The Day the Tolerance Ran Out

By Junaid Ahmed

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I jumped on a demo with Doreca Delbridge this week. She's a coach who works with creative people. Two minutes in, before I had touched the screenshare, she told me what the last three years of her business have actually been about.

Her son graduated high school three years ago and moved out almost immediately. "It just really hit me how quickly time goes," she said. "And if I blink, my daughter is going to be gone."

Then she said the line I haven't been able to shake.

"Once I hit 40, my level of tolerance for things I don't enjoy just started to go down."

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She wasn't being self-pitying about it. She was being clinical. The business she had built worked. It paid the bills. People knew her for it. It also, by the time her daughter came home from school, had emptied her.

"I'm spent. I'm short-tempered. I'm not looking forward to doing anything. We were just surviving."

The hard part wasn't that she stopped enjoying the work. The hard part was that she had become known for a version of the work she had quietly outgrown.

The audience expected the old thing. The income depended on the old thing. The new thing, the thing she was actually excited about, didn't yet have a market that recognized her doing it.

That gap is the entire problem.

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Most "designing your business around your life" advice treats this as a scheduling problem. Work fewer hours. Take Fridays off. Charge more so you have to do less.

That isn't what Doreca is dealing with. She isn't trying to do less of the work she already does. She's trying to do different work, on a brand that was built for the old work, with an audience who was assembled around the old work.

She has been iterating for three years. By her own description, every quarter is a tinker, does this fit, does this fit, does this fit. She's not stuck on the business model. She's stuck on the handoff between who I was known as and who I am now.

I think about this a lot, because it's also the founder problem.

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I spent eight years being known for a podcast called Hacks & Hobbies. Seven hundred episodes, a thousand guests, a whole network of relationships built around long conversations with people I admire. When I started telling people I was building software, the first thing almost everyone said was a version of but you're the podcast guy.

You don't get to wave that off. The brand you built carries weight, and that weight is the reason anybody listens when you launch the next thing. It's also why the next thing has to be visibly connected to the first thing, even when the work underneath has changed completely.

PodGlue is, in one sense, the most direct way to say what the podcast was always trying to teach me, that the relationships are the asset, the conversations are the IP, and the system around them is what determines whether any of it compounds.

It is also, in a less obvious sense, my version of what Doreca is doing. Same person. Old audience. New shape of work.

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The thing about the tolerance dropping is that it tells you the truth.

Up to a certain point in a career, you can absorb the parts of the work you don't enjoy. You're building. The growth covers the tax. Then, one year, the tax outgrows the growth. Doreca's number was forty. Mine was somewhere around episode four hundred. The number is different. The signal is the same.

When the signal arrives, you have two options. You can fight it and call it discipline. Or you can listen to it and rebuild the operation so the parts you don't enjoy aren't the ones running through you anymore.

That is, almost word for word, the brief I gave myself when I started PodGlue. Take the parts of the podcast workflow that drained me, the follow-up, the show notes, the social posts, the guest emails, and make sure they don't have to go through my brain to happen. Keep what I'm there for. Get rid of what I'm not.

If that sounds suspiciously like what a coach would tell a client to do with their whole business, that's because it is.

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Doreca asked me at one point, mostly as an aside, what people know me for vs. what I'm actually excited about. It came out as a question. It is, in fact, the operating question of every creator past a certain age.

The honest answer is that the gap between those two things is allowed to be wide for a while. You don't have to close it overnight. You don't have to do a brand pivot announcement. You have to keep showing up under the name people know, while you ship the work the new version of you wants to be known for.

That's it. That's the whole strategy. The audience will rotate around the new work as you publish it, because they were never really there for the old work. They were there for you.

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I'm building PodGlue partly because I needed it, and partly because building it is the version of me I'm betting on next. The tolerance ran out on doing the podcast the old way. The next thing was already there waiting.

If you're in your own version of that gap, you have my respect. It's the most honest place a creator can be.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks & Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue.