Every strong point of view starts with a rant.
That moment when you finally get fed up with the solutions on the market, the approaches everyone else swears by, the “best practice” advice that never quite works the way you’re promised it will.
My book started that way.
I was furious about the bad guidance I’d been given — hire before you’re ready, market every service like a course business, and “scale” at all costs. I wrote a lot of angry essays about it.
I’ve come to believe that to have a point of view about what does work, you first have to get honest about what doesn’t.
I want you to rant more. But you can’t stop with the rant.
Because ranting gets impressions.
But it doesn’t create impact.
For that, you have to move past the rant.
What’s on the other side of a rant?
On the other side of a rant is curiosity — curiosity about why those “best practices” don’t hold up.
On the other side of a rant is exploration — the quest to scan the landscape to see what exists, what’s missing, and what’s necessary to add.
On the other side of a rant is your voice and message — the distinct perspective that sets your work apart.
Keep going, and the work crescendos into solutions — frameworks, services, and systems that capture what you’ve learned. Maybe even into a book.
That’s what came after the rant for me.
Because critique creates impressions. But curiosity creates transformation.
Leaving the Casino started as a rant and became a philosophical look at how we build aligned businesses. It's not enough to rant about what doesn’t work, because that leaves people with critique but nothing else. I had to investigate what does work, and why. Not just what worked for me, but how pulling together the best parts of all those “best practices” could create frameworks to help you decide what’s right for you.
I shared the deeper story about how my ranting evolved into a book on this week’s Aggressively Human podcast. How those early rants evolved into curiosity, then exploration, and eventually the backbone of Leaving the Casino.
So rant about what’s broken.
Then move to the other side and start building what’s next.