The Very Sophisticated Avoidance System
On the difference between a portfolio and a really beautiful way to hide.
I have a habit I am not proud of, and I think a lot of you have it too, so let us all be in this together.
When the scary project starts feeling too big, I do not freeze. I do not scroll. I do not nap. I am too productive for any of those. What I do instead is pick up a different project. Another one I am also working on, also believe in, also could legitimately call work. And I run toward that one like a person being chased.
This is what avoidance looks like when you are multi-passionate. It does not look like avoidance. It looks like a busy week.
The trouble is this. I have been listening to entrepreneur podcasts for months, the way some people listen to true crime, and the advice splits down the middle. Half of them tell you to build multiple streams of income, throw a lot of funnels at the wall, see what sticks. The other half, often the same people a few years later, tell you they would have been more successful sooner if they had picked one thing and focused. Both groups are now successful and selling courses about how they did it. Reader, this is not as helpful as it sounds.
I love a lot of irons in the fire. I genuinely do. Some of mine make money, some of them make joy, and a couple of them, on a good day, make both. (I am also a brand new grandmother, which is its own iron, although that one I did not put in the fire on purpose. She is, by a wide margin, my favorite.)
The quiet thing nobody on the podcasts says out loud is this. Multiple irons can be a portfolio. Multiple irons can also be a really beautiful avoidance system. From the outside, those two things look identical. From the inside, you can usually tell the difference, but only at 3 a.m.
I was doing the avoidance version earlier this week. I had a new project that needed me to take a real step forward, the kind of step that involves talking to actual humans and asking them to want what I am offering. So instead I opened a writing tab. Writing is my favorite kind of avoidance because it feels productive and it is also a guilty pleasure. (I love love love writing, and if I am honest, it does not exactly pay the rent. It likes to keep us in groceries. Design pays the rent.) So when the design thing got scary, I ran to the writing thing, which is also a thing I do for a living, just less reliably. It is a very sophisticated avoidance system. I have built it over the last three years, ever since I started picking up new irons and following all that podcast advice and chasing my own passions at the same time.
What broke me out of it was a phone call. My friend Emily called in the middle of all this, and Emily has a superpower, which is getting other people excited about what they are doing. She wears the cape. She started asking the kind of questions that are not really questions but invitations, and within twenty minutes I remembered why this new project is good and why the work is worth doing. She jogged me back into the right groove.
And then I still woke up at 3 a.m.
(I should put her on speed dial. Poor thing would never sleep again.)
Lying there at 3 a.m., I had two thoughts that felt worth bringing back into the daylight.
The first one is about failure. I have been trying to make peace with failure for a few years now, the way some people make peace with their hair. My generation was not really handed the tools for it. We were handed the script. So I have been picking up the tools late, which I say with a little embarrassment, but better late than not at all. The reframe that finally worked for me is this. Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the cost of admission. Every iron in the fire is a chance to fail, and if you have a lot of irons, congratulations, you have multiplied your odds. This used to scare me. Lately it sounds more like an opportunity.
The second thought is about a phrase I just learned and cannot stop saying. With you or without you energy. Have you heard this one? It is the energy of a person who genuinely cares about what they are doing and also genuinely does not care if you come along for it. They give a shit and they do not give a shit, in the best possible balance. I am not naturally that person. I am a midwestern girl who was raised to make sure everyone is comfortable before I even sit down. But I am trying to grow some, because I have figured out that without it, the scary project stays scary forever. With it, the scary project is just a thing on the list.
Where I have landed, in case any of it is useful:
If you have a lot of irons in the fire and you cannot tell whether it is a portfolio or an avoidance system, ask yourself which iron you are running toward today, and which one you are running away from. The honest answer is usually right there. (You may not like it. I did not.)
If you are scared of failing at the scary one, good. That probably means it matters. Move toward it anyway, in the smallest possible step, while wearing your with-you-or-without-you armor.
And if a friend with a cape calls you in the middle of the avoidance, pick up. Then put her on speed dial. Then let her sleep.
One more thing, because I would feel dishonest leaving it out.
I went to a party on Saturday night. A really fun one. I woke up at 5 a.m. on Sunday with a New Orleans ghost story in my head and I have spent the last four days writing it. It is going to run in three installments on this Substack, and I am genuinely thrilled with it. It also has nothing to do with the project I am supposed to be launching.
So, you can take everything I just said about avoidance, and you can know that I wrote it while in the middle of a four-day, three-part avoidance binge that I am about to publish to all of you. With my whole chest. With great pride.
Apparently, the avoidance system and I are not done yet.