Wednesday. I opened the phone note this morning. The one titled “ideas” that I’ve had since early 2024. Nine items. I opened it on my second day of writing this and thought I’d sorted through it pretty thoroughly. One viable idea, eight dismissed. Case closed.
I was looking at item nine, the renewals consulting line. The 60-Day Save. The one I’ve spent three weeks building in public, the one Terri validated, the one I said out loud in my car yesterday to a windshield that had no feedback.
But my thumb stopped at item four.
Two words. “Write a book.”
No subtitle, no concept, no chapter outline. Just those two words, sitting between “fractional CRO” and “podcast?” like they belong in the same category. Like writing a book is an equivalent decision to picking a consulting niche or launching a show.
It’s not. Those are business models. “Write a book” is something else. I just haven’t let myself look at it long enough to name what.
Here’s what I’ve been noticing. I like this. The writing part. Not as a commitment device, which is what I told myself and told you this was on day one. Not as accountability. The actual sitting down, opening a blank page, trying to describe what happened and what I’m thinking about it.
The trying is the part I like. Finding the sentence that matches. Getting closer to what I actually mean instead of what sounds good.
I have been doing a version of this for other people for twenty-four years. QBR summaries that tell a story. Emails that untangle complicated account situations into three clear paragraphs. Slack messages that make people say “Leigh always explains things well.” I was, I think, proud of that. I am proud of that. But it’s always been in service of someone else’s product, someone else’s narrative, someone else’s name on the slide.
Three weeks ago I wrote that I wasn’t sure I was “a blogger.” I still don’t know if that’s the right word. But I’ve written every day for three weeks and the only time it felt like a chore was when I was avoiding something I knew I needed to say. The writing wasn’t the hard part. The honesty was.
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Caputo, told me I should be a writer. I was seventeen. I heard it the way you hear something you want to believe but can’t afford to. Impractical. A nice thing a teacher says to a kid who writes decent essays. I filed it under compliments and moved on to a communications degree, four companies, twenty-four years of writing clearly under other people’s names.
I’m not saying she was right. That’s too neat. Seventeen-year-old me didn’t have the life experience to write about anything worth reading, and I’m not sure forty-nine-year-old me does either. But I’ve spent three weeks building toward a consulting business and just noticed that the part I look forward to most is not the consulting part. It’s this. Sitting here. Doing this.
The renewals consulting still makes sense. I know the problem. I’ve documented the pattern four times. I can describe it in fourteen words. That’s the plan. It’s a solid plan.
But there’s this other thing now. This thing I started as a tool and have been pretending isn’t becoming something I want for its own sake. Not because it holds me accountable. Because I like the work of it.
I looked at the phone note one more time before I closed it. Nine items. The consulting is item nine. Spreadsheet, validated problem statement, Terri’s endorsement. “Write a book” is item four. No spreadsheet. No validation. No detail at all.
One item has a business model. The other one has two words and the ghost of a high school English teacher who probably retired years ago.
Drove home. Doug was on the couch. I sat down next to him with two things I’m not telling him now instead of one. The consulting I’ve been not-mentioning for almost three weeks, and this new thing I didn’t even know about until this morning.
He asked if I wanted to watch something. I said sure.
We watched two episodes of something I cannot tell you the name of because I spent the entire time thinking about the fact that I might want two things, and one of them has a plan, and the other one has two words on a phone screen, and I have said neither of them out loud to the person sitting three feet from me on the couch.
The consulting is the practical answer. The writing might be the real one. I haven’t figured out which one to chase, or if I’m allowed to want both.
I’m working on it.