Today we continue our series of short Dispatches from the Workbench: updates on decisions, things I’m trying, and invitations I’m sharing.
In today’s Dispatch:
The pre-mortem and why my business is already dead
The fear you need to face to save yours
An invitation to action takers
I did something uncomfortable this week.
I handed Gemini The Unremarkable Entrepreneur book manuscript and the landing pages for the Order of Unremarkable Creators and The Unremarkable Studio. The brief was simple: look twelve months into the future and tell me why I failed.
And the results were all too plausible.
Failure #1: Being too self-interested
You spent too much time on being seen and showing the things you created instead of seeing others and noticing what they’d created. You continued to hit publish on repeat without ever choosing the contact and conversations your practice needed to grow.
Failure #2: Weak boundaries
You spent too much time with people who needed a hug instead of people actually looking for the next step. You became the emotional steward for dozens of exhausted solo operators who simply weren’t ready to see things from a new perspective. Feeling something and being ready to do something about it are different things.
Failure #3: The ideological prison
You were so terrified of looking like a traditional marketer that you starved the business. You rejected organic opportunities for growth, sensible delegation, and strategic partnerships out of a puritanical reflex, convincing yourself that any friction-reducing system was a betrayal of the Unremarkable ethos. The work remained pure, but invisible to the people looking for it.
Failure #4: You let the campfire die
You unconsciously began prioritising high-ticket Studio clients over the Order of Unremarkable Creators. The first thing you have a gift for; the other is your calling. The Fellowship members felt your presence shift from a co-learner around the campfire to a distracted founder following the money.
Failure #5: You chose admin
You told yourself you were choosing the abundance of one, but instead you created long manual lists to work through, offering shallow connections that still operated with a volume mindset. No one felt seen, so no one took the seat at the campfire you prepared for them. You served the outcome, and it killed your dream.
Brutal.
Here’s the thing: these failures feel dangerously personal not because they’re aimed at me, but because they could be true for anyone who’s building a practice around their calling and hoping it will serve them creatively, spiritually, and financially.
They could be aimed at you.
And I would put money on the idea that at least one of those hit a little too close to home. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
For me, I’m going to cling to these three things:
Continue to be a member of the Order, not just its Steward: It’s not something I run; it’s a fellowship I belong to, which means being challenged and changed by the members around me.
Ring-fence my Studio Partnerships: Currently, I make room in my diary for two Partnerships and four Sessions each month. That isn’t fixed forever, but I’ll always choose to limit the time I spend on this part of my practice, regardless of how good I am at it and the money it makes.
Make contact my religion: Pursuing the abundance of one, at depth and without a pre-selected outcome, is the only thing that will save my business, and yours. Without it, I’ll never discover what the work actually needs.
I often talk about creating from the rubble, the choice to look back and see the building blocks of today’s calling instead of the ruins of failure. Rubble lies ahead too, but this time we can choose how we navigate instead of stumbling through.
So today, I invite you to be honest with yourself. Ask why you’ll fail. Reflect on which of my failures felt the heaviest to you. Then choose to step away from the edge.
And if you’d be willing to let others bear the weight of what you’re trying to build, let’s start with a conversation to explore what that next step might be. Book a call with me here, but please only do so if you’ve got the courage to do something about the way you feel.
You are the fuel. I am the spark. And you are only a few conversations away from the best idea you ever had.
Be well my friends, speak again soon,
Dan
