The game was gone. The thing they had built to make it was not.

The game was called Glitch. It was a gentle, strange online world with no fighting, set inside the minds of eleven giants, and the company behind it had raised millions of dollars to build it. Its founder, Stewart Butterfield, had been here before. He co-founded Flickr, which started life as a photo feature inside a different online game that never took off.

Glitch launched in September 2011. It needed something like 100,000 players to break even. It never got close. About a year later, the team announced it was closing.

Here's the part almost nobody tells. The Glitch team was spread across Vancouver, San Francisco, and New York. To keep up with each other, they started out on an old-school chat system, got frustrated with it, and quietly built their own. Searchable. Organized by topic. Every conversation saved. Nobody called it a product. It was just the thing they used every day so the real work could happen.

It was never on the roadmap. It was the duct tape.

When Butterfield announced the shutdown, he made a point of saying the company itself wasn't closing, only the game. Whatever came next, he hinted, people would know it well.

They did. A little over a year later, that duct tape launched to the public under a new name: Slack. About 8,000 people asked to try it on the first day. In 2021, Salesforce bought it for roughly $27.7 billion.

I think about this story more than I expected to, because it points at something most of us running anything never stop to look at.

We pour our energy into the main thing. The product, the service, the thing on the sign. Meanwhile, to keep the main thing alive, we build all kinds of side tools. A spreadsheet that does more than it should. A template rewritten fifty times. A process that finally stopped breaking. We file all of it under overhead.

Sometimes the scaffolding is the building.

I don't say that as a theory. The AI phone assistant I set up for my own business was supposed to be scaffolding, a way to stop missing calls. It ended up becoming a free guide for anyone who wants one of their own.

The question is how you actually find yours, because the Glitch team almost missed it. They were in the middle of shutting everything down when they finally said out loud what all of them had been thinking about that little chat tool...

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Sara Blakely sold fax machines by day and built a company at night for about two years. For the first year, she told none of her friends or family.

It was 1998. She was working in fax machine sales when the idea for Spanx arrived, and she had $5,000 in savings. She did not quit to chase it. She did the unglamorous thing instead: she kept the job and started doing her homework.

So why didn’t she just quit?

Her nights were not a vision board. She spent a week in the Georgia Tech library researching hosiery patents, wandered craft stores looking for fabric, cold-called hosiery mills, and kept phoning Neiman Marcus headquarters until someone listened. She paid a patent attorney $750 and put $150 toward the trademark. All of it was funded by a job she was still showing up to.

“Ideas are the most vulnerable in the moment you have them.”

Sara Blakely, via Fortune

Most of us were taught that the brave move is the loud one. Quit. Announce it. Bet everything where people can watch. Her story runs the other way. The job paid for the experiment, and silence protected the idea. She has said she waited a year before telling friends or family, and her own explanation is that an idea is at its most fragile the moment you have it.

Notice what the day job did here. It was income, and it was cover. Nobody had a reason to grade the idea yet. She could try something, fail, call another mill, and go back to work Monday morning with nothing to explain.

The product launched in 2000 at Neiman Marcus, in seven stores. That November, Oprah Winfrey named it one of her favorite things, and Blakely resigned from her job around the same time, reportedly about two weeks before the episode aired, according to Inc.

First-year sales were about $4 million. She never took outside investors. In 2021, Blackstone bought a majority stake at a $1.2 billion valuation.

The part that gets cut from the highlight reel is the length of the middle. Two years of evenings. A year of saying nothing. A job she kept using, on purpose, right up until the moment she didn’t need it.

If you’re holding something that works while quietly building something else, it can feel like stalling. Her story is a good argument that it isn’t. The paycheck was not the thing holding her back. It was the thing holding the door open.

So the uncomfortable question isn’t when to quit. It’s what the working thing in your life is buying you right now, and whether you’re using it or only apologizing for it.

Maybe the bravest move this year is the one nobody would film: show up, collect the paycheck, and keep building after hours.

In January 2007, Netflix launched streaming with about 1,000 films. Its mail-order DVD library had 70,000.

The new business was tiny, slow, and barely worth mentioning. The old business was huge, profitable, and about to be disrupted by the new one.

