The unexpected break

I ain’t gonna lie: these past few months have been pretty hectic. Up until late last year, I was running 3 very active businesses: a startup in the music information space, a venture with an artist friend of mine who was booming and a consulting firm with a major client project.

Around that time, we came to the conclusion that the music startup wasn’t going to pan out: not enough traction despite the many efforts we put into it, these things happen more than you think if all you know of entrepreneurship is watching Silicon Valley. Great show of course, just not 100% real life. Although, to be fair, it may be more accurate than many others…

Meanwhile, my artist friend only kept getting more traction, and with it came more stuff to handle, projects to setup, admin to deal with. Things haven’t quite changed on that front, but I’m taking it a little slower for organisational reasons. Turns out working with artists is an interesting endeavor in and of itself. It’s not my first rodeo, just confirms my assumptions. Why do I keep doing it, you might ask? Because I’m a failed artist, that’s why…

Then, the consulting gig also got peculiar. Lots of projects to deal with, not enough resources, organisational changes… In this case, you might say I was facing the opposite issue than with the aforementioned artist: we’re talking big company issues, where a top level decision can have an impact on thousands of people and years of work. Not that it got that far (the team was pretty small, hence many of the issues), but you could still feel the effect of a big machine in motion. And me not being one. For all sorts of reasons that can be logically deduced from what I just wrote, I ended my mission there a few days ago, which is the reason I have time to write a blog post in the middle of the week — during working hours. What the future holds on that front is unclear; what is clear, however, is that I do take advantage of those free working hours.

And so, in a matter of 6 months, I went from having 3 near-full time jobs to having one: cat-sitting. And no, I’m not talking about my daughter: she goes to daycare (luckily). I’m talking about my actual cat, who spent most of the afternoon sitting on my lap, between me and the laptop. Which is the reason I only started writing around 5:15 — he went for a bathroom break. Good times.