I was in the hospital room with my wife and our newborn daughter (our first) having what felt like a psychedelic experience. If you’ve ever experimented with any type of psychedelic, you know that feeling where the day-to-day hustle of work and business suddenly seems like a ludicrous pattern of behavior we’re all trapped in.

Holding my daughter, between the waves of overwhelming joy, I felt intermittent spikes of panic. The stakes of work had never seemed lower (“who cares?”) while, at the same time, the need to provide had never been higher.

With this new dimension of my life, would I ever truly care about “work” again?

But, like any psychedelic experience, the separation between that moment and my normal, day-to-day reality closed after some time. I was once again a fish, swimming around asking, “What’s water?”

I got back to work, but…it’s never been quite the same.

My values shifted. How I wanted to spend my time shifted. Fundamentally, who I am, completely shifted. I started seeing social media as stealing my (increasingly scarce) attention away from my family and my business, which complicated my feelings about creating content on social media.

I began valuing privacy for me and my family more highly, which is at odds with showing up—visually—on social media and YouTube.

I wanted to talk about these things—and how hard being a new dad is—but that doesn’t really fit inside the Creator Science container.

And would anyone care anyway?

But the business was eight years old. The business, while having it’s own name and brand, was still so tethered to me as an individual creator. I had eight years of showing up as Jay Clouse—the guy behind Creator Science. Only…suddenly…I wasn’t sure who Jay Clouse was.

This has slowly simmered and festered, developing deeply conflicting feelings with my own business. The cognitive dissonance has gotten louder as more time has passed. The business is a machine that runs (to some degree) with or without me. But instead of feeling like I was confidently driving the bus, I began feeling like a passenger to my past decisions—along for a ride I don’t even want to be on some days. Creating content for content’s sake wasn’t exciting. The work suffered. Outcomes from the work suffered.

I’m a new version of myself cosplaying as a former version of myself—because that’s what the business (and presumably the audience) expected.

But is that story true? Is it serving me? At least one of those answers is “no.”

I shared this with my mastermind group—a handful of other creators in The Lab.

One of them, a friend named Austin, asked, “Have you given yourself permission to reinvent yourself?”

I have not.

I think about it all the time. I yearn for it. But I haven’t had the courage.

Our brains are math machines. We can easily calculate a potential loss (like revenue), but have a hard time predicting potential gains with the same confidence. So the equation is one-sided—and it’s not pretty.

But…maybe modeling reinvention is exactly what other creators need to see. And if not creators, people from all walks of life need the courage to reinvent themselves—especially today.

I’m working towards it. My courage grows by the day.

I’m still discovering who new Jay is. But I don’t think I’ll discover my new self until I give myself permission stop cosplaying as my old self.

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“Hmm…” said the czar of pads and helmets as he measured my skull. “You’re a ‘tweener.”

This was the ruling every year. We were never quite sure whether I belonged in a medium or a large helmet—I was stuck in between. If we chose medium, I would deal with headaches from the pressure. If we moved up to large, it was a little too loose, which looked funny (a terrible way to look in high school), and lost some of its protective benefits.

I remember this seemingly innocuous comment, decades later, because it has described so much of my life.

***

My best friend growing up had a brother a year older than we were. For a few years, I found myself hanging out with his brother and his friends more than kids my age—we just seemed to understand each other better. I’m hesitant to call it maturity (we certainly weren’t very mature), but hanging out with the older kids just felt more comfortable. Maybe it was growing up with two older sisters (one four years older, another eight), but I never quite felt like I fit in with my classmates. The close friends I did make were ‘tweeners of their own right, spending time in just about every social circle but really only belonging in our own.

This followed me to college, where I quickly discovered an undergraduate student club focused on entrepreneurship. I was a freshman, and the club was full of juniors and seniors who were all-in on tech (this was the period of Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, etc.) It was so cool just to be around them. They had big business ideas, and they were DOING them—in college!

Shortly after graduation, several of them moved to the West Coast (San Francisco and Seattle) to immerse themselves in startups. Many of them are now post-economic (i.e., they made enough to retire). I stayed involved in the club as I got older and they had graduated (I eventually led it as president), but I couldn’t recreate that magic. What’s more, I never quite felt like I was on their level to begin with.

In every season of my life, I’ve always been an inbetweener. I was virtually always the youngest person in the room, which came with equal parts exhilaration and isolation. I felt like I had somehow snuck into a space I didn’t belong in. I was always excited, but also a bit terrified that someone would ask, “How old are you?” When I’d answer, they’d always make the same face—a look that was equal parts shame and disbelief. Disbelief because I present as older, and shame because they believed it. I’ve maintained a beard since my early 20s in hopes to stave off the question entirely.

