I don't know what I do, but I do know what I'm doing.
On letting work take its own shape instead of forcing it into a mold.
“I still don’t really understand what you do.”
Someone who knows me very well in every other respect said this to me over dinner the other night when the conversation turned to work. I thought it was kind of funny, so I laughed, pointed at my chest, and said:
“You know what? Me neither.”
I was being coy, but I wasn’t kidding. “What I do” doesn’t distill down into something that can be blurted out in a split second. It doesn’t map neatly to any one familiar job title, definition, or area of expertise. It changes day to day. It adapts its shape to the work as the work is being done in real time.
My work is adaptive and relational. Sometimes I’m writing. Sometimes I’m editing. Sometimes I’m listening more than I’m speaking. Sometimes I’m helping someone work through an idea that’s been circling them for years without ever quite landing. The throughline isn’t a specific output. It’s the process of helping something take shape that couldn’t quite do so on its own.
I’ve been using the phrase personal producer to describe a lot of the work I’m doing lately. I’m not using it as a clever title, or because it fully explains anything. I’m just using it because it feels like it’s pointing in the right direction.
Like a music producer in the studio, I’m not there to create the work for someone else. I’m there to sit alongside them as they try things, discard things, hesitate, double back, and eventually realize a version of the work that feels like what they’re looking for.
I do whatever I can to help others create the right conditions for their best creative moments and best creative work to come into being.
That’s not something most people would “get” from a quick read of a business card. It doesn’t boil down to a list of services, a price sheet, or a job description. Much of its value is invisible while it’s happening.
What I get to do with my clients lives in the space between intention and expression. It lives in half-formed thoughts, unfinished sentences, and instincts that haven’t yet found language. It involves helping someone slow down enough to notice what they already know and haven’t yet articulated. It involves a thousand little details that need attention. And it involves an ever-changing list of combinations of these things.
Some work is compression-resistant.
So, when someone says they don’t understand what I do, I don’t take that as a criticism, as a failure of my own writing or communication skills, or even a warning signal that I’m explaining myself and my work poorly.
I have come to see it as a natural response to work that lives between many different categories, and to my way of looking at the world through the lens of all of the things that might help the people I want to work with the most.
Some kinds of work only make sense once they’ve been seen in motion, and I don’t need everyone to understand my work. I need the right people to understand it.
The people who want to engage in this kind of work don’t usually find their way to me because of a perfect summary of a service I provide. They recognize the value in my work because something they see me doing, or the way I talk about the work, aligns with something they want to bring into the world themselves. Understanding, in that sense, is less about definition and more about recognition.
My friend Rudi, who has gifted me with several phrases I’ve used to describe myself and my way of looking at the world over the years, introduced me to an old Irish proverb nearly a decade ago: Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile — a beetle recognizes another beetle.
It came back to me while I was writing this, because how people tend to find someone like me and choose to work with them makes me think of the sentiment behind it, something akin to birds of a feather flock together, or like knows like.
I no longer feel a sense of urgency about making the work immediately legible to everyone. Not everything that matters needs to be quickly understood. Some things take time. Some things reveal themselves gradually through exposure, observation, and pattern rather than through explanation.
“Positioning” has its limits, too.
Doing work that’s hard to explain does have consequences and challenges.
It can be harder to introduce, harder to place, and harder to describe without reducing it to something smaller than it actually is. It doesn’t always survive first contact with a conversation about “what you do,” because the full shape of the work isn’t meant to be understood all at once.
Over time, I’ve learned that this isn’t just a communication problem. It’s a feature of how creative work unfolds in practice, especially in spaces that don’t have creative directors, org charts, or preassigned roles to lean on.
Every meaningful client relationship I’ve had begins with one specific thing. That thing might be a problem, a question, or a frustration, and it’s always immediately relevant. The meeting between their most pressing challenge and my most applicable skill set becomes the bridge that gets me across the chasm into their world. It isn’t their whole world, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s simply the entryway.
Once I’m inside, and once I’ve helped someone with the thing that brought them to me in the first place, trust forms. Context accumulates. The relationship deepens. Only then does the broader shape of the work become visible. Only then does it make sense to talk about the other ways I can help.
Trying to explain everything up front defies how trust works. It asks for comprehension before experience. It assumes someone needs a complete picture of my capabilities before they’ve seen me work at all.
That has never been how my work has actually unfolded.
People don’t come to me to understand me. They come because there’s something specific they want help with. That something matters to them, and I happen to be well positioned to work on it. The rest emerges later as a result of doing the work together.
Clarity doesn’t mean full disclosure at the beginning. It means precision at the point of entry.
Naming the job isn’t the same as describing the work.
There’s an opposite side to this coin.
Job titles are supposed to explain what someone does, yet they rarely do. They’re shortcuts rather than descriptions. They flatten complex, situational work into a phrase that fits on a business card or an org chart.
Anyone who’s held a title for more than a year knows this. The lived reality of the work always exceeds the label. The day-to-day involves judgment, adaptation, context, and decisions that never show up in the title itself.
In that sense, my situation isn’t unusual. I’ve simply refused to oversimplify.
Most people have a title that sounds clear and obscures the real work. I have work that’s real and clear to the people inside it, and it resists being cleanly named from the outside.
The mistake is assuming that a title should carry the full burden of explanation. It never does. It can only point, and it can only suggest.
“Personal producer” isn’t a complete description of my work. It’s a signpost. It’s a way in, not a map of the entire territory.
Once you accept that titles are inherently incomplete, the discomfort around not being immediately understood starts to ease. The goal shifts from perfect explanation to appropriate entry.
Not everyone needs to “pick a niche.”
For a long time, I’d been aware of the tension between what my work actually looked like and how I felt compelled to describe it. I kept assuming the solution was better framing, a cleaner title, or a tighter explanation that would make the shape of the work feel more settled, recognizable, and acceptable.
Over time, that effort went from annoying, to exhausting, to infuriating.
That didn’t come from the work itself being “wrong.” It came from how much energy I was spending trying to make the work resemble something it wasn’t. I was optimizing for legibility instead of honesty. I was trying to resolve my own discomfort with the language choices needed to get the point across as quickly as possible, and in the process I was completely ignoring what the work itself was trying to tell me.
I’d known for years that the more honest move was to stop insisting on a single, stable description. I’d also known why I avoided it. Titles offer reassurance, and they give other people something they can find easily, and buy easily. Letting go of that reassurance felt risky as someone who’s prided himself on complimenting my creative skills with a strict approach to processes and documentation and chasing “clarity.”
By the end of 2024, the balance tipped. I became more frustrated by the friction than I was afraid of the ambiguity, and I stopped trying to resolve the conflict. Or, more accurately, I just stopped treating it like something that needed to be resolved in the first place.
It wasn’t much of a reinvention, or a pivot. I simply let go of my long-held assumption that the work needed to be simplified in order to be legitimate.
What followed was exactly what I hoped for, but had been afraid wouldn’t come.
The work became easier to inhabit. Conversations became more natural. The people who engaged with me were the ones who were excited to tackle the work together as it actually unfolds rather than needing all of the answers fully discovered, scoped, and explained in advance before agreeing to start the work.
I don’t have a cleaner title now than I did before. What I have is less resistance to the uncertainty around the work, and much more trust that once the work begins, the work will be good.
The trust in myself it took to let go of those assumptions and embrace this way of looking at my own work… took quite a few years for me to build up. I was afraid to act on it for a long time, even though I suspected it would lead somewhere better.
So far, it has.