I've started a handful of blogs and set up a number of web pages. None really went anywhere, because of one simple thing.

I spent too much time on the how and not enough time on the point. WordPress, Kajabi, Blogspot, Beehiiv, Stan Store and Substack. Font size, logo size, colour palette. All of it, when it comes down to it, performative productivity.

I'm terrible at design and would spend hours trying to resize photos on horrible backgrounds. All of that when I should have been asking myself: what is the point? Who is this for? What does it do? How does it help them?

In our podcast, Phil Walters, the founder of Metalbird, talked about a system his business partner introduced him to. Jay Neely describes a pyramid that goes something like this: Vision - Strategy - Structure - Tactics.

The trick is to start from the top and work your way down. The temptation, particularly if you've come from a corporate environment, is to do the opposite.

That's because someone else has already thought about the point for you. Vision was decided in a boardroom years before you arrived. Strategy was handed down. Structure was already in place. Your job was to execute tactics reliably and not ask too many uncomfortable questions. That's not a criticism. That's just how large organisations function. The pyramid was built. You just moved around inside it.

The problem is that this trains you to start from the bottom. You become expert at execution. You get good at choosing tools, building processes, optimising workflows. And when you eventually decide to build something of your own, you bring those same instincts with you, because they're the only instincts you've ever needed.

So you open WordPress and start picking themes. You sign up to Kajabi and watch tutorials about funnels. You spend a Saturday afternoon arguing with yourself about where the CTA button should be and what colour. All of it feels productive. None of it is the point.

I've done this. Repeatedly. I didn't fail on any of those platforms because I lacked the tools. I failed because I never clearly answered the question that should have come first. I was executing inside a structure I hadn't actually built. There was no pyramid. Just a pile of tactics, dressed up as momentum.

Vision requires commitment. Commitment requires you to say "this is the thing." And that means it can fail as that thing. Tactics don't carry that risk. Nobody feels exposed choosing a font. Everybody feels exposed naming what they're actually trying to build and admitting they don't know if it'll work. So we hide in the mechanics.

It's not laziness. It's fear in a productivity costume.

Not a mission statement. Not a brand purpose exercise. Something simpler: what does it look like when this works? Not the metrics. The feeling. Who's reading it? What are they doing with it? What's changed for them, and for you, because this exists? That picture, held clearly, is the point. Everything else arranges itself underneath it.

Before you do one more tactical thing on your project, answer three questions:

If you can't answer those, the tactics aren't the problem.

The point isn't a reward you unlock after the logo looks right and the email sequence is built and the website finally loads quickly on mobile. It doesn't live at the end of the to-do list. It's the thing that makes the to-do list worth having.

Busyness without direction isn't progress. It's just a more elaborate way of standing still.

You can be extraordinarily busy, posting, tweaking, optimising, A/B testing your subject lines, and still be going nowhere in particular.

Marcus Aurelius put it plainly in the Meditations: "People who labour all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time, even when hard at work."

The pyramid works because it forces sequence. Vision first. Then strategy. Then structure. Then tactics. Each layer only makes sense in the context of the one above it. Tactics without structure are chaotic. Structure without strategy is bureaucracy. Strategy without vision is just clever movement in the wrong direction.

You don't find the point on the way up. You start at the top. Uncomfortably, vulnerably, without the safety net of knowing whether it'll work. And you build downwards from there.

That's the harder thing. It's also the only thing that works.