When it comes to how to spend your days, no one tells you “when” or “how” to jump into actualizing a curiosity. In other words, we all know no one tells you when you should take the jump; and I’ve spent a great deal of my career sharing what created my own “seachange moment” to start my law firm. Without an ounce of irony, I will always be grateful for what looked like the worst time in my life. That period reframed what looked or felt like a “fearful next step”; a luxury not afforded to many.
In the 8 years since then, I’ve always known that I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I shudder to think about the likely shiny life as a “regular” litigator or corporate lawyer laced with the lingering question of “what if” that would have occurred if I’d stayed in my comfort zone.
Comfort zones are a myth; a temporary holding pattern. A rest stop on the journey. It doesn’t always require a life- altering life occurrence to break you out of that holding pattern; eventually, you just outgrow that comfort zone.
I doubt this is a new concept for most entrepreneurs.
But what happens when you’ve made the brave, bold, “wild”, “how did you know you could do that?” leap, surpassed all of the statistics of failure (45% of businesses close up shop before the five year mark, and 96% of businesses don’t make it to the 10-year mark), provided for your family, built a legacy… but in your gut, you know you’re stuck in a holding pattern?
What happens when you start to question if that ladder of success that you built, brick by brick, you’ve kept alive, may actually be a ladder of innovation in name alone? In reality, that quiet voice of your integrity knows it’s more of an escalator?
A heady question that will result in different answers for everyone. But, a question that you can’t unthink once it hits you.
I’ve always known that even as an entrepreneur (a very “rogue” role for any lawyer), one of the best decisions I’ve made in my entire career was operating in an even more rogue role: as an “entrepreneur with a law license”.
When I started my firm 8 years ago, a coaching figure I was learning from advised me to choose: focus solely on the firm, or on the other businesses (at the time, just the Creative Law Shop®). It was thoughtful advice -on paper, sound- but I knew even then my path would look different. I knew, even though I hadn’t seen the term used in “conventional marketing”, that I didn’t have to set down either hat. I was both an entrepreneur and a lawyer; an entrepreneur with a law license, as it turns out.
If I could give any piece of advice to someone in love with entrepreneurship, it would be this: get really good at one thing, be patient, and then strike. Many of the colleagues I most admire have done exactly that — building enduring firms and impressive portfolios by focusing their energy on a single “X” by amassing numbers of trademarks, surpassing my numbers in the USPTO.
By that, I mean they intentionally focused on that one thing, and became extremely proficient in it. They’ve identified their “growth path” (which is half of the battle). It usually looks like an uninterrupted linear growth path, such as:
Jump start _____________________________________________________________> Success
This applies to most areas of life. For example, one of my college degrees was political science, and I reference one specific moment from one class all the time. I’m convinced we don’t just operate within an “X” axis. We’re on an X/Y axis, and if we step back and examine the totality of the circumstances, it’s obvious.
When looking at American politics, stating that political beliefs are on a linear path, or exist only on an “X” axis is such a myopic view of the scenario, it’s almost a false narrative (intended to create bias, and the foundation for many failed arguments). When studied, political scientists agree that most political viewpoints look like this:
X is most easily identifiable. Point being, beliefs usually fall within a quadrant rather than just in a black and white two-dimension.
In the context of business, many are successful because they’ve mastered how to grow and scale on the linear model with the actionable steps we’re taught as online business owners. Half of the battle is defining what the “X” actually means (when do you know to jump?). We get so good at “thinking outside the box”, we’re in reality stacking up boxes that create a set of stairs that we perpetually climb. Recalibration — and the reviewing of your X’s – is the modern-day seachange, expanding capacity beyond the linear.
In other words, I approach my clients’ businesses from the lens of exactly how I am thinking about scaling my own businesses- asymmetrically.
But for the past little while, I’ve known intuitively that continuing to grow, expand my boundaries of thinking, the answer isn’t just found in building more businesses. Growing asymmetrically didn’t require more of the same behaviors (starting a new company appx. Every 2 years). This approach has shaped how I’ve led Paige Hulse Law — and it’s exactly why my next chapter will exist in an asymmetrical version of anything I’ve created. I disrupted the script of how a law firm should operate; repeating the same “disruptive” behavior, of course, at some point, no longer qualifies as disruptive.
I believe that some businesses should, actually, grow on just an “X” axis”. But to know whether or not that applies to your own, you need to examine the map in its totality.
But I’ve known since the first 40 days of starting my law firm, that for myself, the skills of one sharpen the skills of the other. In other words, I am a better lawyer for my clients because I literally walk in their shoes. Likewise, I’m a better entrepreneur because of what these years of advocacy have taught me. I have an intellectual property law firm, but what that actually means is that we don’t just register- we restructure existing intellectual property into licensing deals that 10x existing companies.
In reality, the second half of the battle looks more like remembering that while we work so hard to grow along the “X”, we forget about the “big blue ocean” that is the “Y”. In other words, I’d argue that entrepreneurial growth actually looks more like this:
There’s a difference between the question of what you should do, v. asking yourself what you should do.
Permission is a myth, but paradigms are not. In other words, you may be like me, and roll your eyes a bit when you hear the first part of that sentence, but have you identified the latter? You can build something extraordinary and dismantle the existing market. Or, you can build your own market.
That same wake-up call prompted me, over the past few years], to take a hard look at how my own practice is built — and why. What have we built? A key to a truly rich life, or a gilded cage?
Taking this out of the abstract, for many of my clients this has looked like examining (and strategizing) their existing intellectual property portfolios, and then creating licensing strategies that create legacy-building recurring wealth, while simultaneously making more space for their other innovations. Honestly, I don’t think I could have found the richness in my vocation that I’ve found, or have such a natural proclivity for identifying and executing these strategies, if I wasn’t in the same position myself.
Just like any journey, navigating this axis requires continuously checking in, and recalibrating your direction as necessary. I’m sure you’ve heard the example of the “1 in 60 rule”- Simply put, for every 1° you are off course, you will end up being 1 mile off course after traveling 60 miles. Consequently, getting just 1° off course will result in you becoming farther off course the longer you travel. A flight from New York to Tokyo would end up somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Similarly, thinking of business as an “X/Y” axis allows us to identify and execute on those elusive “10x v. 2x” opportunities we’re told to look for.
The more I’ve studied this X/Y-axis idea, the clearer it’s become that growth sometimes means recalibration — one where the question isn’t whether you’ve mastered the X-axis, but when you’re ready to chart the Y. That’s where this combines with my thoughts around seachanges in our lives and businesses. In the weeks ahead, I’ll share how I’m applying that in my own work — an evolution that expands capacity without losing clarity.
You never know what doing things differently in your arena could lead to the type of asymmetrical movements required to both build a business, and build a legacy.
As a final note,
The same applies to your business — growth isn’t always linear. Sometimes, it means recalibrating your foundation before you expand your reach. In 2017, when I had made the decision to start my law firm, I remember that moment of “announcing it” as being the actual hardest step. I knew what the right next step was, but exposing it to the world took a different type of courage. I remember the morning I walked into my final boss’ office, posting this quote:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
A reminder for myself more than anyone else: not only is it about stepping into the arena. It’s what we do in there; how we move about our axis, that counts.
For those who’ve followed my journey, I’ll soon be sharing what this recalibration means for the future of my practice.
