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Business advice has become constant background noise. It fills your feed, your inbox, and your podcasts with confident instructions from people who have never lived your week. A lot of it boils down to the same guilt-tripping line: if you really wanted it, you'd make time. As if the only thing between you and results is effort, not the fact you might already be running at full stretch.

The UK numbers tell a different story. Every year about 650,000 people register as sole traders, and in that same year about 580,000 stop. It's rarely the idea that fails. It's the fit between the business and the life of the person trying to run it. This is the dirty secret in plain sight: the traditional plan only works if you're willing to pay with your health, your relationships, and your time.

Most plans have no room for a normal Tuesday.

• Phone goes - it's the garage about your MOT.
• Your partner needs you to grab things from the supermarket because their appointments are overrunning.
• An elderly parent needs a lift to the doctor.
• Your energy drops off a cliff for no obvious reason.
• Your brain refuses to co-operate today.

You lose a day, guilt kicks in, and you end up staring at your business plan like it was written for someone else. That's where a lot of founders get quietly poisoned. Not by failure, but by the meaning they attach to it. The plan collapses and the conclusion is "I'm useless", "I'm lazy", "I'm not serious". And the advice voice is right there to help it along: "Maybe you just don't want it enough." Which is convenient, because it keeps the advice looking flawless and it turns you into the broken part of the machine.

You are not broken. You are trying to run instructions written for a different life.

I've lived this. I've beaten myself up for years, ever since I started my first limited company in 1997, because I was convinced I wasn't successful enough, or accomplished enough, or on the same level as my peers. Six kids, a blended family, and a neurodivergent brain that doesn't do what it's told will do that to you. You can have a great plan and still lose the week to real life. That's why I built the Misfit Engine™ . I needed it before anyone else did.

This is what "misfit" means here. It's not a badge, and it's not a personality. It means the standard advice breaks on contact with real life, and then acts like you're the faulty part.

Ignore the cheerleaders and admit your life has constraints, which means you will never look like the people selling the "perfect" founder life online. The way out is to build around your exact life - your own fingerprint - and design the business to fit that, not a generic template that only works when something hits the fan.

Where to go next:

If you want a business you can design around your own fingerprint of a life, the book is where you start.

If you want to chat and see how I can help you apply this to your ideas, go to Work with me.

If you want to understand what the Misfit Engine™ actually is - the ideology, the movement, and the system being built behind it - go to The Misfit Engine™.