Why 'pivoting' is just quitting with better PR (and what to do instead)

There is a type of person I encounter regularly — smart, talented, deeply committed to building something real — who cannot seem to get traction no matter what they try.

(I know this person well. I was her for years before I figured out how to make a shift.)

Not because they're doing it wrong. But because they keep stopping before anything they try has a real chance to work.

There's a name for this pattern. It comes from a Finnish-American photographer named Arno Minkkinen, and Oliver Burkeman wrote about it in Four Thousand Weeks. When I first read it, I put the book down and sat with it for a while. Because it explains something I watch happen to consultants over and over again — and something I did to myself more times than I'd like to count.

It's called the Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

Helsinki's main bus station has dozens of platforms. From each platform, multiple bus lines depart — and here's what matters. For the first kilometer or two out of the station, every single bus on every single platform takes the same route. Same roads. Same stops. From the outside, you genuinely cannot tell which bus is which.

Minkkinen used this as a metaphor for creative careers. You choose a direction. Let's say you're a photographer and you decide to focus on platinum print portraiture. You put in a few years of serious work. You take your portfolio to a gallery and the curator looks at it and says: "Have you seen the work of Irving Penn? This reminds me of his early nudes."

And your stomach drops.

You're not original. You're derivative. You're doing what someone else already did, better, decades ago.

So you hop off the bus. You go back to the station, find a new platform, and start over. Landscapes this time. Or documentary. Or street photography.

A few years later, same thing. Another comparison. Another moment of "this isn't actually mine."

Another fresh start.

Here's what Minkkinen's theory says — the part that changes everything.

The routes diverge. Or they will, just not yet.

The early path looks identical for every bus leaving every platform.

The moment where your work becomes distinctly, undeniably, irreplaceably yours? That divergence only happens further down the road.

If you keep getting off the bus every time the route looks familiar, you never reach it.

"Stay on the fucking bus," he said.

Five words. (Including an f-bomb, so clearly my style!) Probably the most important business advice I've encountered that was never intended as business advice.

Every week I talk to consultants who are, without knowing it, getting off the bus.

What they tell me is that they're being nimble, responsive, and willing to evolve.

What I see is a bus station full of barely started journeys.

There is a meaningful difference between adjusting a strategy and abandoning it.

→ Adjusting means you ran the webinar, you looked at your show-up rate, you noticed it dropped at minute twenty-two, and you changed that section.

→ Abandoning means the webinar didn't produce what you hoped in the first two runs, so webinars don't work for you, so you're starting over.

The first person stays on the bus and compounds. The second goes back to the station and starts again — carrying the weight of all that work without any of the benefit.

Part of why people keep getting off the bus is that they got on the wrong one to begin with.

Here's how it usually happens.

You're scrolling. You see someone talking about how they built a $50K month with a particular strategy — a webinar funnel, a LinkedIn-to-DM system, a specific podcast guesting approach. It sounds compelling. They seem credible. The logic tracks. So you try it.

But it doesn't work.

What they almost never tell you — and this is the part that costs people years — is that what worked for them worked because of a very specific set of conditions. Their audience. Their personality. Their offer type. Their existing credibility. The way their ideal clients make decisions.

The strategy wasn't transferable. It was designed, intentionally or not, for someone who is not you, selling something that is not what you sell, to people who buy completely differently from your people.

I watch consultants who run sophisticated, high-stakes engagements — long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, months of trust-building before anyone signs — try to follow the playbook of a 25-year-old ghostwriter selling writing packages through Twitter DMs.

It is not REMOTELY the same. And the fact that it worked for him tells you nothing about whether it will work for you.

This is why I talk constantly about what I call the Essentialist CEO Sweet Spot.

The first circle is everything you know about your target market.

The second circle is everything that's true about you.

The strategies that work live in the intersection of those two circles. They fit both how your clients buy and how you actually operate.

Most people skip this entirely. They see a tactic that's working for someone else, they get on a bus without reading the destination board, and then they're baffled when it doesn't take them where they wanted to go.

