Newsletter Emerges from the Cold

I've allowed this miserable cold to control me for the entire week. Last weekend, I was essentially confined to the house, save one trek out to buy lunch on Saturday. At least I got to watch a lot of mindless film, and some good stuff, as well. (Incidentally, I learned that State of Play, the BBC miniseries I watched last weekend, has been made into a full-length movies starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, et al; will be released in March.)

I made it to work all week long, but my wife caught my crud about Wednesday and was sick at home Wednesday and Thursday. She is back among the living now, but both of us continue to have ugly coughs and we still feel like refried shit. I supposed another week or two of being "under the weather" and we'll be fit as fiddles.

During this stint of feeling lousy and having to work nonetheless, I began to think back to all those times I've felt like I've just not been in the right business (if you've read my blog for long at all, you know that's always just below, or just above, the surface). Those feelings are out there again, but I'm doing something different this time. I'm examining WHY I feel the way I do.

It all comes down to control. I am a control-freak. You'd think owning my own business should take care of that, but it doesn't. My clients wield the power and the control, I don't. I'm not "doing my thing," I'm "doing their thing." There may be little I can do about that as long as I confine myself to a field I know enough about to cause people to pay me for my time and expertise. BUT, I keep coming back to what I enjoy doing and what I enjoy most when I do like my work: writing. It's not just any writing, though, it's a special kind of writing. It's writing about my interpretations of the meaning of changes in the business, social, political, and economic environments in which we all function. More precisely, I've always enjoyed reading the work of futurists who attempt to describe the ways in which current, new, and emerging trends are likely to affect the world around us. While I've not written so much in that genre, I have enough confidence in my intellectual capacity and in my writing skills to believe I can join the pack.

So, I've decided to try to satisfy my need for control over that little part of my life by creating a newsletter for my clients, with which I will share my interpretations of how changes in the world around us all will affect their organizations and their businesses, now and in the future. I will distribute it to all current clients and may send it to key players who were involved with clients in the past...and I may go to people who have the potential to bring clients to me. It's a bit of a risk, in that my interpretations often reveal my personal political leanings, but I think I can live with that. The purpose of the newsletter will be to give readers reason to think about things in ways they may never have thought about them before; I want people to say, "wow, I never considered that before." Actually, I don't care what they say; I want them to think something like it!

My first issue will be distributed soon, possibly within the week. If this backfires on me, I may add a "contribute here" button to my blog and request alms for the poor. I hope you'll be kind.