What’s been on my mind, just in the last few days, is something I’ve been watching play out across the online business world over the last few months. A real wobble in a few corners of the industry, where people I know, and people I really respect, have been quietly questioning whether what worked for them five years ago is still going to work in another five.
What I’ve noticed is the pattern of who panics when this happens, and who doesn’t. I think it tells us something deeply important about how we build our own businesses.
The story
A few months ago, someone I learnt hugely from over the course of a year (someone who’s been a real shaping voice in online education, and who has helped a lot of businesses think more clearly about what they’re doing) made a fairly significant shift in her own business model. She decided that what had been working for her for years was no longer the right shape for her, and she changed direction.
It caused a huge amount of unease in her industry.
People accused her of being disingenuous. Of seeing things others couldn’t see and not sharing them. Of changing direction because she knew the old model was dead, and not warning everyone else. There were a lot of conversations questioning her integrity, questioning her motives, suggesting she was abandoning the very industry she’d helped build.
She communicated honestly and calmly throughout it. And she also continued to say something I think is really important. That the industry would keep growing. That there was nothing wrong with the model itself. That this was simply a personal decision, based on what was the right shape for her business at this stage of her life.
But the noise was loud. And it was really angry.
The bit that stayed with me was that the noise was almost entirely coming from one type of person.
What I noticed
The people who were most distressed by her decision, the ones leaving the most upset comments and writing the most worried posts, were largely people whose own businesses hadn’t really worked out yet. They were people who had followed her model very rigidly. People who had taken her structure, her formulas, and her language, and used them effectively as a roadmap for their own businesses.
When she changed direction, they panicked. Because they didn’t know what to do anymore. Because the formula they’d been following was suddenly gone. And because their own businesses hadn’t given them anything else to stand on.
So they reached for the explanation that felt least painful. Which was that the industry must be dying. That something outside of them must be the problem. That the whole of online education was failing.
It was much easier to believe that than to look inwards and ask why their version of the same model hadn’t worked when other people’s had.
I want to be careful and gentle here, because I’m not saying any of this to be cruel. Building a business is hugely difficult, and I have huge empathy for anyone who has invested in something that hasn’t yet given them what they hoped for. We’ve all been there in our own way. I have certainly been there.
But it’s worth naming the pattern. Because it’s a pattern I see again and again, in every industry shift, in every moment of uncertainty. And until we name it, we can’t see ourselves in it.
The people who panic when an industry shifts are very often the people who built their businesses by following someone else’s blueprint. When the person they were following changes direction, they have nothing of their own to fall back on. So they assume the whole thing must be ending.
The other side of it
At exactly the same time as all of this noise was happening, I was also quietly watching a handful of online educators in completely different industries to mine.
These people are absolutely flying right now. I mean really flying.
One of them, who I’ve been following with a huge amount of admiration, had an eight-figure month not long ago. (And yes, she has a real team around her, and yes she’s been building this for a few years, but she only started her business about five years ago, which I think is really worth pausing on.)
What’s interesting about her, and the others I’ve been watching, is that they’re all using fairly classic, fairly traditional business models. The very models that all those panicking voices had been declaring dead.
But they didn’t follow someone else’s formula. They took the classic shape of the model and made it completely their own. They leaned into who they were. They built around their actual strengths. They knew exactly who they were for. They didn’t try to copy anyone, and they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel either. They just made the wheel theirs.
And they shone. And are shining right now.
That’s the difference. They used the model as a structure for their own thinking, rather than as a substitute for it. Which sounds like a small distinction, but it’s actually the whole thing.
The pattern underneath
This sits at the heart of so much of what I talk about here on the journal, and on the podcast.
The work of building a really good creative business is the work of becoming so deeply rooted in who you are, what you’re naturally exceptional at, and who you most want to serve, that nothing happening in the wider industry can knock you off course.
Not because you become arrogant about it. Not because you stop listening. But because you’ve done the inner work that means you’re actually building from somewhere real. And so when someone else changes direction, or an industry wobbles, or a new technology arrives, it’s interesting to you. You watch it. You consider it. You take from it what’s useful. But it doesn’t shake you, because the foundation underneath you is yours. Fully, deeply yours.
This is the thing that takes the most courage to do, and is the most worth doing. The temptation, especially in the early years, is to find someone successful and copy them. There is nothing wrong with learning from people. I’ve learnt hugely from many people. But there is a really big difference between learning from someone, and outsourcing the question of who you are to them.
The first builds something durable. The second builds something that depends on someone else’s continued direction.
The same pattern, right now
I want to mention briefly, because I’d be missing something if I didn’t, that I’m seeing exactly the same pattern playing out right now around AI. Which follows on directly from the last two podcast episodes.
The people I see most upset and most fearful about AI tend to be people who weren’t fully grounded in what makes their work theirs in the first place. So when something arrives that can mimic the surface of what they do, they understandably feel deeply destabilised. The language gets very absolute very quickly. AI is the end of creativity. AI is killing real work. AI must be rejected entirely.
But the creative business owners I see who stay calm and keep quietly building are the ones who already know what they’re exceptional at. Who already know who they’re for. Who already know what makes their work theirs. They look at AI and see a tool. They don’t see a threat. Because the thing AI cannot replicate is the foundation they’ve already built.
It’s the same pattern. And it’ll be the same pattern for the next thing, and the thing after that.
What matters is whether you’ve done the work that makes you steady inside the change.
What I’d love you to take from this
Watching what other people do is fine. Learning from them is fine. Drawing inspiration from them is wonderful. But the foundation of your business has to come from inside you, not from inside their model.
Understand yourself first. The work you’re naturally exceptional at. The people you most want to serve. The thing you most want to be known for. The way you actually like working. The shape of the life you’re building this business around.
Then, and only then, follow what makes sense. Use the structures and the models that fit you. Borrow what’s useful. Let go of what isn’t. Make the model your own. Make it impossible to copy, because the substance of it is you.
And then block out the noise.
There will always be people telling you a particular industry is dying. And at exactly the same time, there will always be people telling you it’s never been better. There will always be people telling you about the next big thing to be afraid of. Most of that noise is coming from people who haven’t done the inner work themselves. And if you’ve done yours, you don’t really need it.
There are always opportunities. There will also always be failures. The difference between the two is almost never about the market or the moment. It comes down to how grounded you were in your own work before you walked into any of it.
The calm always comes from the foundation underneath. And the foundation is fully and wonderfully entirely yours to build.
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