I’ve been having the same thoughts for months:
I am not making enough money
I can’t find “good” people to work with
I can’t close “good“ clients consistently
I can’t post content and work at the same time
This week these thoughts hit me again when:
A $3000/mo client ghosted me (money)
A team member left because he couldn’t manage time with college (people)
I didn’t work on one studio for a week because of all this
I couldn't film content as planned and it made me frustrated
And to make the matters even worse I skipped gym and caught cold.
But this week, instead of spiralling like I usually do, I read something that made me realize something: I wasn't failing at making money or finding good people. I was failing at being me.
All this time, I've been trying to build what other people told me to build. Their content strategies. Their business models. Their hiring processes.
No wonder I kept hitting the same walls.
It’s a trap and the only way out is to not listen to anyone who doesn’t have the life I want. I wasn't making money because I was trying to succeed at someone else's game instead of creating my own.
Maybe the $3000 client who ghosted me wasn't my client to begin with. Maybe the team member leaving me was my fault because I was trying to fit people into roles that didn't match my actual vision.
What if the problem wasn't that I couldn't do these things - but that I was doing the wrong things entirely?
So I decided to start over, but this time from who I actually am...
I spent time thinking - who I am? what are my beliefs? what do I stand for? what do I want to build? who do I want to build with? what is my vision? what is my north star? what are the principles I value that I wouldn’t settle less for in any case?
I realised what I really want is far different from what most people are doing. And that's exactly why I kept failing - I was building their dream, not mine.
Right now, One Studio is almost out of resources. We're basically at the end of our runway, which reminds me of Apple in the mid-90s before Steve Jobs came back. They were crashing, almost dead, and if they didn't do something radical soon, it would be over.
But that's when Jobs stopped trying to compete with everyone else and started building from Apple's unique vision. If you remember the "Think Different" campaign it was not marketing it was them deciding to build from who they actually were instead of copying what worked for others.
That's exactly where we are. We're almost dead, but we know what to do. We've realigned everything - our beliefs, our approach, our vision of what we want to build.
We’ve started working super hard on the right things. Just like Apple did.
To make it a bit dramatic: We're like a plane at the end of the runway. Either we take off or we crash.
Exciting times ahead.
I'll tell you how it goes - I’ve got more things to reveal in the next letters.
— Sam
PS: What beliefs have been holding you back from building what you actually want?
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