This is my case to all founders to stop forcing their business to go a certain way and instead watch where it goes.

Because what I’ve discovered is that we’ve been sold a lie.

“Do this X thing, and you’ll get this Y result.”

This is such a lucrative message that millions of minds are continuing to buy into. And many are beginning to wake up to the reality of things. That no two people can do the same strategy in the same way and get the exact same results.

• We can see this play out in how Slack came out from internal messaging tool of a “failed” game development company.
• How Elizabeth Gilbert has openly said she’s been unable to repeat the success of Eat, Pray, Love – and how much she’s tried!
• And how many are still guiding others in attempting to reproduce the strategies they aren’t able to replicate themselves with marketing messages like “come get these things but know that results we’re sharing are not typical and not guaranteed”.

So what are we buying into really, then?

What this previous way of looking for strategies to grow a business has resulted in is the turning of creative founder ambition into a pressure to perform and produce made-up outcomes.

And the issue with that is that the first sniff of the outcomes potentially not coming ends up throwing whatever excitement and ambition we had out of the window back into helpless and powerless pit of lost hope and despair.

This comes in as quarterly goals to hit – pulled out of thin air that our worth is then measured against.

It comes as past results that we’re attempting to replicate.

Or past outcomes of others that we’re longing to repeat!

What got us started in the first place, that inkling, that spark of desire has later turned into some kind of pressure to prove that we’re these magical creatures, the robots, who have to fit a story that nobody questioned.

Instead… we’re moving away from chasing outcomes and back into living a creative, expressive, exploration of what becomes possible when we simply allow the living spark inside to guide our way.

Where uncertainty is part of the whole design.

It’s what makes playing games fun, outcome unknown, yet allows for full commitment and participation.

It’s what makes the joy of discovery possible, and shifts the disappointment of failure into celebration of an unexpected surprise – once we see that there can actually be no wrong turn in our journey, and that each is actually a shortcut guiding us to the most optimal path of what we’ve come here to create… as our experience.

Hence the work is now shifting from attempting to gain results to uncovering what makes the journey uncomfortable to experience the way it is right now.

Because it’s time to stop making the present moment into a project for reaching a better present moment… at some point in the imagined future that never comes.

– Dmitri “Now Simply Watching What Emerges” Sennikov