In 2010, I took a year off. I left my position at Lunchbox Collective and spent the year volunteering at Youth Leadership Camps Canada just outside of Peterborough, Ontario. No clients. No deliverables. No agenda.
I found a copy of Canoecraft in a local bookstore and could not put it down. Ted Moores had written the definitive guide to building cedar strip canoes by hand, and within a month I had enrolled myself at his Bear Mountain Boat Shop as a birthday gift to myself. Three weeks later, we placed our names in a hat, and a fellow builder walked out with it. Last I saw, he was lashing it to his car with Nova Scotia written all over his face.
I did not need the canoe. I needed to know I could build something that would hold water.
That sabbatical, and that canoe, still inform how I work.
I am a solopreneur working out of Ely, Minnesota, a town of 3,000 people on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I chose this place deliberately. I run two businesses from here: Free Nudge, which handles inbound marketing and web infrastructure for owner-operated companies; and Your Web Guy, which prescribes and builds revenue systems for businesses that have outgrown off-the-shelf platforms. I also host a weekly AI Mastermind, I am building apps (including Distillio.io, a tool that turns your bookshelf into an actionable report), and I have been doing all of this, in various forms, for thirty years.
I honor the Luni-Solar Sabbath on the seventh day. That rhythm is not a footnote. It is where this work comes from. My faith does not sit alongside what I do; it is the reason I do it, and it sets the terms. I work six days and rest hard on the seventh, and that practice has taught me more about sustainable output than anything I have read in a business book.
The Weekly Prescription is where I write down what I am seeing. One diagnosis per week. The patterns that keep breaking capable people, and what I would actually do about them.
Richard D. Stuart
Ely, Minnesota
