The hard “identity crisis” lesson I learned when one of my client’s business went under
I was so excited to catch up with one of my clients.
Grabbed a mug of tea. I put on my ring lights. I adjusted my hair on zoom.
I hadn’t spoken to him and his team in three months. The project had gone well. I was just waiting for my final invoice to get paid and talk through the opportunities for new work.
10 minutes into the call, my brows had scrunched up, as I leaned into my laptop. “Wait, what do you mean? Did you say you’re declaring bankruptcy?”
“Yah. It’s like the European version of America’s chapter 11.”
I think my brain short-circuited for like 3 seconds.
That’s when it clicked. They’d been avoiding me for months. I couldn’t even get a hold of my main contact on Whatsapp.
I asked “Well I sent my invoice weeks before you filed for bankruptcy, so how do I get my last invoice paid?”
He said, “well join our newsletter to get updates on our legal structure and distribution.”
“Newsletter?”
I went from thinking “oh great, new work” to “say what? Where’s my money, fam?” I immediately reached out to my cousin for quick legal advice. She said sorry – I can’t help. I sat back and knew it was a lost cause. The money was gone.
I was out of pocket a good five figures.
And yet another new thing that has happened on the job that no one prepared me for.
After months of spiraling, I realized that the speed of recovery from failure had something to do with my attachment to an identity I had built.
No one is coming to save you from the vulnerable path
Vulnerability isn’t a flaw to fix. It’s a condition to recover from faster.
And the speed of your recovery depends on how many baskets you’re putting your identity into.
My identity was solely tied to my business and being a successful entrepreneur.
But entrepreneurship has been a great reminder of life’s vulnerability.
You get fired by a client sometimes without even knowing about it.
Your business revenue goes all the way to zero because of a global pandemic.
No one needs your services anymore because interest rates are too high.
Or simply, your client goes bankrupt and tells you to join their newsletter for updates on how you might, maybe, one day, collect your outstanding payment.
Is it fair? Who cares?
It’s a cold chaotic world out there.
But here’s the thing. When the client told me they went bankrupt, I lingered in self-pity. I dwelled too long on what was lost. I had missed another revenue target – another hit to my ego. I started voicing things like “well at least you have a job that pays you every two weeks” to my friends, who had more established stable jobs. I was angry.
I was angry at the client.
I was mad at my contact who hadn’t responded to me on time.
I acted like the sole victim, thinking, “he could have at least given me a heads up.”
It took me some time to realize that my client and his entire team had lost their jobs. Thousands of employees had to find new income sources. Their company got delisted from Nasdaq.
I was probably the last person on their radar.
Whether it’s your one employee giving you the boot or your main client going out of business, putting all your weight into one identity opens you up to shocks.
So I stopped waiting for a life with no vulnerabilities. I started building my resilience instead by diversifying my identity.
Developing a creative practice as identity insurance
While most advice says: double down, grind harder, prove yourself.
I did the opposite: I stepped sideways into a creative practice with zero commercial pressure.
When the bankruptcy hit my client, I spiraled because my identity was the business. Two months later, I published my first newsletter as an experiment. That act of showing up elsewhere – getting feedback, iterating on writing, experiencing small failures in a low-stakes arena – began to detach my worth from my company’s survival.
By month six, I could hear about business setbacks without my whole self-image fragmenting.
Writing has helped me process my failures. With each newsletter I write, it’s a reminder that I have an identity outside my business.
3 years later, people ask me about my business but also my writing, a recent newsletter topic, or a LinkedIn post about music. While the business is still the main thing that takes up most of my time, I have detached my identity solely from one endeavor, which allows me to approach that endeavor with more awareness.
Experimenting with other creative outlets that take 5 – 10% of your time is worth it. Whether that’s writing, cooking, making music, working on a side project, or building a side business. These activities build resilience, particularly when you do it consistently.
They provide low-stake conditions for you to fail and learn better recovery.
So as the new year starts, pick a project or hobby of yours, perhaps one that you keep saying “I used to do that back in my youth.”
Choose a time-span and do it consistently:
Spend 15 minutes writing everyday.
Run your 30-minute DJ set once a week.
Spend 1 hour on Saturdays, building your side business or working on a book.
Detachment from a singular identity helps you recover from risk faster.
Don’t put your identity in one basket, nurture your multi-faceted self with hobbies.
Practice focus:
When my European client went bankrupt and I knew I wasn’t going to get paid, it was just another reminder of the risks of entrepreneurship.
The more you attach your identity to one thing, the more vulnerable you are. If I had my creative practice then, I would have taken a few steps back from that failure, worked on something else, and come back to deal with the problem with clarity, a lot faster.
If I’d had this practice then, would the failure have hurt less? No. Would I have recovered faster? Absolutely.
So here’s what I’m asking: “What would change about how you handle your next business or career failure if you knew you had a creative practice outside of it? And what’s stopping you from starting that practice today?”
Then ask yourself: “What’s one hobby you’ve been putting off that could become your practice ground?”
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. If you’re building something this year? Reply ‘let’s talk’ if you want a thought partner who gets the psychology behind the strategy.