Most companies in that spot pick a side. Netflix kept both going for sixteen years.

So how do you build your own replacement without starving the thing that pays you today?

By the end of 2011, streaming had 21.7 million subscribers and DVD had 11.2 million. But look at the money. DVD earned a margin of about 52 percent. Streaming earned about 11 percent. In its final quarter of 2011, DVD made $194 million in profit and streaming made $52 million.

“The old business was very lucrative.” TechCrunch, January 2012

The less exciting business was giving the exciting one room to grow up.

The old business is not the enemy of the new one. It is the time you are buying.

Netflix could have killed the discs early and looked bold. Instead it kept mailing them until September 2023, more than 5 billion discs later, when DVD was about half a percent of revenue.

The one time it forced customers to feel the switch, it went badly. In 2011 Netflix raised prices by as much as 60 percent and split the DVD and streaming plans. About 800,000 U.S. subscribers left over a few months, and the stock dropped 35 percent in a single day.

That mess tells you as much as the success does. Between the two stories is a simple pattern, three decisions any one-person business can copy, and the first one is the one almost everyone gets backwards...

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Or maybe you realize you've heard the same handful of songs on repeat all week. So the other day I stopped searching for the right song and had AI write one about me.

I'm not a creative person. I'm the one who builds the spreadsheet, not the one who writes the song. So it was surreal to sit there listening to a full song with pieces of my own life in the lyrics.

Now picture a playlist of songs that exist nowhere else. Your words, your beat, your mood, and you made every one. It's free, it takes a few minutes, and here's how to try it.

Start with whichever AI you talk to most and paste in this prompt:

Based on everything you know about me, write original song lyrics about my life. Use real details: what I do, what I care about, what I've been through, what makes me laugh, and the little quirks that make me me. Make it feel personal, not generic, with some humor and a little heart. Structure it like a real song: two verses, a catchy chorus, a bridge, and a final chorus. Label each section in brackets, like [Verse 1] and [Chorus]. Keep it short enough for a song around 2 to 3 minutes long. Give me only the lyrics, no explanation, so I can copy and paste them straight into a music app.

If your AI doesn't know you well yet, give it a few details first, like your job, your hobbies, and what a normal week looks like. The more it has to work with, the better the song.

Copy the lyrics it gives you, then open an app called Suno, which has a free version, and paste them in. Choose a vibe that matches your mood: pop, dance, country, blues, whatever sounds fun. Hit create and give it a minute.

Then get ready to be pleasantly surprised.

To be clear, I'm not planning to turn this into income, and that's the point. Most of my days are about running things and getting results. This was just for fun, with nothing to prove, and it turned out to be the best kind of break.

You might laugh out loud at what it comes up with. You might tear up a little, because hearing your own story set to music hits differently than you'd expect. Either way, it's a great project for a slow evening.

I never thought of myself as creative, and AI has quietly changed that. I didn't plan it, and I'm still a little surprised by it, but I'll take it.

So if you're curious, try it. Ask your AI, paste the lyrics, pick a vibe, and press play.

You don't have to be creative to start. You just have to be curious enough to press play.

The first thing I let AI do for me was add one shift to one calendar, and I watched it the entire time.

That sounds like nothing. It turned out to be the most important thing I did.

Every time someone I staff is confirmed for a shift, that shift has to land on the schedule. For a long time, the person putting it there was me. It's a small, repetitive job, and it pulls me out of whatever I'm in the middle of.

It was also the job I was most nervous to hand off. It's one thing to hand off to another human being you've trained, but it's another thing to hand off to AI when you're new with it. The nerves had nothing to do with whether AI was smart enough. They were about letting go of control.

AI is not me. It doesn't know everything I do without thinking, so I knew going in that it would get things wrong at the start. I decided that was not a reason to wait. It was a reason to watch.

So I didn't hand it the job. I handed it the smallest version of the job I could think of. It would open my Google Calendar and add a shift exactly the way I add one. That's it. The app I use to schedule and message my team was off limits, because at the time AI couldn't work in it through the browser anyway.

The job itself is simple: a confirmed person, a day, a time, a spot on the calendar. The simplicity was the point. If it got something wrong, I would see it right away and know exactly what to correct.

