When your dream business meets reality

Lately, I’ve been thinking that businesses fall into three functional categories: We need you, We might need you, and We might want you.

The first category includes roles and services that are economically essential—software engineers who maintain revenue-generating platforms, dentists, mechanics—providers you pay because the alternative is costly or risky. The second category competes primarily for discretionary attention: novelists, TV creators, musicians, comedians. No one strictly needs a novel, but many people want one. The third category sits in between—services that aren’t mandatory but increase probability of success or efficiency, like editors, marketers, audio engineers, or virtual assistants.

When I started writing short stories, I realized my future book would live in the We might want you category: high upside, high uncertainty. The outcomes are asymmetric—you might earn nothing, earn supplemental income, or become an outlier success.

That forces a strategic question: how do you want to play the game? You can keep your 9-to-5 and build your passion project slowly, trade security for speed and go all in, or monetize We might need you skills to create more stability if you want to quit your 9-to-5 sooner. None of these approaches is universally correct; each has a different risk profile, cash-flow structure, and psychological cost.

For me, the real challenge is balancing ambition with realism—dreaming big without ignoring the reality that most creators never reach the top 1%.