I opened it again this morning, early, before Doug was up. Three pages. Same three pages, more or less, that have been sitting there for close to a week. I added one sentence, moved the cursor around, added nothing else.
I keep not naming this document. I’ve been treating that as a temporary state, the way you don’t title a project until you know what it is. I have been very committed to not knowing what it is.
Except I think I do know. I think I’ve known since the night I opened it. And I’m not naming it because naming it is different from naming the consulting idea or the rate I want to charge. Naming this one means something I’m not quite ready for it to mean.
Here is what’s in the document, as plainly as I can say it.
Stories. Specifically: the stories I’ve been telling myself belong to my clients, because they happened at client sites, in client conference rooms, to client accounts. The $2.2 million renewal in 2019. The telecom account where I read the room at a quarterly review and saw the relationship was over before the client said it. The healthcare company where I talked a VP through a contract renegotiation on a napkin at a conference dinner.
I’ve been calling these “case studies” when I write about them here, but they aren’t, really. Case studies have frameworks and steps. What I have are the stories behind the steps: what I noticed, what I said, what it cost the company when they paid attention and what it cost when they didn’t. The human part, not the methodology.
Seven of them, roughly. Three pages, seven stories. Or the outlines of seven stories and the beginnings of what they have in common.
I don’t know what to call that.
That’s not true. I know exactly what to call it. I keep not saying it.
My high school English teacher told me I should be a writer. I was seventeen. I heard it as a compliment and then filed it under “impractical” and moved on to figuring out how to get a job that paid. This was 1993. Writing as a career meant journalism or being published by someone with a building in New York, and I had no map to either of those. So I let the comment drift.
I have thought about it roughly once a year since, usually in the car, in between things. It surfaces, I give it about thirty seconds, and then I arrive somewhere and the thought stops. That pattern has held since 1993. I am, apparently, very good at deferring the things that feel important.
The thing I keep working around is this: naming the document makes it a thing that can fail. Right now it is three pages of notes I add a sentence to every few days, and a thing with no name cannot fail because it is not yet anything. The moment I call it something, it becomes a thing I was trying to do. And things you are trying to do can be tried and found wanting.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months thinking about the failure I am afraid of: leaving a $185,000 salary for a consulting practice that lasts nineteen months and having to explain that at 52. I have rehearsed that explanation more times than I would like to admit. I have a version that sounds almost reasonable.
What I have not been thinking about, or what I have been actively not thinking about: starting something I care about more than the consulting, and watching it not become what I hoped it would be. That failure does not have a rehearsed version. I have not let myself get close enough to it to draft one.
The consulting I can discuss rationally. Rates, clients, the woman in Texas charging $275 an hour with a three-page website and five testimonials. I can say the number clearly and know where it came from. The document is not like that. It has no rate. No comparable. It exists because I keep going back to it, and the only reason I keep going back to it is that something happens when I write in it that doesn’t happen when I write case study notes or one-pagers or, sometimes, even this.
Zoe is at a friend’s house. Max is somewhere with his lacrosse stick. Doug is still asleep.
I spent a few minutes this morning choosing a photo for this post, longer than usual, and I noticed that. Something that felt like early light before the day commits to anything. Credited the photographer, a name I didn’t recognize, because that is the right thing to do and I would want the credit if it were mine.
Then I went back to the document, added the sentence, and closed it again. Still three pages. Still no name.
I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. That’s probably information.