I have been racking my brain about how to fight my website’s declining traffic for months. But what if it’s a feature, not a bug? What if all there is to do is enjoy it?
Less traffic means less revenue. Okay, sure, that’s the part I, like most people, was focused on and immediately started worrying about. But apart from that, what do fewer website visitors really mean? It means there’s a smaller community. Therefore, it’s a smaller project. So why don’t I treat it as such? If something no longer wants to offer a full-time occupation, why don’t you just make it a side hustle? Perhaps that’s exactly where it’s meant to go.
“We shall find the truth when we examine the problem,” Bruce Lee once wrote. “The problem is never apart from the answer; the problem is the answer.”
A mentor of mine once told me that “your problem is someone else’s solution.” What you lack, someone else may have too much of. If the two of you get into a room together, perhaps you can both walk out with more than you had when you walked in.
But sometimes, as per Bruce’s words, the solution can stem even more literally from the problem. What if your challenge is something to be celebrated and embraced instead of defeated? “When the dream starts to fall apart or the formula we are using stops working, this can be a time of crisis,” Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter, writes in her book Be Water, My Friend. “Or this can be a time of coming back to oneself, back to your dream, back to your clarity.”
For a long time, I felt I had to publish a new book summary every week on Four Minute Books. That I had to send out a newsletter each Saturday, follow a certain format, and focus on popular titles. Maybe now that none of those things are no longer working, I can just do whatever I like. Only summarize books I personally enjoyed reading, and only after I’m 100% done with them. Change the newsletter to a more casual, personal format. Or write longer summaries whenever I feel that the usual four-minute format doesn’t suffice. Sometimes, what you lose in earnings, you gain in creative freedom!
The problem is never apart from the answer — but what if the problem is the answer? Whatever your current struggle, look at the challenge from a different angle, perhaps even through it instead of at it, and maybe you’ll realize there’s no struggle at all.