Here's the part I wish someone had told me before I started: the first run isn't supposed to be impressive. It's supposed to be a test.

If you have never tried that kind of small test, I made a free guide called One Task Off Your Plate. It walks you through a first try with a pretend business and shows you how to check the result.

I sat there for the first shift. Then the next one. I wasn't checking how fast it was. I was checking whether it understood what I was asking.

That one tiny job eventually turned into something I do with a single sentence while I work on something else entirely. It got there in three steps I would repeat with any task, and the one that mattered most happened the second that first shift appeared on my calendar, exactly where I would have put it, and I...

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There is a woman in scrubs on my Facebook page and my website. Her name is Emily, she looks a lot like me, and she answers questions all day without being asked twice.

She is not a person. She is a chatbot with a face. Anyone who talks to her can tell it is AI.

I built her in Jotform. That one tool does everything: the chatbot, the avatar, and the connection to my Facebook page and my website. The first time, it took about an hour. That was a while ago, before AI got as good as it is now. Today it would take far less. (That link is my referral link, if you want to try it.)

I did not start with a plan. I started by playing around on the site until it did what I wanted. Jotform is easy enough to use that you can learn it by clicking around, and that is exactly how I learned it.

The main thing you do is give her everything you know. Every question you can think of, every answer you give people again and again. The more you put in, the better she answers.

Here is what she handles on her own: almost everything you would want a front door to handle. When someone asks something she knows, she answers. When it is something serious, like a real inquiry, or a question she has no answer for, it comes to me.

The part I did not expect to love is that every conversation lands in my inbox.

When someone talks to Emily, I get an email with the whole conversation. I do not have to watch the chat. I can read it later and see exactly what people asked, how she answered, and where she came up short.

She did get things wrong. There were questions she handled badly. That is not a flaw in the tool. You can put in everything you know and still not think of every question a stranger will ask. Real people find the gaps faster than you will.

Here is the part worth knowing: you will not think of everything at the start, and you are not supposed to. Her setup gets better because strangers keep asking things I would never have thought to include.

So the emails became my training material.

You can read a conversation yourself and tweak the setup. Or you can paste it into AI and let it do the first pass. Here is the prompt I would use:

Here is a conversation between my chatbot and a visitor. Show me where the chatbot gave a weak, vague, or incorrect answer. Then write the exact information I should add so it handles this type of question better next time. Use plain language and do not make up facts about my business.

Before you paste any conversation into an AI tool, remove names, phone numbers, and anything private.

If you want to build your own, this is the order I would follow:

1. Write down the questions people ask you again and again.

2. Decide what the chatbot answers and what it hands to you.

3. Ask it your own questions, including the dumb ones, before anyone else does.

4. Read the emailed conversations once a week and fix what you find.

None of that requires you to be technical. It requires you to pay attention.

You do not need a perfect setup. You need a first version, and a place where its mistakes show up in your inbox.

I did not hire a front desk. I built one that shows me exactly where it needs to get better.

A few weeks ago I watched a YouTuber build three AI influencers in one week.

Three characters. Three niches. Post them all, see which one takes off, then build something to sell around the winner. He made it look so doable that I thought, I can do this too.

So I bought the same plan he used. Under $100 a month. In my head, that meant I would get about what he got: enough videos to test all three characters and see who won.

Honestly, this was a fun project. I wanted to find out what AI could really do, and I wanted to get excited about it. If my characters earned something someday, great. Mostly, I wanted to play.

I picked my first niche because it was everywhere on social media. Then, halfway through building that first character, I wanted to try a different niche too. So I started a second one: Frankie Vale, a relationship advice bartender.

Then I looked at my credit balance.

I started the month with 3,000 credits. Less than a week later, I had about 391 left.

I stared at that number, completely shocked. I had watched the whole video. I had bought the same plan. I had done what he did, or so I thought. And what did I have to show for it? A couple of decent videos, and even those needed more tweaking.

Watching someone’s finished week makes it look like the starting point. It is actually the finish line.

He is a well-known creator with real experience, and that is not the point. The point is what the video makes you believe. When a week is laid out that neatly, it is easy to assume that is what your first week will look like too. Mine looked nothing like it, and nobody warned me it might not.