I’ve never outgrown this. Even today, I identify with the perspective of parents and people 5-10 years older than me. The audience analytics across all my content channels show my audience is typically 5-15 years older than me. My wife and I moved into a new neighborhood, and we seem to be the youngest couple.

I started my content business in 2017, which was both years ahead of most creators today but years behind the class of bloggers like Pat Flynn, Mark Manson, Tim Urban, or Maria Popova. Somehow, I was both late to blogging and podcasting, and too slow to take social media more seriously.

One constant throughout all this time has been my ability to build community. Whether it was leading clubs, organizing in-person events like Startup Weekend, or online communities like SPI Pro and The Lab, I’ve always had a knack for creating space for people.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time feeling out of place that I really want to create a space where I feel at home.

My friend shared this post, which I felt a little too personally:

The painful irony for community builders, though, is that when you play such a crucial role in the formation and moderation of a space, the community itself treats you a little differently. Not badly, but actually with a certain amount of respect and esteem reserved only for the leader(s) of that space. It’s kind, it’s flattering, but ultimately it actually creates distance between you and the rest of the community, which feeds into the same pattern of loneliness and isolation as before. So, by creating a space where you feel you belong, you actually create conditions in which just fitting in is more difficult.

I share all this because I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately.

When my wife and I were planning our wedding, one of the first decisions was how many guests to invite. Once family is accounted for, the question comes down to friends—and that forces some uncomfortable clarity.

What is a friend? Depending on how you define it, I may have two thousand friends—or maybe I just have two. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that while my outer ring of friends has expanded, my inner circle seems to have gotten much smaller.

Now that we have a daughter and are growing our family, I’m noticing that my “village” is actually pretty small. Our neighbors are friendly, but none of them are friends. Their kids are several years older than ours, or they’re empty nesters.

By spending a decade striving, I deprioritized many friendships. Of course, I’m friendly with many of the people I’ve met over the years, but I haven’t made many new lifelong friends. Worse, I lost touch with some of my oldest friends—and you can’t make new, old friends.

So after a decade of helping people become better creators, I find myself as a creator pulled to explore how to become a better person. Instead of connecting with an audience, I want to better connect with myself and the people around me. Maybe this identity of being an “inbetweener” isn’t something I need to hold onto. Maybe through different actions and priorities, I can actually feel comfortable belonging.

That’s what I’ll be exploring here on this Substack. If you’re interested in joining me on that journey, I’d enjoy your company.

If I just continue doing what I did last year, I’ll have my first seven-figure year since starting the company in 2017.

There’s just one problem: I don’t want to.

When your highest gear isn’t enough

My wife and I recently started leasing a new SUV. One of the decisions we had to make in the process was the size of the engine. Ultimately, we chose the smaller option – we couldn’t imagine needing the larger engine for our purposes.

While that smaller engine seems like MORE than enough for our needs, it does have limits. If I suddenly needed to tow a heavy trailer every day, that engine would struggle (and may even break down).

You know that sound of a car accelerating, when your engine reaches its highest pitch before shifting into the next gear?

R-R-R-R-EEEEEEEE

That’s what my business sounds like right now.

The engine of this “car” has reached its limits. It’s working as hard as it can. The problem is, our lean team is already operating at the highest gear – and if I don’t upgrade the engine, it will eventually burn out.

The crossroads

I’ve been at this crossroads for a while now. My wife and I are the only W-2 employees with a growing list of independent contractors. We’re running this hybrid business, part product company and part media company, publishing across most major platforms.

We sell our own products. We sell advertising. We publish a weekly newsletter, podcast, and YouTube videos bi-monthly.

It sounds like the best of all worlds – but it’s actually a bunch of complex capabilities that we’re doing, but certainly not optimizing. The content itself still largely relies on me. I’m operating as both visionary and integrator, splitting my time (and brain) evenly between creativity and operations.

I’m a huge bottleneck. The engine is operating at capacity, but it feels like we’re doing everything at 50% of what the car is capable of.

So we have two options:

1. Accept that this car is limited by its engine

2. Upgrade the engine

To this point, I’ve chosen door number one by default by sticking with the status quo. I love this car, and it does a lot for our family. However, this car is currently much more valuable to my family than anyone else – it works with ME driving it, but if I ever wanted to sell the car, the buyer would notice some limitations.

So, as the year has gone on, I find myself drawn more and more to the challenge of stepping through door number two.

