I opened the note.
The one on my phone. The one I mentioned yesterday, the one with nine business ideas I typed over the course of about eight months, mostly late at night, mostly with one thumb, mostly while I should have been doing something else.
I’ve been carrying it around the way you carry around a voicemail you haven’t listened to. You know it’s there. You know you should deal with it. But as long as you haven’t opened it, everything on it is still possible. Schrödinger’s career pivot. The moment I actually read the list, some of those ideas would stop being maybe and start being no. I wasn’t ready for that.
This morning I was ready. Or at least I was standing in the kitchen waiting for my coffee to brew and I had ninety seconds with nothing to do and I thought, fine. Let’s see what past-me thought was a good idea at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Here’s what I can tell you without telling you everything, because some of these are genuinely too half-formed to say out loud: there are nine items. Two are consulting variations. One is a course idea. One is about writing. A couple are things I clearly saw on LinkedIn and thought “I could do that,” which is a genre of professional inspiration I have learned to distrust. One of them just says “candles” followed by two question marks and then “no,” which I apparently added the next morning. Past-me had the good sense to overrule 11pm-me on that one.
Most of them made me feel a very specific kind of embarrassment. Not shame, exactly. More like the feeling of finding an old journal entry where you wrote something earnest and you have to sit with the fact that you were that person, recently, in this body, with these hands typing it. The consulting ideas felt generic. The course idea felt like something a person who has taken a lot of courses would come up with, which is not the same as having something to teach. The writing one is just two words. I’m not going to tell you what they are because I’m not ready, and also because two words is not a plan.
But the last one.
The last one I wrote about four months ago, on a Sunday afternoon, after spending forty minutes on the phone with a colleague who was panicking about a renewal she was about to lose. I’d seen it before. I’ve seen it dozens of times. An enterprise account, significant revenue, and nobody manages the actual renewal properly until the final 60 days before the contract expires. By that point the client has already made their decision and you’re just performing enthusiasm at someone who’s already gone.
I know how to fix that. I’ve been fixing it for years. I’ve saved accounts that were effectively dead and turned them into expansions, and I did it with a process, not magic. Not charm, not relationships, although those help. A process. The idea on the list is basically: what if that process was a service? What if companies hired someone specifically for the final 60 days of an at-risk renewal?
I don’t know if anyone would pay for that as a standalone thing. That’s the part I can’t see around. It might be too narrow. It might be something companies think they already handle internally, even when they clearly don’t. It might be the kind of idea that sounds sharp in a phone note and collapses the second you try to price it.
But here’s what I noticed when I was reading through the list this morning, standing in my kitchen with coffee I’d forgotten to pick up: it’s the only idea on that note that made me feel something other than mild embarrassment. It’s the only one where I thought, I actually know how to do this. Not “I could probably figure this out.” I know how. I’ve done it. Repeatedly. For someone else’s revenue line, at someone else’s company, for 24 years.
That’s not nothing. I think. I’m not sure it’s enough, but it’s not nothing.
I didn’t do anything with it today. I closed the note. I went to work. I sat through a pipeline review where someone used the phrase “proactive renewal engagement strategy” and I thought, you are describing the thing I wrote in my phone at 3pm on a Sunday and none of you know I wrote it and I don’t know what to do with that information.
So that’s where I am. I opened the list. Most of it is noise. One item might not be noise. I don’t know what the next step is, or if the step is just sitting with the fact that I noticed it, and it noticed me back.
I’ll let you know what I do. Or don’t do. Both seem equally likely right now.