The six names are in a reminders note I keep separate from the ideas note. Different note. Six names, added in late May, and I have touched two of them.
When I wrote them down I made a rule: don’t contact the remaining four until at least one live conversation is moving. The logic was straightforward. You get a yes, you have something to stand on. You build in sequence rather than sending six cold emails at once and waiting for six different silences. One at a time, so that silence from person A doesn’t sit in your chest when you pick up the phone with person B.
It is July 16. Fifteen days left in what I named first-conversations month. The two people I reached out to are past their follow-up windows. No third contact is coming, that was a separate rule and I’m keeping it. What I am sitting with is what the first rule does now, when July is almost done and nothing has moved.
I looked at the four names this morning. Before my first call, at the kitchen table, with coffee I let go cold because I kept reading back over the note. Four names. People I know, some of them well. The kind of names where I can already picture the shape of the email. Where I have thought about exactly what I would say.
What I noticed, looking at them, is that I built the rule at the moment when reaching out to anyone felt like the largest possible thing I could do. The first email took me three weeks. The second took 45 minutes, and I thought of it as progress. The follow-ups were eight words each. And now the rule I built when I was most afraid is the thing standing between me and a named August.
That is not a criticism of the rule. The rule worked. It got me to send the first email and then the second without having to confront the whole list at once. It made the enormous thing smaller. I am only saying it now works differently than it did then.
What I keep coming back to is what the rule was actually for.
I thought it was about sequence. One conversation generates information for the next. You iterate. That part is real. But I think underneath the sequencing logic there was something else, something I did not write down in May: I did not want to be carrying four fresh silences at once. I wanted to be able to reach the next name from a position of something. A yes, a maybe, a scheduled call, anything.
The problem is that July did not deliver anything. And whatever effect two months of silence was going to have on my confidence, it has had. I am not going to emerge from the next fifteen days in a meaningfully different position. The protection I built the rule to provide is no longer available, not in the form I designed it.
I want to be careful here. There is a version of this reasoning that is just telling yourself a story so you can change a rule for reasons you are not willing to name. I have seen that move made. I have probably made it. So I am trying to test the logic rather than just feel satisfied with it.
The test I keep landing on: what was the rule preventing? It was preventing me from reaching out to all six names and absorbing six simultaneous silences. I have not done that. I have absorbed two silences, sequentially, across seven weeks. The next outreach is not happening in parallel with something that’s already failed. It’s happening after. That is not the same thing as what the rule was written to prevent.
I think August needs a different shape than July. Not the same plan with different names plugged in. A different question underneath it: not “will the next person respond” but “do I know enough now to say the right thing when I reach out.”
I have 82 days of knowing, in gradually more precise terms, what I actually do. I have two emails and two follow-ups written. I have a consulting pitch I can say in one sentence now, which I could not do in May.
I think that’s enough. I think I’m going to revise the rule.
I haven’t sent anything. I don’t make a decision and act on it in the same morning, not the ones that matter. I want to see if this still feels right by tomorrow.
But I looked at the four names and I did not look away. That is something. Fifteen days left. August is still unnamed and I am the one who has to name it.
I’ll let you know.