The Business That Fits
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
— Anne Lamott
I had a moment last month that I haven’t told you about.
I was sitting at my desk at 9 PM on a Tuesday — not because I had to, but because I’d convinced myself that “one more thing” would make the difference. The content calendar was full. The posts were scheduled. The system was running. And I was running on empty.
So I closed the laptop. Made a kava. Sat on the balcony and did absolutely nothing productive for forty minutes.
And somewhere between the second sip and the sound of the neighbours arguing about parking, I thought:
When did I start building a business that needs me to be tired to feel like I’m doing enough?
There’s a version of success that looks like this: full calendar, constant output, a to-do list that bleeds into the weekend. Impressive from the outside. Exhausting from the inside.
And then there’s the version nobody puts on a vision board — the one where Tuesday afternoon is yours because Tuesday afternoon is when you think best. Where you don’t answer emails before coffee. Where your most important creative work happens in the morning, because that’s when you’re actually alive.
That second version? That’s the one worth building toward.
We talk a lot about building businesses. Systems, strategies, funnels, frameworks. And all of that matters. But underneath all of it is a question we rarely ask directly: does this business actually fit me?
Not the idea of me. Not the hustle version. Not the version that can produce seven pieces of content a week without blinking.
Me. With my energy cycles. My slow mornings. My need for silence before I can write anything worth reading. My tendency to do my best thinking on a walk, not at a desk. Ok, sometimes at a café.
The solopreneur model was supposed to give us freedom. And it does — but only if we design it that way. Only if we consciously build the work around the life, not the other way around.
Pomalo means little by little in Croatian. My Baka used to say it the way other people say breathe. Not as instruction — as permission.
Pomalo.
You don’t have to have it all figured out by next Monday. You don’t have to scale this quarter. You don’t have to be more consistent, more visible, more everything.
You just have to know what kind of days make you feel like yourself — and build more of those.
That’s the real foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it.
This week, one question worth sitting with:
If your business had to fit around your actual life — your real rhythms, your honest capacity, your genuine priorities — what would you change first?
You don’t have to answer it out loud. But you do have to answer it.
Anita 🧡
The Soulful Balkanish AI Way