The Day I Stopped Asking What People Wanted

For a while, I outsourced almost every creative decision I made. I honestly thought that was the responsible…effective thing to do.

Not to an agency. To Google.

Search volume. Competitor research. SEO. Market trends. Best practices. Customer avatars.

If ten people on the internet had an opinion, I wanted to know it. If there was a podcast episode about it, I listened. If there was a YouTube video promising “the right niche,” I probably watched that too. If there was a business bro on the internet, I was watching his clips on YouTube or reading his book.

I genuinely believed that if I gathered enough information, the answer would eventually become obvious. 

None of those things are bad. But somewhere along the way, I realized I’d accidentally started asking strangers a question they could never answer. 

What should I spend the next decade making?

And that’s how I got to that fateful Friday night where I started burning the whole thing down. Because I knew the answer to that question wasn’t perimenopause anymore.

But…if I wasn’t going to do peri anymore, what the hell was I going to do?

I let myself grieve the idea for a few days. Then I spent weeks throwing tons of random ideas against the wall: travel planning…coaching…courses…affiliate marketing. I suppose I probably should’ve realized I was truly in the throes of a breakdown when I started googling things like paint striping and signing up for elevator mechanic school.

Travel planning sounded fun…

…until I realized I wanted to do the traveling myself and write about it way more than I wanted to book it for other people.

Coaching sounded meaningful…and after spending years as an instructional designer, courses seemed to make perfect sense.

…until I imagined spending the next ten years trying to become an authority again. Hard pass. Probably forever.

Newsletters felt the closest. When I was growing up, my dream job was to be a writer.

Then I actually did start a real Substack outside of Venvy Lab…and discovered that writing on the internet still somehow requires social media. 

It seems every platform insists on inventing its own version of social media. Apparently there’s no escape anymore. (Bitter. Party of one. 🙋🏻‍♀️)

Online business management actually made a ridiculous amount of sense.

I’d spent years building a career around project management. I’d learned an unbelievable amount from trying to build Venvy Lab.

But then I’d think…

How exactly was I supposed to market myself as someone who helps people build businesses…when I still hadn’t built the business I actually wanted?

One by one, I realized I wasn’t rejecting bad ideas. I was rejecting lives I didn’t actually want to live. 

And then I grieved some more.

Because every single idea, and every rejection, eventually brought me back to exactly the same place.

I just don’t want to do that.

By then I was so exhausted and disappointed by the entire experience that, for the first time, what might sell stopped being the first question I asked.

The only question I still had the energy to care about was this: 

What keeps pulling me in?

I didn’t want to spend weeks researching another idea. I didn’t want another spreadsheet. Another customer avatar. Another trend report. I wanted to be interested.

And I’d noticed something else. The things I found myself wandering toward had nothing to do with market research anymore. They were things I’d always loved. Books. Travel. Long walks outside. Noticing things. Writing essays. Remembering simpler times and all the analog rituals we’ve let ourselves lose now. 

I didn’t know what any of it meant yet. But in hindsight, I’d been circling the answer the whole time. I just hadn’t recognized it yet. 

I had absolutely no idea what that thing might be. No plan. No roadmap.

But I did know one thing.

The moment I slipped back into market research mode, the wrongness of it all came back almost instantly. 

It hadn’t taken me nearly a year to realize something was off this time. No. It took about five minutes.

That’s when it finally dawned on me.

There is no amount of marketing data that can tell you what you’re truly meant to care about.

The turning point wasn’t that I stopped caring what people wanted.

It was that I stopped asking strangers to tell me who I should become. Nobody else could answer the question I actually needed answered.

I only cared about what kind of creator I wanted to become.