Saviour / Servant
Serve the work, not the outcome
This book could probably exist as a single line: serve the work, not the outcome.
But it’s hard. My attention is constantly being dragged the other way. The tension is alive right now, as I write these very words.
This chapter has been finished, chewed up, and reimagined several times because when I try and ‘get the job done’ I’m writing for the finish line, to sound smart, to earn your attention.
I tighten up. The ideas get bloated. I lose hours chasing every inflection instead of discovering what the work itself has to say.
You know this dance. You circle something you feel but can’t quite translate onto the page. The easy way out is to work backward from the outcome, but the result rarely has the ring of truth the work was asking for. The feeling left unresolved.
It’s why most work we do, the presentations we give, and the content we create feel endured rather than expressed.
Followed by relief rather than satisfaction.
Then I remember what my work actually is: nothing more than my best attempt to bridge the gap between myself and others, and I cannot control how they interpret it.
The benchmark for whether this chapter is good is whether it goes far enough to reveal the truth I’m reaching for and expresses in words what I feel. Have I managed to ground myself in the work instead of the promise of the finish line?
The problem is that I’m not a clean filter. I can’t help getting in the way of the work. My biases, my incomplete worldview, and my addiction to outcomes bend the words.
It’s a reality we all live with, and why presence must be something we practise, not just something we feel. It requires the architecture we explored in What Presence Requires, the structure that reveals our best work. Found, not chosen.
To serve the work, not the outcome, is to create from the rubble, to weave the threads of our lived experience, to express what we know versus what we think we should do.
The absolute antithesis of performance. An act of raw presence.
Incomplete, imperfect, and exactly what the work requires.
The problem with outcomes
Common wisdom asks us to choose the outcome we want and work backwards.
As a business owner, I’m told that if I want to increase my personal agency and serve the needs of my family, I need more money. To get the money, I need to exploit a market friction, apply pressure to pain points, and treat people like targets.
The path to freedom, paved with collateral damage.
But we can’t outcome our way to who we are.
When we treat our work as an identity multiplier, we convince ourselves that if we just collect enough wealth or reach enough scale, we’ll finally have the breathing room to be the person we’ve always hoped we were. Then we could finally slow down, finally give to charity, finally paint every day, finally volunteer, finally do the thing that has always brought us joy.
As if who we are needs to earn its moment in the sun.
Look, outcomes aren’t the enemy. It’s that we measure our worth against them. But you cannot solve an existential longing with a metric. No amount of data can deliver the peace you long for, because who you are cannot be measured, contained, or controlled.
You can follow someone else’s exact steps. You might make money. You might get seen. For a while, years or even decades, it will feel like progress.
But the moment will come when you question how you’ve managed to travel so far from who you actually are. From your Majesty.
I remember my fifth redundancy with great sadness. I heard my wife release a sound of pain through the closed door. Not for the lost income, but for me.
She knew that I already felt left behind.
Of course, the financial impact was real, but underneath it ran something sharper: five endings in a decade start to feel like evidence. About who I was. That my worth had been measured. That I wasn’t valuable enough.
So I scrambled. I joined courses, downloaded playbooks, spent thousands on training, and published a library’s worth of content. Yes, I needed to achieve financial security, but the outcome I really wanted? Proof that I mattered.
Let me draw a quick line here. These people didn’t convince me to buy anything. I convinced myself. Because, much like the first draft of this very chapter, I hadn’t yet returned to the rubble.
The question of my worth was being forced through the wrong filter: the immediate financial need. I was unknowingly trying to solve an existential question with an outcome. So when they pointed at my panic and named it for me, the resonance felt real enough. Their solution seemed obvious too.
None of it is alive in my practice today, because none of it was built to respond to the longing of my heart. It was built for market friction, not my own. My panic was just a pain point, given a price tag and a promise, and sold back to me.
Then came Culture Crush. It wasn’t about proof, it wasn’t a strategy, it was an experiment in response to a feeling: I can’t be the only one. That was when my work began to feel like a practice, and my audience began to grow in a way that felt closer to my calling. It formed partnerships, unearthed client work, and paid the bills. But more importantly, it killed my fear that I was alone.
And when fear lost its grip, I could finally slip the Founder’s Noose.
I discovered that the pain I was trying to escape wasn’t my weakness. It was my strength.
That feeling of isolation has since become the signature of my work. Found in the rubble, not chosen by an imagined outcome.
