Worthy Wednesdays

Issue #57 - Transformation doesn't require burning it all down. Sometimes the most radical change happens in the margins of what already exists.

💡 The future you're building doesn't require you to abandon the present you're in. It requires adjacency, the courage to hold multiple truths simultaneously.

The dominant narrative around change is binary: old life or new life. Who you were or who you're becoming. The safe path or the bold one.

This narrative serves a specific purpose: it keeps transformation packaged as event, not process. It makes change legible to systems that need clear categories. It creates content for the reinvention industrial complex.

Here's what that narrative obscures: most people can't afford the luxury of clean breaks.

Sometimes you can't afford the rupture. Sometimes you can, but the cost is steeper than you're willing to pay. And sometimes forcing the break too soon kills what you're trying to build.

Adjacency is the strategy of building what's next in the margins of what is. It's the side project that becomes the main thing. The weekend exploration that becomes your livelihood. The quiet identity you're cultivating while publicly performing the old one.

It's transformation without rupture. Evolution without announcement. Becoming without burning down.

1. You’re building in two realities at once ​
   Your LinkedIn shows one career. Your quiet body of work points somewhere else entirely.
2. You’re holding identities that don’t yet reconcile
   ​The consultant becoming an artist. The corporate leader building a regenerative farm. The tech executive exploring somatic healing. These aren’t contradictions. They’re adjacencies. Systems demand you choose. You refuse.
3. You’re experimenting without announcing
   ​You’re not ready to declare the pivot publicly. You’re still testing whether it’s real. Adjacency gives you permission to explore without performance pressure or the expectation of immediate legibility.
4. You’re funding the future with the present
   Your current work creates the resources that allow the adjacent work to exist. Money. Time. Stability. Credibility. This isn’t compromise. It’s strategic scaffolding.
5. People are confused by you
   You don’t fit one box. People keep trying to simplify you. “So what do you really do?” They can’t hold the complexity. They pressure you to choose. You don’t.

Adjacency requires you to abandon the myth of the clean narrative and embrace the reality of complexity.

Try this instead:

Stop explaining yourself to people who need you to be singular.​
Your multi-dimensional reality doesn't need to be justified. Some people will get it. Many won't. That's not your problem to solve.

Protect the margins.​
The adjacent work happens in the spaces between. Guard those edges fiercely. Don't let the main thing colonise every hour. The future needs room to breathe.

Let one identity resource the other.​
Your "day job" might fund your creative work. Your creative work might feed your strategic thinking. Stop seeing them as competing, see them as symbiotic.

Track the shift, not the rupture.​
Transformation rarely announces itself clearly. Notice when your energy is moving. Notice when what was central starts feeling peripheral. Notice when the adjacent work starts demanding more of you. The shift is already happening before you name it.

Trust the overlap.​
The most interesting innovations happen at intersections. Your ability to hold multiple domains simultaneously isn't confusion, it's your competitive advantage.
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🔍 Deepen The Inquiry

• Seth Godin – "The Dip"​
  On knowing when to quit and when to push through, but also on the strategic value of straddling before you leap.
• Herminia Ibarra – "Working Identity"​
  Research on how people actually change careers (spoiler: not through planning and leaping, but through experimentation and adjacency).
• My previous piece: "When Legibility Becomes a Cage" (Issue 52)​
  On why making yourself understandable to systems that demand singular narratives might be costing you your evolution.

🚶‍♀️This Weeks Worthy Move

Name your adjacency.

Where are you building something next to (not instead of) what you're currently doing?

Write it down. No business plan needed. No five-year projection. Just name it:

"I am [current identity] and I am also becoming [adjacent identity]."

Then this week, do one thing, even something small, that feeds the adjacent work:

• Spend 30 minutes on the side project
• Have one conversation in the new domain
• Read one thing that belongs to the future, not the present
• Make one small decision from the emerging identity

The moment you're waiting for might never arrive. Start now.

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🌙 WISDOM WHISPERER​
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Why this whisper? Because the pressure to be singular, legible, and consistent is a cage. Your capacity to hold contradictions, inhabit multiple identities, and build across domains simultaneously isn't confusion, it's wholeness. Adjacency honours the truth that you are always more than one thing. You don't have to choose. You just have to give yourself permission to be large enough to contain it all.