Nobody around you will understand why you are doing this, do it anyway
I owe everything to about 4 people
What I’m Seeing
I want to talk about the part nobody warns you about.
You can find advice on headlines, content strategy, monetisation, posting schedules.
There are courses for all of it.
But almost nobody talks about the loneliest part of building something online: the people closest to you will not understand what you are doing or why.
Your partner will wonder why you are spending your evenings writing posts that get 12 likes.
Your friends will ask when you are going to get a proper job. Your parents will worry. Your colleagues, if you still have them, will think it is a phase.
This is not a maybe. This is a pattern I have seen in almost every professional I have worked with who started building something of their own. And it is the number one reason people quit before anything has time to compound.
Not burnout. Not lack of ideas. Not the algorithm. Isolation.
My Personal story
When I left Warner Bros, the reactions from people around me ranged from confusion to concern.
I had spent 13 years building a career that made sense to other people. Head of EMEA YouTube Strategy, that is a sentence people understand.
It fits into a dinner conversation (and dating apps, too).
They call it “career suicide”.
“I left to build something on my own” does not fit into a dinner conversation.
It opens a door to questions you cannot answer yet. What exactly?
How will you make money?
What if it does not work?
I did not have clean answers. I had a conviction that the path I was on was dissolving and a vague sense that there had to be a better way to use what I knew.
But here is what kept me sane through all of it.
I owe everything to about 4 people. Not my whole network. Not a mastermind group. Four people.
We all started our careers around the same time, in London. Same age. Same hunger. Completely different paths.
Some ended up at Google and Apple.
Some built businesses through YouTube worth millions.
None of us planned it. It grew organically, we had the same interests towards our careers, personal finance and whatever was/is happening in the world.
The most valuable thing these people gave me was not introductions or advice.
It was a protected environment where my worst ideas could get destroyed before they saw the light of the world.
They were not yes men.
They told me the hardest things about my thinking, specifically because they wanted me to get better.
That is very different from criticism.
It is the difference between someone tearing something down and someone forcing you to build it stronger.
One Framework: The Right Circle
The people who love you most will almost never understand what you are building.
That is not a failure of the relationship. It is a structural limitation.
They are not in it.
They cannot see what you see.
Asking them to validate something they do not understand will frustrate both of you.
What you need is not more support from the people already around you.
You need a different circle, even a tiny one, made up of people who are building in the same era, facing the same kind of problems, and willing to be honest with you about your work.
Not a networking group.
Not a mastermind you pay for.
Just a few people where the dynamic is: challenge my worldview without making me feel unsafe.
Show me by example where I can get to.
Call me out when I am choosing comfort over growth.
You do not need 50 of these people. You need 2 or 3.
The criteria is simple: do they make you think harder?
Do they hold you to a higher standard without tearing you down?
Would you trust them to tell you your idea is bad?
If yes, hold onto them. They are rarer than you think.
The Build Update
Showrunner exists partly because of this problem.
The professionals I worked with were not just looking for strategy.
Half of those conversations were tactical.
The other half were someone finally talking to a person who understood what they were going through.
That is the loneliest gap in this space. Everyone sells you the how. Nobody sits with you in the why-is-this-so-hard.
If you have not tried it: showrunner.one. It is a tool, but it is built by someone who knows what this part feels like.
One Thing to Try This Week
Think about who is in your Right Circle right now. Not your friends, not your family, the people who understand the specific thing you are building and will be honest with you about it.
If the answer is nobody, that is the most important problem to solve this week.
Not another post. Not another framework. Find one person who gets it.
Reply to this email if you want, that counts.
Francesco