Book 03. Sub-Pillar One

Stop selling the CV. Own the pain. #

The problem you own is the front door to your practice. It gives buyers, referrers, and partners a retrieval hook for when the right situation appears.

You describe yourself broadly. Most senior independent people do. The reason feels safe: I help with growth. Or: I help with strategy. Or: I help with operations and revenue. The range is real. In your last role, you moved between domains. You solved leadership problems, revenue problems, operational bottlenecks. You were valuable because you saw connections that function-focused people missed. That capability is genuine.

But here is what you suspect, even if you have not said it aloud: I help with everything is the same as saying I help with nothing.

That sentence is the load-bearing belief. The moment you accept it, you understand why broad feels protective. It keeps the market from narrowing you. What you may not see yet is how this protection works against you. Broad capability creates the opposite effect. It makes the market widen its view until you disappear into the crowd. You become one more capable person saying roughly the same thing as everyone else in the room.

Broad capability feels safe. Two reasons explain why. The first is historical. In employment, range was rewarded. Your company supplied the category, the buyer, the meeting process, and the credibility markers. Your job was to exercise judgement inside a structure that already existed. The company created the demand. You supplied the expertise. A senior operations leader at a company could describe themselves loosely because the company's business model did the selling. The market knew what the company did. You just had to be excellent at the work.

The second reason is protective. Broad keeps options open. If you own one problem, you are betting on a piece of the market. What if the market shifts. What if you get restless. What if the focus costs you work. These fears are sensible. They are also irrelevant to how the market operates now.

In employment, the narrowness was chosen for you. Your title was narrow. Your buyer was narrow. Your domain was narrow. The company put you into a role that already existed. That structure protected you from your own vagueness. Now you have the freedom to be vague, and the market has zero obligation to figure out why you matter.