Work∞Life Balance - WTF?!

The madness of solopreneur life — and why I'm doing it anyway.

In Short: A week launching a business — diary style.

Substack System: I use this tracker daily — comment “YES” and I’ll send it for free

On My Radar: Nicole Croft — eloquent, wise, literary.

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Dear friends,

I was speaking to one of my best friends tonight, and she quipped:

“Are you sure helping other people with their short-form content isn’t costing you more time than doing your own ever did?”

I chuckled, ruefully.

“You got me there!”

The truth is that launching a business solo is a hell of a lot of work, and this week has been utterly savage.

Not, though, for the reasons you’d think.

Because the creative knows that whatever full-time job anyone has — there is always a secondary full-time job on top of that: your art.

This week’s Substack is a whirlwind tour through the last week launching my business while the album project comes to a head.

It’s rough and ready with bits of behind the scenes and hopefully a few insights!

With love, Jim

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Tuesday 12 May — Winging It

I wake up in a panic. I am releasing “The Substack Workstation” on Saturday, and over my coffee I realise that it makes no sense to send the launch video out with the Saturday Substack.

I want the newsletter to be about the written word, and feel a video dilutes the message.

However, since I’m in the launch week, the video needs to be written AND recorded today.

I need to make some money, so I realise I’ll have to do the whole damn thing myself.

I bundle my way down to my office at Mahalla and start writing a script. I power through it and get in good flow.

As soon as I start recording…. ach… it just feels not me to read from the teleprompter.

I decide to wing it.

I know that the message will be clearer if I stick to the script. But equally, life is about energy. You have to back yourself. Yes, on the one hand I feel the allure of making a smart product video. But that video doesn’t reflect the love and energy I put into creating “The Substack Workstation”

By the time it’s filmed, edited and uploaded, it’s been a 16hr day and I crumple in bed at 3am.

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Wednesday 13 May — Cringe Mountain

Wake with a startle. FUCK!

I’d set up the Substack last night and it’s already gone out. I have literally no memory of what I’ve made, and dread my foolhardiness.

They say that business is about the capacity to make decisions, but I literally circle my computer with foreboding. I decide not to watch it at all. I’ve surely already embarrassed myself before my unwitting subscribers, who, to make matters worse, have been accosted with a rare midweek email.

As the morning develops, my mood lightens.

We all know it — if you are going to put something out into the world, you have to ascend cringe mountain.

That means showing your face, shipping it, and getting on with it

We forget it, but we are our own harshest judges. And you know what — so much love goes into this stuff, and if you don’t stand behind it, no one else will.

Some lovely comments come in from my dear subscribers, and I feel that I can once again exist in my own body. Thank you Steve Palfreyman Maja Greja , and all you others who rescued me this day!

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Thursday 14 May — The .com Nightmare

IDIOT!

I’ve designed the landing page wrong. I have built it into my website for The Creative Life, but realise that I need the .com if I’m ever going to get SEO traffic.

I buy www.thesubstackworkstation.com from Cloudfare but only then does it dawn on me — I have a live product page and even first customers.

All the work I’ve put into integrating the buying widgets through Lemon Squeezy and setting up the automated email sequences through Kit (weeks of it) is suddenly in mortal danger. Migrating to a new site — a job I’ve never done — risks losing the lot.

And so begins the nightmare.

15 hours of meticulous work, taken step by micro step. There is so much that can go wrong, but by surrendering my very existence to this task, I manage to get it done.

This may seem obvious to anyone in the know — but for those that don’t, PLEASE buy the .com (or corresponding) for the landing page for your business.

Now if you click on “The Substack Workstation” from my website, it navigates to the .com immediately.

That means I can build SEO traffic from people actively searching for a tool like this. A dedicated .com tells Google this is the canonical page for the product — and every backlink, share, and click compounds into one URL instead of getting lost inside my wider site.

I reward myself at the end of the day by working on a ditty on the piano:

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Friday 15 May — The Icky Sell

Put in a shift in the morning to get the “Introducing The Substack Workstation” newsletter ready.

Any newsletter is a miniature labour of love. It is the first newsletter I’ve written in years to actually sell something.

It feels curiously icky.

Not because of any feeling of shame — I am very proud of what I’ve built — but just because usually I am sending out my newsletter from a more reflective perspective.

That said, the point of The Creative Life is to explore the tension between content creation and making art.

What I have built is in many ways the culmination of that process. The problem we face in life is that we are always in deficit of

• time

• money

• energy

My whole life is designed around how I can preserve my energy for the creative work I do. The problem is that everything takes so much time that you are always eaten away at the core. As dear Kafka (see my essay here) wrote:

"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

That said, I use the workstation to generate my pre and post CTAs, and am rather chuffed to get this done in a jiffy — as I detest marketing my newsletter after writing it!

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Mahalla, where my office is based in Berlin.

Saturday 16 May — Return to My Story

Release day! I am officially a Solopreneur.

After 5 months coding, 3 rebuilds and 1 eccentric product video — it is finally live.

I’ve taken some punches along the way, and so decide to celebrate by dressing up as Rocky.

This year I had intended to have my album Chromatic Zero out, but suffered a vocal nodule that shattered my original plans.

I’ve also been in a state of questioning for some time about my life as a freelance filmmaker. I love my work, and especially my clients, many of whom I’m blessed to call friends.

But as I get older, I feel more than ever that I want to fight for every second of my creative life.

In my freelance work I have the privilege to be paid to tell other people’s stories. But I feel I have more work to do than life to live. And so, it is time to return to my story.

My friend was right — the Solopreneur path is going to be a monumental challenge.

But equally — this week I made sales from my own studio, and was told by customers that they’re really finding value in what I’ve built. It makes me so happy — to help, to bring value, and of course, to earn.

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Sunday 17 May — A Letter to You

It might sound absurd, but I find in my heart great hope. Yes, the world can weary you, and yes, some days every blasted thing goes wrong and you question your own competence and capability.

But equally, we must guardrail our own gifts — and to do that we have to figure out the temporal world.

There is a long way to go but I am learning so very much.

My solopreneur path will fund getting Chromatic Zero made, and I remain in pursuit of the dream.

Whatever your dream is, I want to leave you with this — do not underestimate your capacity to do wonderful things.

You are capable of making bold moves.

You have strength to realise your insane visions.

You have skill in you beyond what you know today.

But you must find the courage to bear the burden of the time it takes to fulfil all this.

I would ask, on that matter, only one thing — that you keep believing in yourself.

With love, Jim

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