And that door leads to reinvention.

The chasm that must be crossed

The biggest hurdle (I think) is structural – finance, legal, and benefits. Right now, my wife and I contribute to a Solo 401(k) plan, which has some tax advantages. To hire W-2 employees who are NOT my wife and I, we will have to change our benefits packages.

Full-time employees are more expensive than contractors when you factor in all the elements of compensation (yesterday, an attorney estimated about 9-10% more expensive). But that tradeoff comes with more stability, stronger employment contracts, and a generally stronger business.

One of my biggest hurdles to getting myself out of the operations of the business is the trust required to bring in a contractor into systems with privileged information (banking, payroll, payment processors, etc). The second biggest hurdle is mental. Hiring full-time employees is a commitment to them and their families. Of course, no employment relationship is forever (especially in today's world), but I take commitments seriously. And hiring someone full-time adds both financial and emotional stress (in the near term).

What’s on the other side

Ultimately, here’s the future I’m hoping to realize:

1. Get myself out of operations

2. Support growth in my membership

3. Build enterprise value

4. Create more time to fuel up

5. Double down on writing

Let me break down each of these…

Get myself out of operations

Before I was creating content, I was a startup operator. For a long time, being a good operator was my identity. In the early days, this served me very well – I could effectively split my time between business operations and content creation. But as the business has matured, both halves require more attention. And even more problematic, my available time as a new father has been dramatically reduced.

Ultimately, these are two very distinct roles that a mature organization divides into at least two people. The question is, which half do I take?

In a creator business where much of the audience relationship begins and ends with the creator themselves, the clear answer is to focus more on the content than on the operations. But, as previously discussed, integrating an operator is something I see as too high-trust and high-value to do on a contract basis (let alone what the courts may say about the technical classification of an employee).

Plus, the longer I’ve been in business, the more I’ve realized my own ego. Part of the reason I’ve been hesitant to bring in a true operator is that I believed no one could operate the business as well as I could.

But that’s ridiculous.

In fact, I’m more certain than ever that a true operator could operate the business much better than I could. And by creating new value, they ought to pay for themselves.

Support growth in my membership

The Lab (our membership for creators) has steadily grown since its inception in March 2022. We’re nearing 400 total members, $500,000 in ARR, and we’re focusing on facilitating small group experiences both online and offline.

Small group experiences (especially localized, offline experiences) require a certain level of scale to create geographic density. That is, if you’re growing as an online community first with offline experiences (top down), rather than an offline community with online experiences (bottom up).

Small group facilitation also requires logistical effort. If left to the members themselves, the experience varies widely (and often fails to coalesce at all). So, an optimal community strategy has staff support.

Stability is paramount in a community, not just among the members, but also the community leaders. So, to do it well, you want full-time team members whose incentives are aligned with the members.

Build enterprise value

Creator businesses often suffer from key person risk. Basically, when any business has a critical employee (or founder) who’s a linchpin of value, that’s a problem. What happens when that employee decides to quit, retire, or has some unforeseen disaster?

When the business’s success starts and ends with the creator, it’s a brittle business. Hopefully, you maintain enthusiasm forever and lead a long, healthy life.

But what if you don’t?

I’m grateful for the decision to build a true brand behind Creator Science, but I’m still a key person. But by building a larger content and community team, I reduce that risk and develop the inverse: enterprise value.

I have no intention of selling the company, but what if I built it as if I could? That’s just smart business practice. In that world, all of my effort not only creates value today while I’m at the helm, but potentially long into the future as well.

Open more time to fuel up

I interviewed James Clear on the second episode of the Creator Science podcast. We talked a lot about writing, and he shared the importance of reading:

I sort of think about writing kind of like driving a car. So I, I wrote for a few years, and then my audience kept growing, and I got to like 100,000 readers or so. And getting to that number made me think, ‘Oh, now people are really paying attention, so now I have to write like all the time, and now it needs to be really good.’ So I spent more time writing, and it actually got worse. And I think the reason is because writing is kind of like driving the car and going on an adventure…and reading is kind of like filling the car up with gas. The point of having a car is not to only fill it up with gas and stay at the station, you have to drive somewhere and go on an adventure at some point. But you do need to stop and refill every now and then. And so for me, if I ever struggle and don't have good ideas to write about, I need to read more need to fill up the tank.

I’ve always believed I was a slow reader. So, as my time became more scarce and valuable, I reduced my reading (because it was hard to justify the time). But I’m now seeing how short-sighted this was.

There are different types of fuel. Anything you consume is fuel for the tank, but books tend to be the most efficient, clean, and potent fuel. As I’m working on my book proposal, I’m reading more books than ever before. I’m reaping the benefits of dense, high-quality, highly-revised writing. But I’m also learning about different book writing structures. Different tones and voices.

It’s invaluable.

Your content is downstream of the content you consume. Besides getting more reps, the highest-leverage way to improve your content is to actually improve the content you consume.

Double down on writing

In my last post, I shared that I’m working toward my first book. Writing has always been my endgame, but I’ve consistently reduced its space in my life in favor of other needs of the business.

But with this eye towards business building and getting myself out of some of the operations, I intend to refocus more of my time toward writing. One worry I have with AI is that people will outsource their critical thinking capacity. When we stop working our muscles, they atrophy.

This can also be seen as a potential competitive advantage. The opportunity is to think more. Not shortcutting your thinking, but sharpening it.

Writing is thinking in action. And I want to do more of it.

Conclusion

This year is going to be awkward and painful. A lot of new capabilities need to be built. From the outside, it may look like my output isn’t changing, or may even get slower. But I need to dedicate my attention to upgrading the internal engine people can’t see.

A year from now, people will say, “Wow, you’re on fire!” and it will be the lagging results of this effort.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

If you enjoyed this, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or Restack with your own thoughts if you’re inclined.

Book Proposal Update

For paid subscribers only ⤵

Read more

I’ll talk more about that later. First, we need to go back.

Creator Science started 8 years ago as a simple daily newsletter. I was working with a coach named Chris, who helped me identify an extremely limiting belief.

One afternoon, he told me to go for a walk. I was to take a notebook, but not my phone, music, or any other distractions. He told me to listen to my internal monologue – what was it saying?

Turns out, my inner critic is pretty harsh:

I am not an artist. I don’t have good ideas, I can’t do creative work, and I am less valuable because of it.

Chris is a great coach. He challenged me to take that limiting belief and prove myself wrong. At the time, I was in my mid-20s and dreamed of being an author. Having recently discovered Seth Godin, I decided that the best way to prove my creativity was to start writing a newsletter.

Daily.

So every day for a year, I published a short, unimpressive, navel-gazing newsletter (not unlike this one) just to prove I could.

And it worked! In year two, I pared back to weekly, and that newsletter has now grown to 64,000 subscribers under the Creator Science brand – a media company earning $800,000+ per year.

During this 8-year journey of building the company, I’ve worn many hats and taken on many identities, including writer, podcaster, YouTuber, teacher, and community builder.

As the business has diversified beyond a newsletter and required more from me, I’ve stopped identifying as a writer. It’s such a small percentage of the work I do now – and yet, becoming a published author is still the dream.

At some point, dreams need to be pursued.

That’s what brings me to Substack.

In some ways, I feel like I’m restarting my writing journey. Yes, I write and publish two issues of Creator Science each week, but as the brand has grown, the company needs a specific part of me. People come to Creator Science to learn and grow as creators, and I intend to fulfill that promise.

As a writer, I know that container.

But I’ve lost touch with writing about the messy, human side of my life. I’ve also gotten further and further away from being a beginner, and more than 75% of my audience are just getting started today.

What if I had to start over?

That’s also what brings me to Substack.

It’s easy to point to my success to lend my words weight, but I started 8 years ago! Things are different today, and I haven’t felt the excruciating pain of deafening silence in a long time.

So I’m here to practice writing. To get outside the Creator Science brand voice and truly inhabit my own (maybe I’ll find they aren’t so different after all).

I’m also here to learn the platform. An increasing number of creators inside our membership (The Lab) are writing on (or considering) Substack. I pride myself on having a strong working knowledge of the best platforms available to creators today, and Substack was a blind spot.

And I’m here to be a beginner again. What does it feel like to build from zero? Of course, I recognize I have some advantages with my name and reputation – I’d have to write under a pseudonym for a complete beginner experience.

Oh…I’m also working on a book. There, I said it. I’m currently in the proposal process, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll be full-on writing a book by the end of the year. Some of that writing will fit within the Creator Science container, and others won’t. This Substack will be a perfect place to test those parts that don’t fit within the Creator Science ecosystem.

I’ve been on Substack for two months now. At first, I was just reading other people’s writing, lurking on Notes, and then I began posting on Notes myself. At least a month ago, I knew Substack would be my next experiment.

But why haven’t I written more?

I know I’ve been hiding from the work. Hiding behind excuses like “not knowing what to write about” (but I defeated that excuse years ago)!