So before we talk about staying on the bus — you have to get intentional about which bus you're boarding. That means getting genuinely clear on both circles of that Venn diagram before you commit to a direction.

Because the right strategy for YOU isn't the one with the best case study. It's the one built at the intersection of how your market buys and how you're actually built to work.

Get on the right bus. Then stay on it.

The startup world has completely corrupted how most of us think about strategic change.

We hear "pivot" and we picture visionary founders making bold, prescient moves. We picture Slack, which started as a gaming company. We picture Instagram, which was originally a Foursquare competitor. The pivot, in startup mythology, is the move that changes everything.

What we conveniently don't picture is that those companies had millions in VC funding, full teams, and the financial runway to absorb a complete reinvention. When they swung big and missed, they could afford to swing again.

You are not doing that.

As a solo consultant, the engine of your business is not your methodology, your network, or even your expertise — though all of those matter enormously. The engine is your ability to compound.

And compounding requires one thing above everything else: time in the same direction.

When you stay with the same audience, the same positioning, and the same core offer long enough to actually learn from it, something starts to happen that cannot happen any other way. Your case studies multiply. Your content gets sharper because you've said the same things in enough different ways that you've found the language that actually lands. Word-of-mouth referrals start arriving from clients who worked with you eighteen months ago.

You become substantively better at what you do because you're doing the same thing enough times to actually improve.

You become, eventually, irreplaceable in a specific lane.

That's where the bus routes diverge.

But only if you stay on long enough to get there.

I want to be specific about what I'm not saying because this often gets misread.

I'm not saying keep doing something that clearly isn't working and pretend otherwise. I'm not saying ignore evidence, stay committed to a dead strategy out of stubbornness, or refuse to learn.

The distinction is the scale of the change.

When something isn't producing the results you want, the question isn't "what do I replace this with?" It's "what is the one thing I'd adjust to see if it moves?" What's the single variable — the single metric, the single moment in the funnel — that I'd change?

That question keeps you on the bus. The other one sends you back to the station.

I've been running the same webinar, the same offer, and the same basic funnel since November 2025. But zoom out further and you'll see the real picture. I've had an incredibly similar offer since July 2024. And before that, I was selling to the exact same audience, solving a nearly identical problem, just in a different way, since 2023.

The only reason this business is where it is today is because I've allowed things to compound across years — not months. Years.

Each iteration felt significant to me at the time. Some of it genuinely felt like reinvention. But looking back, every version was built directly on top of the last. The case studies carried over. The audience recognition compounded. The language I'd tested kept getting sharper. Nothing started from zero.

Every time I run the webinar now, I look at one thing. Maybe the show-up rate. Maybe what happens in the first fifteen minutes. Maybe the follow-up sequence. I adjust one variable and I see what moves.

That's how compounding actually works. Not dramatic reinvention. Relentless, patient refinement of something you've chosen to see through.

And here's what I can tell you from the other side of it: I'm more confident about where this business is going than I have ever been. Not because I found the perfect strategy. Because I stayed on the bus long enough for it to start delivering.

And let me tell you, the bus is taking me to places I could have NEVER predicted. But only because I refused to get off.

Every time you start from scratch — new positioning, new offer, new platform, new marketing approach — you reset the clock on everything that compounds.

The case study library. The content that's starting to rank. The warm audience that's been watching you long enough to trust you. The word-of-mouth that was just beginning to build. The hard-won knowledge of what your specific audience responds to.

None of it transfers. You start from zero.

This is the cost no one mentions when they celebrate the pivot. Starting over is not free. It's expensive — not just in hours or dollars, but in the compounded value of the momentum you just walked away from.

The consultants building the most successful independent businesses are almost never the ones who found the most brilliant new strategy. They're the ones who ran a smart strategy long enough for it to actually work.

The routes diverge. But you have to stay on the bus to find out where yours goes.

In love, growth, and staying the course,

Kasey

P.S. Sunday's issue is the personal version of this same story — every bus I hopped off on the way to building what Essentialist CEO is today.