When people decide to start an online business, they often begin with the business.
The business model.
The content strategy.
The income goals.
The systems.
The deadlines.
That’s exactly what I did.
When I launched Hamster Wheel Exit in January, I started by asking how to build an online business.
But if the goal is freedom, shouldn’t the first question be:
What kind of life do I actually want to live?
And only after that:
How can I build the means to support that life?
Over the last month or so, I’ve started to realise that I was at risk of doing the opposite.
I was slowly building another hamster wheel.
Not a traditional job.
Not a boss.
Not a commute.
But a new set of expectations, deadlines and obligations that looked surprisingly familiar.
And that made me stop and think.
Why Things Have Been Moving Slower Than Planned
By May, I found myself increasingly frustrated.
The AI writing book I’m working on isn’t finished.
I’ve published fewer ExitLab reports than I originally planned.
Some projects have taken longer than expected.
At times, it felt like I should be further along by now.
But after spending some time reflecting on it, I realised that the problem wasn’t really the book, the deadlines or the pace of progress.
I wrote about a related challenge recently in Do You Have Too Many Ideas and Too Few Results?
The truth is that I’ve spent the last few months doing a different kind of work.
Not visible work.
Foundational work.
The kind of work that doesn’t show up in traffic numbers, income reports or finished products.
The kind of work that happens beneath the surface.
Looking back, Hamster Wheel Exit has gradually changed.
Part of that change came from making decisions I had been postponing for too long, something I discussed in The Hidden Cost of Not Deciding.
When I launched the blog in January, I thought it would mainly be about building income streams outside a traditional job.
Today, I see it differently.
Income still matters.
But it isn’t the destination.
It’s one of the tools.
The bigger question is this:
How do you build a life with more freedom, more meaning and more control over your time?
That shift changes everything.
It changes how I think about work.
It changes how I think about projects.
And it changes how I think about success.
A Pattern I Should Have Seen Earlier
One of the biggest realisations I’ve had recently is that the original ExitLab structure didn’t really reflect how I’ve worked throughout most of my life.
As a carpenter in my father’s business, we often worked intensely for a period and then had time before the next project started.
As a proofreader, I had deadlines, but complete freedom in how I structured the work leading up to them.
As a freelance copywriter and writer, I worked in much the same way.
Even my fiction writing has always happened in waves of intense focus followed by periods of reflection and recovery.
Looking back, the pattern is obvious.
I’ve rarely done my best work through rigid routines and fixed schedules.
I’ve always worked better in focused bursts.
Yet when I created ExitLab, I unconsciously fell back into a more traditional business mindset.
Without really noticing it, I slipped into the default thinking that surrounds so much of the online business world:
More structure.
More output.
More consistency.
More deadlines.
In other words, I started designing the business first and the life second.
That’s exactly the opposite of what Hamster Wheel Exit is supposed to be about.
The ExitLab Is Changing
Because of this, I’m making a small but important change.
Future ExitLab projects will still have goals.
They will still have direction.
They will still be documented openly.
But they will be less tied to rigid timelines.
Some projects may take months.
Others may only take a few weeks.
Some smaller experiments may even run alongside larger projects.
Some projects may evolve.
Some may lead somewhere completely different than originally planned.
And that’s okay.
The purpose of ExitLab is not to force reality into a schedule.
The purpose is to explore better ways of building a life with more freedom and flexibility.
For me, that means working in periods of higher intensity followed by periods of reflection, recovery or simply living life.
For someone else, it might mean a few focused hours every morning.
Or working evenings.
Or maintaining a highly structured weekly routine.
The point isn’t to copy my approach.
The point is to build your work around the life you want to live, rather than blindly copying someone else’s model.
If I discover that a project needs another month, I’ll take another month.
If I need a week to think, reflect or simply step away for a while, I’ll do that too.
Because the goal is not to build another system that controls my time.
The goal is to build a life where I have more say over how my time is spent.
The Work You Can’t See
I think one of the hardest parts of building anything meaningful is that so much of the work remains invisible for a long time.
If someone builds a piece of furniture, they can point to it at the end of the day.
If someone writes a novel, builds a blog or creates a business, much of the work happens where nobody can see it.
You learn.
You rethink assumptions.
You change direction.
And slowly, something begins to take shape.
From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening.
Sometimes it even feels that way from the inside.
But some of the most important work happens there.
Beneath the surface.
Out of sight.
Long before the results become visible.
Hamster Wheel Exit Is the Experiment
Another thing I’ve realised is that I originally thought the experiments would mostly happen inside ExitLab.
Today, I see things differently.
The blog itself is an experiment.
The Pinterest strategy is an experiment.
The newsletter will be an experiment.
Future affiliate projects will be experiments.
Even the way I choose to work has become part of the experiment.
In essence, Hamster Wheel Exit has become one large ongoing experiment in building a life with more freedom, flexibility and meaning.
And perhaps that’s the biggest change of all.
Why You Should Build Your Life First
The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the last few months is surprisingly simple.
Don’t start with the business.
Start with the life.
Start with the freedom you’re looking for.
Start with the kind of days you want to live.
Not the other way around.
Because it’s entirely possible to leave one hamster wheel and accidentally build another.
Not simply to build income.
Not simply to build a business.
The real purpose of Hamster Wheel Exit is to build a life that feels worth living first — and then build the means to sustain it.