What do you do when you stop loving your babies?

Or why I fell off the face of the earth

Over the past few months, I’ve received no less than 43 messages from people asking me why I fell off the face of the earth.

My decision to step back from business has been brewing for some time, but I’m finally ready to talk about it. 

I started The Scribesmith at 22, and it will always be the single most rewarding experience of my life. My team, the clients I worked with, the mad experiments we pulled (The launch planning app, anyone?). 

But the thing about entrepreneurship is that it requires so much intrinsic motivation and that’s great. While you have it. 

Between feeling increasingly isolated during the pandemic, and then regularly working 16-hour days building Terrain, I had very much started to feel like my personal identity had melded into my business. 

“What do you like to do for fun?”

Uh I don’t know. Work I guess?

But somewhere along the business stopped feeling like fun. Running a business is great and all, but when other people’s livelihoods depend on you, and there’s a recession looming over you? You take on what you can get instead of what fulfils you. And there are lots of people who can do good work even if they don’t enjoy it, unfortunately for me, I’m not one of those people.

My hobbies had fallen by the wayside, and once the joy of work started to diminish, I started feeling deeply unsatisfied.

So in 2022, I made some pretty big life changes. I packed up and left Canada and moved to Ireland. Got a master's in Entrepreneurship so I had a pathway into consulting or academia, or something while still working on the businesses and trying to rekindle some of that joy. 2022-2023 was time for me to figure out whether this was something I wanted to do for another decade, if not, I needed to figure out an exit plan. 

By the end of the year, I was done. I was incredibly burnt out and for a few months, I just kinda did what I felt like. From Dublin, I moved to Belfast, and then back to Vancouver for a few months, and then back to Ireland, where I split my time between Dublin and a little town called Carlow. 

If you’re wondering what I’m doing now? I’m writing from a little coffee shop in Dublin. Working with a few select clients, and being militant about boundaries so I can find balance and joy outside of work.

I’m still consulting, trying to contribute to open-source projects, and trying to redefine the way I engage with work. 

What is an inflection point?

It’s a turning point. I think in business and in life, the most interesting stories are moments of change. This newsletter exists to capture some of those stories.

I’ve wanted to do this for a while and toyed with the idea of creating something that goes a bit deeper into the micro (and macro) moments of change that end up shaping our lives and careers (ChatGPT, anyone?).   

I’m still figuring out the format for this, but you’ll hear from me every couple of weeks. It might be about marketing or business, it might be about the pastel del nata I’m currently eyeing.

If any of this is interesting to you at all, stick around for the ride.

If not, thank you for being part of my journey so far, and you can hop off the list by hitting unsubscribe.