I figured I had wasted my credits on hundreds of tiny mistakes. So I opened my transaction history to find out where they actually went. What I found was not what I expected at all...

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I wanted to take a road trip with my mom to see the fall leaves in Tennessee. That was the entire plan.

I did not know which part of Tennessee made the most sense, which route would give us the best views, or where we should stay. I just knew we wanted fall leaves, we wanted to drive, and we had four or five days.

I am a horrible trip planner. I like taking trips. I do not like opening fifteen tabs to compare routes, hotels, restaurants, drive times, and activities, only to become less sure with every new option. Usually that leaves me turning a vague idea into reservations and an actual plan.

This time, I gave the unfinished idea to AI.

What surprised me was not how quickly it produced an itinerary. It was the questions it asked before trying to plan one. How many days do you have? What matters most: scenery, food, small towns, hiking, or relaxing? Would you rather have a hotel or an Airbnb? How much driving feels reasonable in one day?

I did not need to know where to go. I only needed to know what I wanted the trip to feel like. A search gives you a list built for everyone. AI could keep narrowing the same information around us. It could compare destinations, drive times, lodging, and restaurants without turning each one into another research project.

And if the first version felt too packed, too expensive, or too focused on hiking, I did not have to start over. I could say, “This is too much driving,” or “Give us more time to relax,” and the entire itinerary could change around that decision. That is the part of using AI that I do not think enough people see. Sometimes you just need help getting from an idea you keep talking about to a plan you can actually use.

The best result came when I stopped asking it to plan the trip immediately and asked it to do something first...

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It’s not that the technology can’t handle it. It’s that something else entirely is happening on that page.

Right now, on any given day, I have software handling scheduling, a chatbot fielding inquiries, and an AI assistant that runs workflows I used to do by hand, the kind of setup that looks, from the outside, like someone who’s digitized her entire life. And every single morning, I still pull out a notebook and write my list on paper, in pen, the old fashioned way.

I’ve tried the apps. I’ve used the reminders, the boards, the color coded categories. Every digital version does the exact same job the paper does. None of them do the other thing the paper does. I didn’t notice what that other thing was for a long time, because it’s not really about the list at all.

Here’s the part that took me a while to admit: I cannot flip the page until every single item on it is crossed off. Not checked in an app. Not marked complete with a little satisfying animation. Crossed off, with a pen, by hand. If three things are left undone at the end of the day, they get copied onto tomorrow’s page before I let myself close the notebook, and something about that transfer, the physical act of rewriting it, changes how I feel about carrying it forward.

I started asking myself why, since I run a whole operation on software that’s better at tracking things than I will ever be. And the answer, once I actually sat with it, wasn’t about the list. It was about…

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For thirteen years, I was the one in the room. The room most people never see, where someone is dying and their family is standing at the edge of it, needing someone steady beside them. I learned to be that person, calm no matter what the room asked of me, and I don't think anything I've built since has mattered quite the same way that did.

It asked a lot of my body in return, more than people picture when they think about nursing. And somewhere in those years I started carrying the work home with me too, thinking constantly about my own parents aging, in a way I wouldn't have if I hadn't spent a decade sitting with other people's parents at the end. Eventually both things reached a point I couldn't ignore. I needed something new, not because I'd stopped believing in the work, but because I'd given it everything I had left to give from that particular seat.

Here's the part I didn't expect: leaving the bedside didn't mean leaving hospice. I started a staffing company that places nurses in hospice care, and every family that agency serves is a family I'll never meet in person, cared for by someone I chose, trained, and stand behind. I'm still in the room. I'm just not the one holding the hand anymore. I'm the one making sure the right person is.

Here's the part I don't usually explain out loud...

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For two years, my lower back would lock up if I sat at my desk longer than about forty minutes. I knew exactly what was causing it. I'd known since the first time it happened.

I told myself I'd deal with it once things calmed down at work. Once the season shifted. Once I had a free weekend to actually build a routine instead of white-knuckling through one more sedentary week.

The season never shifted. I sat anyway. I told myself the same sentence for roughly two years straight: I'll start once it's easier.

