In startup parlance, an exit strategy is how an entrepreneur plans to eventually cash in on their endeavour. Are you optimising to be acquired by a tech giant? Or aiming for a public listing? Are you optimising to be acquired by a tech giant? Or aiming for a public listing? Those are two common — and typical — exit strategies.
They’re also not very motivating — at least not to me. For one thing: if getting rich is your primary motive in life, then entrepreneurship is probably not the way to go. More than that, though: pouring your soul into something with the overarching goal of getting the hell out of it — to take the money and run, so to speak — just seems like such a bleak thing to do. Possibly lucrative, in the most mundane sense of that word, sure — but existentially speaking, it’s a very poor proposition.
I prefer thinking of the Spanish variation of the word — éxito — which means success. In that light, an exit strategy isn’t confined to the arena of entrepreneurship; it becomes a matter of defining what achievement means to you, in its most fundamental sense. An exit strategy, then, is something everyone can — and perhaps should — dream up.
In this more inclusive sense of the term, an exit strategy — or should we say una estrategia de éxito — is not a monolithic thing. You can have several, in fact; as many as you like. Just think how different success looks when applied to something like your marriage, as opposed to the project of renovating that old wreck of a car that’s taken you just over a decade — with still no light at the end of the tunnel. Or consider what’s at stake in the struggle to learn Japanese, in contrast to, say, mastering the art of sharpening a kitchen knife.
I’ve been giving some thought lately to what the point of writing really is — deep down. I find that the answer has morphed since I first started doing it in public, some five years ago. Morphed, and perhaps more than that: revealed itself. Because when I began, the motivation was murky. I was driven, I suppose, by a mute but insistent urge to express myself — and to do so in a medium that, by virtue of being a public stage, imposed a certain measure of discipline on my thinking.
That remains the core motivation to this day. But in the early days, there was also a part of me I didn’t quite dare acknowledge. I’ll admit it now, in hindsight: I was also after some measure of recognition.
I couldn’t tell you how big a slice of the motivational pie was represented by this ‘see me’ drive, but I can tell you that it was fuelled by the aspects of writing in public that I’ve now come to appreciate the least: the ‘Likes’.
The Likes were a dime a dozen on Medium, the platform where Slow Thoughts first saw the light of day (although back then it sailed under the name What Else Is New). Later, when I ‘de-platformed’ myself and moved to this plain-vanilla WordPress installation, I became one step removed from the Likes. They now appeared — to the extent that they did — on LinkedIn, where I had taken to posting updates pointing to Slow Thoughts.
Years passed like that, during which I convinced myself I had ‘quit social media’. Not because I necessarily disqualified LinkedIn — I’m still not sure whether it counts or not, and I don’t much care — but because I told myself I was merely using it as a shopfront: a neutral pane through which to hawk my wares.
I forgot, of course, about the insidious power of the Like — or, just as sinister, the absence of it.
Because checking to see if someone paid attention is a reflex hardwired into us by evolution. Add to that the astute behavioural engineering that makes a platform a platform, and you might as well convince yourself you’ll be fine trying heroin just this once.
Which is why I recently decided — or rather, forced myself — to take a hard look at my own private definition of success, as it applies to my writing.
What I found was — and yes, I know, what else is new — that the Like was at odds with what I love most about writing: the freedom to go off on larks, to explore unexpected (to me, at least) angles on phenomena that might not matter to anyone else in the world, but that matter deeply to me.
Which led, predictably, to an updated exit strategy. It’s quite elaborate, and I stick to it strictly. While it’s something I swear by, it’s not something I’m prepared to share with the world — because going public, after all, isn’t for everything.