Tuesday, August 4.
Nine-thirty this morning, my phone made the sound it makes for calendar notifications. A single tap. Not demanding. The kind of alert you can ignore for four minutes if you’re in the middle of something, which I was.
I was not in the middle of something.
I picked it up. August 4. “Follow up — first client conversations?” No name in the entry because I didn’t put one there when I made it. I had set it as a placeholder, a checkpoint, the point on the backward map where the backward map said something should have happened by now.
Four emails. Zero conversations.
That is still the ledger.
I sat with it for a while. Not dramatically — I did not go for a drive or stare out any particular window. I made a second cup of coffee and read through the four emails in sequence for maybe the third time this summer, looking for whatever I had missed. The problem with doing this after months of silence is that you can’t look at the emails neutrally anymore. You look at them through the silence. Everything that seemed reasonable in the sending becomes a question under thirty, forty, fifty days of no response.
What I found is this: the emails are correct. Not wrong. But they are emails that describe a service to people who never asked about a service. They are organized and credible and they lay out the problem and the approach and why I am the one to solve it. They are, in other words, exactly what you send when you are treating a first conversation like a proposal.
I think that might be the problem.
I have spent twenty-four years opening conversations. Not closing them, opening. The difference between a renewal that works and one that fails is almost never about the contract terms or the price point. It is almost always about whether the other person feels found, the way you feel found when someone calls because they were thinking about you specifically, not because you are on a list. I know how to make a person feel found. I have done it hundreds of times.
I have not done it once in four months of trying to find my first client. I sent emails the way you send a well-reasoned memo to someone you expect to take action on your behalf. That is not how I would teach someone to open a client conversation. I know this. I knew it in the sending. I sent them anyway.
I am not sure what that was about, except that it is easier to be organized than it is to pick up the phone and ask a person directly if they have a problem you think you can solve. A memo is safe in the way a conversation is not. A memo lets you control the framing. A conversation requires you to give up the framing.
I think I have been protecting myself from the part of this that requires me to give up the framing.
The notification is still sitting on my phone because I did not dismiss it. I set it to remind me in two hours, and then two hours later I set it to remind me again tomorrow. This is either a sign that I am still working on the decision or a sign that I am avoiding a decision I have already made. I genuinely cannot tell which.
What I have decided, provisionally, is that I am not sending a fifth email in the same mode. Whatever comes next is not another version of the thing that hasn’t worked. I don’t know yet exactly what it is. I have one name left on the list. I have a phone I have been carrying around for four months without using it to call anyone about this.
I think the next thing is a call. Not with a deck. Not with a problem statement. Just to ask if there is something worth a thirty-minute conversation.
I have not made the call yet.
Zoe knocked on my door at eight this morning to borrow a charger. She looked at me and said “is today the day?” and I said yes, and she said “okay” and took the charger and left.
I don’t know what that meant. I should probably ask.