In Defense of “Random”

Hi Cringers,

Are you someone who tends to act “randomly?”

Have people in your life given you a hard time for moving in ways they don’t understand? For taking the winding path instead of the straight one? Doing too much? Being “unfocused?”

What if none of it was ever random? What if your “randomness” is part of your process?

For me, what others have considered “random” has always been an intentional act of information gathering, usually guided by existing knowledge and intuition.

I never understood how, from an early age, people are expected to know their calling, their dream career, and their life roadmap. That was never me.

I’m one of those people who has to touch every item in the store before I buy something. I need to understand my environment, get a sense for what I’m into and not into, and understand the lay of the land before I decide where I want to go.

I like to put all the clay on the table before I sculpt it down.

This has proved to be true in how I’ve gone about building my business, which from the outside probably looks rather “random.”

I’ve definitely been a dabbler. Over the last three years, I’ve done everything from ghostwriting executive LinkedIn posts to designing personal brand visuals, to creating marketing strategies for tech consultants.

And while it would have been the financially savvier move to pick a lane and stick to it, to niche down, choose my ICP, etc., I also know that I don’t work like that.

Because of how I’m wired, I need to be genuinely into what I’m doing to stick to it. I figured if I was going to go off on my own, build my own career, I wanted to make sure I actually liked it and didn’t want to quit after a year or two, so I allowed myself to try a lot of things and dabble until I could get a clearer understanding of what I was into and what I could make out of all of it.

After doing Clarity Calls with 50+ consultants over the past few years, I’ve realized that these “random acts of business” are more the norm than the exception. Most founders and consultants operate in a constant state of flux. We are constantly responding to our environments, the market, and our personal needs.

This isn’t only true for solos, but for big business. Nintendo started as a playing card manufacturer, Samsung used to export dried fish, Tiffany & Co. sold stationary, Colgate used to sell candles, etc. The list goes on and on.

“Randomness” as an act of information gathering is even true in nature. I love this passage from Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in which she describes the seemingly chaotic behavior of wolves in the wild:

“Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles; they plow up the ground with their noses; they scratch the ground, then run ahead, then back, then stand stock-still. They look as if they have lost their wits. But what they are really doing is picking up all the clues they can find. They’re biting them down out of the air, they’re filling up their lungs with the smells at ground level and at shoulder level, they are tasting the air to see who has passed through it recently, their ears are rotating like satellite dishes, pickup up transmissions from afar. Once they have all these clues in one place, they know what to do next.”

Each move you make is a learning experience, even if it doesn’t look “successful” from the outside.

I know personally that all my sniffing around over the last few years has helped me to realize I no longer want to write for others.

I enjoy the visual and strategy aspects of working with people, but really only like writing for myself.

So, I’m doubling down on providing more advisory support to founders and visual design, but will no longer be offering ghostwriting or content writing.

If you’re interested in working together in this way, book an intro call!

I’d love to hear what you’re working on and see if there are ways we can partner.

What “random acts” have led to more clarity in your business? Reply to this and let me know.

Later, Cringers.