In these stories, the overt goal was to make money, but the clients’ contrary actions indicated otherwise. On the surface, the projects failed. In actual business terms, they failed. In terms of maintaining a life narrative, well, the projects failed that way too, but only because the clients probably weren’t doing it consciously.

It’s kind of like wanting to be a famous author, so you wear something that looks authorish and hang out with literary people and keep up with the New York Times book review and so on… but you rarely get around to any actual writing. You must not seriously want the book to get published, because if you really wanted that you’d behave differently. What you actually want is to feel ambitious and sophisticated, and in those terms it’s working.

This is kind of related to (but not exactly the same thing as) what Mark Silver wrote about passion in business. “Surprisingly, your business can do better with less passion,” he says, because passion can be misleading.

I guess I’m saying to be clear on why you’re in business, and why you want to do a certain project. If it scratches an itch or fulfills an emotional need, fine, but it works better if you’re clear about that. Maybe you have to start by giving yourself permission to say, if it’s true: “Self, it isn’t going to be profitable, but I really feel a need to [for example] host this community.” Instead of lying to yourself by saying, “Self, hosting this community will make me a lot of money in the long run” when the business reality doesn’t support it.

Being clear with intentions is a big deal, but sometimes it’s kind of difficult.

So I guess I’m wondering: did they really get what they wanted after all, or did they just rationalize it after the fact?

Very interesting post.