘authenticity’ and ‘identity’ (which are exceptionally difficult to define satisfactorily, in my view) leads me to a potential project which my aforementioned friend Cory described as “both the douchiest and coolest thing ever”: create a second personal brand under the name Julius Fink.

Julius is my middle name, and I hated it as a child. It felt much too formal and sophisticated. As the name of an author on a book, however, I rather like it. It’s got an intellectual flair. More so than Col, or the name I hate most… Colin (a name only ever given to characters on screen who are the comic relief at best and the butt of every joke at worst)..

I’m inspired by the idea of creating Julius Fink partly because I think it would be effective. Given that I coach people around the idea of building a personal brand, I also like the idea because if I had two personal brands, it would give me a chance to experiment on myself twice as often.

Finally, I’m fascinated by the idea that it’s more accurate to think of a person as a Congress of Selves than it is to think of us as an individual, best illustrated in the Pixar movie Inside Out. (Dr Richard Schwartz has written a number of books about this including Internal Family Systems and No Bad Parts).

A number of my clients have had great success improving a variety of aspects of their solo business, from promotion to productivity and everything in between, by building a better understanding of their internal congress. My personal productivity improved significantly when I learned more about some of my less productive characters, and better ways to incorporate their influence into my professional life.

Julius Fink would present an opportunity to explore this concept in even greater depth, taking one of the characters in my congress to establish a whole new brand, a strategy used by Beyoncé to become a global superstar (her pop star persona for the first ten years of her career was not the ‘true’ Beyoncé, who was a socially-conservative church-goer, it was a character she created called Sasha Fierce), and a process described in Todd Herman’s book The Alter Ego Effect.

There’s loads of reasons why Julius Fink might be a great idea. On the other hand, it would be a lot of work, and would require an enormous further reduction in my general level of cynicism (a process that has been ongoing for the last 20 years or so) in order to fully embrace it.

Will I do it? Probably not this year… possibly not ever. But I’m tempted.

9. What are you thinking about in 2024?

Comment on this article and let me know what you’re up to!

Thanks for reading, and best of luck for the year ahead.

Cheers,

Col.