And honestly, my audience is shrinking week by week.
But for the first time in years, I feel free.
Look at your bookshelf. The evidence of the Founder’s Noose in your life is probably just a few feet from where you’re sitting. The graveyard of unfinished books and untested wisdom. The repeated decision to buy the next solution before you’ve read past chapter three of the last one. Panic purchases made by someone whose Majesty was silenced when another named their pain and put a price tag on it.
The irony is not lost on me that you’re reading this book right now, a book that could probably exist as a single line: serve the work, not the outcome.
Close the book. Do that. You’ll be fine.
The servant’s posture
If you’re still reading, you are welcome here. But consider this your final warning: there are no answers here.
And look, I know it sounds easy to say ‘serve the work’ and walk away when the world seems to demand saviours, but truly, it’s the servants who get shit done.
They follow what they feel, not what the market told them to want. And history is full of them.
Tim Berners-Lee wasn’t trying to invent the digital economy. The Wright brothers weren’t building a transportation revolution. Marie Curie wasn’t trying to pioneer modern medicine. Alexander Fleming just went on holiday.
The internet, flight, the X-ray, penicillin. They all came from people who weren’t aiming for the outcome and served the work anyway.
Others saw the promised land and marched from the rubble.
Martin Luther King didn’t get out of bed one morning and say, “Today, I’m going to be the most significant voice for civil rights in a generation.” His goal wasn’t to be an icon. His status is the byproduct of his service and the fruit of the unnamed millions who marched with him.
But history has a problem. It gives us the highlight reel and sanitises the daily grind. Like you, they were all just practitioners who got up on a random Tuesday, faced the terrifying friction in front of them, and decided to take the next unremarkable step alongside their friends.
We’ve built cathedrals in their honour. But they were building campfires.
It might seem crazy to suggest that your name can exist alongside the heroes of history, but only because we’ve learnt to judge the worth of the person by the magnitude of their impact.
The hidden footnotes of history are overflowing with people who bent the arc of humanity and were never celebrated for it. They served the work, quietly changed things, and nobody wrote their names down.
What they did mattered anyway.
And I bet they were content.
The servant’s invitation
Sunday School did not begin as a church programme.
It started when a printer in northern England looked at children working six days a week in the mills and decided to teach them to read on their one free day. His name was Robert Raikes.
He wasn’t trying to start a movement. He wasn’t building a platform. He wasn’t thinking about scale. He was serving the work directly in front of him: these children, this Sunday, this room.
Within a decade, 200,000 children across Europe were in Sunday School. Universal children’s education, as we know it today, can trace its lineage back to one printer’s decision.
The outcome was so far beyond anything he could have imagined that imagining it would have been a distraction.
He served the work. The outcome looked after itself.
On the days when my work feels too small, too slow, too unremarkable to matter, I think about Raikes. Not to draw a parallel (this work is inconsequential in comparison), but to remind myself that The Unremarkable Entrepreneur doesn’t need to change the world. It has to serve the person in front of it.
Here’s what I believe, and I hold it carefully: somewhere, someone reading this is standing at the edge of something significant. A practitioner with a specific gift, for a specific group of people, at a specific moment in history. What is holding them back is not lack of talent, or preparation, or permission.
It is the Noose. It is the outcome. It is the quiet conviction that they have to know enough first. Be present enough first. Be perfect enough first.
They do not.
We do not wait to know enough. We do not wait to be present enough. We do not wait to be perfect enough. We serve the work in front of us. Incomplete, imperfect, and as honestly as we can for the people who need it.
The rest we cannot control.
Practice Note
Three questions to carry into this week. Small. Honest. No outcomes required.
Where is the friction? Not in the market, in you. Find the problem you keep coming back to. Begin there.
Who can you ask? Speak to someone who knows you, who noticed the moment you came to life or stopped performing. What were you doing? Do more of that.
What are you actually serving? Not the outcome you want, but the person or the problem in front of you today. Name it. Be specific.
We do not need to know where this leads. We need to take the next step.
Where We Are:
This is Week 9 of a year-long practice.
Movement 1: Presence - eight weeks, eight stanzas, exploring how to show up as yourself.
Saviour / Servant ← You are here
Start with WHO
The Increment is the Way
Invite Like an Artist
The World is Abundant
From there we’ll explore Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.
The Raikes example is great. Serving the work, not the outcome itself is a good way of looking at it.
Good post
-Frank