Blame the Malaysian (End of Osmosis P1/3)

The following is part one of three parts in an email series in which I said goodbye to a list of subscribers from my “other life” as a marketing consultant

Hey there. Long time no talk. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? In fact, it’s been eight months since my last communication. Where have I been? What have I done? And why am I writing you now?

But before I get to any of that, as per the disclaimer above: If you don’t know who I am and/or how you ended up on this email list, I would encourage you to click here to unsubscribe. A lot of what I’m about to write only pertains to people who’ve read/followed Osmosis, bought a copy of the Freelancer’s Guide to the Universe, and/or subscribed to The Salt Letters.

Here’s the short of it: I am shutting down this ConvertKit account. The deadline is March 21st. I will go into the reasons why over a series of emails. And again, I must emphasize, if you don’t care about any of this, you can click here to unsubscribe.

Still here? Cool. Let’s have a chat. But first, before I start, I need to do some housekeeping.

  1. If you are an Osmosis Patron. I cancelled your subscription last month. You shouldn’t have been charged. Please let me know if you were. I want to take this time to thank you for your support over 114 issues of Osmosis between 2021-2023. One-hundred-and-fourteen issues!
  2. If you purchased a copy of “Freelancers Guide to the Universe”, I will be emailing you separately. Please be patient.
  3. If you have prepaid for consulting hours, but have not used them, I will still honor them. This email address will still be live.

OK - now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about why I’m shutting down this ConvertKit account and email list.

The curt answer is there’s a $490 bill coming up and I just don’t want to pay for it, given I haven’t used ConvertKit for eight months now. The short answer is that after multiple false starts, several attempts to reignite Osmosis, and even rewriting the landing page several times – I simply can’t find it in myself to keep going. I am exhausted. My priorities have shifted drastically.

HOWEVER – I don’t want to completely shut this down without an explanation and give those who are still interested in what I’m doing a place to go. (And listen, I know I’m not obligated to “explain myself” – I know I have a tendency to do that, and in some ways, it’s unhealthy – but i/r/t this, I feel like I do owe it to you, and also – this is a carthatic release for me where I can journal, reflect, and share what I went through with you, especially for those of you who have read Osmosis).

Over the next few days, I’m going to talk about, in an emotionally raw and honest manner…

That’s three very long emails coming your way (including this one) every day until it’s done. So again, if you have no idea who I am, why you’re on this list, or how you got here, please go ahead and click here to unsubscribe.

I think the first question some of you might have is… Where have I been the last eight months. Osmosis went on hiatus in late June of 2023 when I went on my first real family vacation after not having gone on one in three years due to the pandemic. This was a really important trip for me as we used to do this annually. My children are all getting older (two of three are teenagers now) and I know that I’m running out of time for trips like these.

We went to London, York, Edinburgh, Inverness, and Glasgow. It was sixteen days of sightseeing, urban exploration, and a lot of train rides between cities. Travelling by train is a lovely experience. Especially two, three hour long rides across the Scottish countryside. I spent a lot of time with my reMarkable Type Folio journalling and reflecting.

A lot of what I was reflecting on came about because longtime Osmosis reader, Ian Chew, gave me a list of questions to ponder on as I had confided my uncertainty with my newsletter to him. As some of you may recall, there was an attempt to monetize the list sometime shortly before I left on that trip. The short of it was, it didn’t work. I was disappointed, but I was also hyper-aware that I had built the list “wrong”. These are all things I’ll get to over the next couple of days. But back to Ian Chew, the wonderful human being in Malaysia who had become a friend through Osmosis… his last question was the one that struck me down and triggered a further cascade of self-doubt, denial, and eventually acceptance.

His question was: Let’s say you meet yourself from the future (50 years from now). What advice would he give you? What would he regret?

I did not hesistate on that question. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. (And the answer wasn’t “building an audience” nor writing a newsletter summarizing books). In fact, answering that one question dislodged a key piece in this whole “build an audience” artifice I had spent so much energy, time, and money on the last two years.

It became very clear to me that all this stuff I’m doing for money: the freelancing, the businesses, the investing, and even my attempt to “build an audience” I could monetize… that’s all stuff I do because I have to. Like you (I’m assuming you’re in the 99.9% of the population that has to work for a living), life and raising a family requires financing one way or another. This is the simple reality. We work because we have to. Now, granted, some of us are very good at lying to ourselves about being passionate about our work, and many of us do get certain needs met at work that we can’t get anywhere else, while a few others use work as a distraction to avoid personal problems… BUT. I’ll bet you that if you asked most people to answer honestly (like in the middle of the night after a few drinks or a shot of truth serum) what they would rather be doing, I can guarantee you… is not work.

I’ve often joked that entrepreneurialism is self-deluding yourself into hustling, grinding, and sacrificing until you get a huge payoff. At which point, you have millions in the bank and you go a separate route of self-delusion where you justify everything you gave up (and sacrificed) as “it was all worth it in the end”. But in a lot of cases, most entrepreneurs don’t get there. They fail. They go back to lives of quiet desperation. We never hear about them because survivor bias promotes the stories of those who have succeeded. (See “Black Swans” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb).

All this is to say is – Ian Chew’s question and my answer has created a bifurcation in my life. On one hand, I’ve built a successful career as a copywriter/consultant, which has afforded me a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. I mean, obviously, I’m not rich, as I still work. But on the other hand was “Ian’s Question”, a question of what I really want out of life.

And what I’ve come to realize at a deep-rooted soul-level understanding is that I write copy, invest, and take entrepreneurial risks because it’s a necessary evil. I want nice things in life, and that’s the trade off. It pays the bills and then some. Of course, I’ve always known this, but I don’t think I knew-it-knew-it until I had to truly face it like I did the last eight months. Truth is – there’s always been something in my life that wasn’t work-related I’ve kept putting off and haven’t given the attention it needed. So over the last eight months, I’ve had to answer a very simple crossroads question. Do I keep chasing opportunities, adding more projects, finding more clients, and doing stuff that might make more money (like “building an audience” and monetizing a newsletter with courses and stuff)? OR do I readjust my life to chase a passion that might never (and probably never will) make money, but fulfills this vague undefinable need?

Back in the summer of ‘22, when I got COVID (Osmosis readers will recall this event), and I was forced to confront my existence, as my COVID headache prevented me from distracting myself with books/games/shows… I already knew my answer. All “Ian’s Question” did was push me over the edge. What’s more, it also became very clear to me that during the entire run of Osmosis, I was trying to do something monetizable (and on top of that, make it unique to me), but ultimately ended up just sabotaging the entire venture. This revelation, too, was not necessarily news to me. I’ve written about this as early as issue #0012 of Osmosis. But again, it wasn’t until “Ian’s Question” that the glitch in the matrix became un-ignorable.

The thing is – Osmosis was problematic from the start. The intentions were wrong. The execution (and even the pivots) were shoddy. And the “jobs to be done” was simply never there, which is why, ultimately, I never found my holy grail of the elusive product-market-fit (PMF) that startups chase after. Osmosis was also boot-strapped, which meant all of it fell on me and I was not accountable to anyone except my audience (you). But even that was a tenuous relationship.

I’ll reflect more on this in tomorrow’s email. But allow me to remind you again – feel free to leave. I’m actively trying to kill this list, and only those that stick around will be invited to what’s next, and “what’s next” has very little to do with copywriting, human psychology, marketing, freelancing, or summarizing business and self-help books. So please, click here to unsubscribe if the only reason you signed up for my stuff relates to those aforementioned topics.