I think wanting to know how things will turn out is a very human thing.
We grow up with stories that have endings. The moment a story begins, we start waiting for something. The villain will lose. The person who has suffered will finally win. Sometimes the main character dies, but their child grows up and comes back to settle things. Even the sad endings usually give us a reason for everything that happened before them.
I wonder how much of that we carry into our own lives.
We have an idea, and almost immediately we want to know where it is going. What will it become? Will it make money? Will the difficult part eventually make sense? We want to imagine the version of ourselves who gets through it all and can explain why every step was necessary.
I understand that feeling. I just don’t think life owes us that kind of story.
I didn’t know what Ejom Studios would become
When I was at university, my cousin helped me take CS50 through edX. Later came a bootcamp, an introduction to someone who needed a website, and some social media work. Through those connections, we started working on podcasts.
The idea I had for Ejom Studios was a podcasting studio. Help people make podcasts. That was the work in front of me, and I could see more people wanting to do it.
Then people needed websites. We learned and built websites.
People needed someone to manage their business’s social media. We started doing that too. They needed short clips and reels from their longer conversations. They needed help creating content. We kept responding to what people actually needed.
Today, we’re a team of six working on websites, podcasts, branding, social media and other digital experiences. That is a lot broader than the idea I started with.
I can tell that story neatly now. But living through it did not feel like following a neat plan. One job led to a conversation. A conversation led to another job. Sometimes we had to learn something because the work required it, not because it was the next step in a strategy we had written down.
Let the idea change
I’m almost thirty, and I’m becoming more comfortable admitting that I don’t know exactly where things are going.
That doesn’t mean I don’t care. I care enough to keep working, to notice what is happening, and to change my mind when I need to.
I think an idea needs room to change. If I had insisted that Ejom Studios could only ever be a podcasting studio, I would have closed the door on a lot of the work we now do. I would also have missed skills and relationships that came through doing that work.
There is a difference between having a direction and demanding a particular ending. I can decide what matters to me and what I’m willing to work on without pretending I can predict every place it will take me.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out
I also don’t want to turn this into another story where everything eventually goes right.
You can start a business and it can fail. You might never return to it. You might start something completely different. Some experiences are disappointing, and you don’t have to pretend they were secretly wonderful because you learned a lesson.
But starting gives you something that imagining cannot. You meet the work itself. You find out what you enjoy, what you struggle with, what people need, and what you are willing to keep doing.
Those things can stay with you even when the original idea doesn’t.
So if you have something you want to try, maybe the first question doesn’t have to be, “How does this end?”
Maybe it can be, “What is a small version of this that I can start?”
Take the course. Make the first episode. Build the first page. Have the conversation.
Pay attention to what happens after that. Let it teach you something. Give yourself permission to adjust, or even to stop and begin something else.
You don’t need to know the ending before you’re allowed to start.
Back to the notebook