So, about an hour ago, I returned to the prompt from Chris. I went for a walk, turned off the podcast I was listening to, and just started listening to myself.

That’s why I haven’t been writing.

I’ve held onto this imagined future of being an author for so long. The idea that I may not actually be a great writer and the disappointment I’d have to face…It’s just so much easier to delay that possibility.

Besides, I’m “busy.”

In a brief moment of strength, I pushed myself to sit down and write this. It didn’t take long, because it’s what was real.

I’d love to hear what you thought.

Cheers,
Jay

PS: I activated paid subscriptions yesterday. We have three tiers:

1. Free: For the casual reader. Access to free blog posts (weekly-ish).

2. Paid: For fans who want to get deeper into my brain. Access our Subscriber Chat and private journal entry sections of the blog.

3. Trustees: For the special few who want to support my journey to becoming an author. You get the paid perks, the ability to start Threads in the Subscriber Chat, random surprises, and a soft spot in my heart for believing in me.

I write a morning journal most days. Paid subscribers will see some journal entries (stuff I’m not quite brave enough to share with the whole Internet) and early updates into my book-writing process.

Regardless of whether you ever become a paid subscriber, I appreciate you reading.

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PPS: I recorded an episode of my podcast to go deeper on what I’m doing here, which you can listen to in your favorite player!

One of the unique gifts of being human is our extraordinary imagination. In addition to our imagination, we have more visibility into the world of possibility than ever before.

Billie Jean King is credited with saying, "If you see it, you can be it.” Today, we can SEE what it looks like for anyone, anywhere, to achieve their dream.

Inspiration is at an all-time high.

Then one day, you have a flash of insight. An idea appears – seemingly out of nowhere – and you can’t stop thinking about it. When you tell people about it, their eyes light up. They’re excited and supportive – “You should do that!”

Everything and everyone around you seems to reinforce just how good this idea is.

And yet…you haven’t started.

You tell yourself that you just have a few more details to work through. This isn’t quite the right time – better to wait until “things slow down.” Every now and then, you get a sudden burst of courage, and you sit down to start.

But maybe I should change the laundry first.

Actually, let me just check my email…

Suddenly, you glance at the clock and realize you’ve been scrolling Instagram for an hour and lost your motivation.

Maybe tomorrow.

The perfect idea

When an idea is just an idea, it’s perfect. Our imagination has this vision for how it will change our lives. We don’t know exactly when or how long it will take, but we’re confident this idea holds the key to a better future.

The details are fuzzy – just chemicals and synapses firing in our brain, after all. But when we sit down to get started, the details begin to matter. Uncertainty enters the equation – and that’s much less comfy than the feeling of the fuzzy, perfect idea in our mind.

That uncomfy feeling makes us pause and whispers in our ear some convenient distraction, like, “It’s a good day to clean the garage.”

An existential threat

The longer we wait to take action on the perfect idea, the more perfect it feels. And the more perfect it feels…the harder it is to get started. As time passes, we get completely enamored with this perfect idea, and the uncertainty from DOING THE WORK feels like a threat.

The threat is that maybe this idea isn’t perfect.

Maybe I can’t do this.

It threatens your very identity. Not your current identity, but an unrealized identity you’ve created for yourself and become completely attached to. In your mind, you’re already living in the future where this idea is real.

If I can’t do this, then I can’t BECOME this.

But that identity isn’t real! And it never will be if you don’t start moving.

The salve

Action absorbs anxiety. Greater than the risk of trying and failing yourself is the risk of seeing someone else succeeding with this idea while you sit idly by.

Dan Pink has been studying regret with his recent book, The Power of Regret, and found that as we age, our principal regrets are not our failed attempts, but our failures to attempt at all.

The truth is, no idea comes out perfect. Our understanding is incomplete, our assumptions are often wrong, but we don’t learn that until we try.

You need more data.

You can’t realize that future in your mind until you take action.

We all experience the quick tumble from peak confidence. But imperfect action – the first little step – gets you out of the trough of sorrow and on the path to becoming the person you saw in your mind.

I wrote this for myself

I’ve been lurking on Substack for a month now. In my mind, this publication will be the perfect outlet for my more personal writing – things that go beyond the creator space (what I publish under the Creator Science brand).

Feedback has been positive! I’ve grown a following of ~500 using just Notes, and 200 subscribers here before publishing anything!

And yet…the idea was too perfect.

What if no one likes my other ideas?

What if I’m not actually a good writer?

What if Substack isn’t a place where I feel welcome?

It was time to take the first step.

Thank you for reading it.