Build the Couch Before You Buy the Throw Pillows
Everyone tells you to pick a niche. I spent the last few months doing the opposite.
For the longest time, I thought if I did less and focused harder, I'd finally be able to explain it clearly. Less is more, right?
Over the past few months, I've dropped that idea and started thinking of my work like a portfolio instead.
For Field, that means doing work that may seem mundane and unglamorous, because it pays the bills and buys us room to experiment. Without that seemingly ‘boring’ work, the moonshots don't exist.
The book 'Art Thinking' has an analogy for this: build the couch first, then you can afford the throw pillows. The couch is your stable economic engine. The throw pillows are the experiments that might become the next one.
A serial entrepreneur once told me something similar - the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur is not die. Building a couch is the only way to do that.
Sounds obvious. It isn't, once you're the one deciding what counts as the couch and what counts as the throw pillow.
Name your couch - the thing that pays reliably.
Pick one or two throw pillows - the bets worth testing right now.
Decide what has to be true before a pillow earns the right to be treated like a couch.
This reframe has made me a lot less guilty about saying yes to the 'boring' work. It's not a compromise. It's the couch.
What is your couch right now? And what throw pillow are you secretly hoping becomes the next couch?