Then one morning I bent down to grab a printout off the floor and couldn't stand back up for almost a full minute. Nothing dramatic happened. No ER visit, no diagnosis, no scary word from a doctor. Just me, on my kitchen floor, laughing at how ridiculous it looked, and then not laughing anymore.

I didn't change because I finally understood the risk. I understood the risk the entire two years. I changed because the pain finally weighed more than the excuse did.

That's the part nobody tells you about change. It's rarely a lack of information that keeps you stuck. You already know. You've known the whole time. What's missing isn't clarity. It's enough discomfort to finally outweigh whatever you were protecting by staying still.

This isn't just a body thing. I've watched the exact same pattern play out with money, with relationships, with the parts of a business nobody wants to touch. The knowing was never the missing piece. It was always the threshold.

I started walking five days a week that month. Not because a doctor told me to. Plenty of doctors had told me that for two years and it hadn't moved me an inch. I started because the floor moment cost more than the walk did.

Once I noticed that pattern in my body, I started seeing it everywhere else too, especially in my business. There's a decision I've been circling for months. I know exactly what it is. I've known for months. And I still haven't moved on it, for the same reason I didn't start walking sooner. The pain of staying hasn't outweighed the pain of changing yet. Not quite.

Which raises the actual question, the one that matters more than any five-step plan: is there a way to reach that threshold on purpose, instead of waiting for your back, your bank account, or your patience to hit the floor first?

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I told some friends what I was working on. New platform, new direction, putting myself out there in a way I hadn't before. I'd been excited about it for weeks. Their reaction wasn't mean. It was just flat. The conversation moved on before I finished explaining it.

I drove home and wrote something in my journal I hadn't let myself say out loud yet. You are the average of the five people closest to you. I'd heard it probably a hundred times. That night it landed differently.

There's a specific moment when you realize the people you're closest to aren't built for the direction you're heading. Not because they're bad people. Because the person they know, the one who was there when those friendships formed, wasn't building anything yet. The gap between who you were then and who you're becoming now is hard for anyone on the outside to track.

You can't explain your way out of it. You can't have a conversation that transfers the excitement. You can't borrow belief from someone who doesn't have any to give. And sometimes the people who've known you the longest are the least equipped to see what's possible for you. Not because they don't care. Because their picture of you was formed before this version existed.

The "average of five people" concept sounds simple until you really sit with it. It's not just about mood. It's about what you start to believe is possible. Which ideas you take seriously and which ones you quietly let die because no one around you seemed that interested. The people you spend the most time with are shaping your ceiling. Most of the time, you don't even notice it's happening.

The thing nobody warns you about: building in a direction your circle doesn't share creates a specific kind of quiet. Not loneliness, exactly. Just the awareness that what you're most excited about has no echo in the room.

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I was scrolling through Substack last week, looking at publications in my niche that already look like they have it figured out. Polished About pages. Consistent voice. Subscriber counts I couldn't tell you how long it took them to build.

That specific feeling hit. The one that's not quite jealousy and not quite self-doubt, but something in between that makes you want to close the app and go do something else.

Everyone you're comparing yourself to looked exactly like this once. You just weren't watching yet.

The beginning is the note that gets zero hearts. Zero comments. Not for a day. For months. It's the article you spent a week on that gets twelve views. The stat page you refresh four times in an hour because you can't explain what you're looking for. You keep going anyway, and you can't even fully explain why.

Nobody shows you that part. Not because they're hiding it. Because by the time they're worth watching, they're already past it.

Nobody posts that part. And so we scroll into everyone else's polished middle and compare it to our messy beginning, and we call that comparison realistic.

It isn't. It's a trick your brain plays when it wants to go back to the thing that already works.

The most successful people I know started somewhere genuinely embarrassing. Not strategically humble, not charmingly flawed. Actually, genuinely figuring it out in real time, making choices that seemed smart until they didn't, building something that looked small from every angle before it looked like anything at all.

They just didn't document that part publicly. Or if they did, they shared it after the fact, with the relief of knowing it worked. Which is a completely different energy than the moment itself.

I started this newsletter earlier this year. Some pieces landed. Some got almost no reads. Not a little. Almost none. I kept going. Not because I had a content strategy. Because I kept thinking about a woman I found through a friend who was doing something similar, making real money, managing only herself. I couldn't stop thinking: if she can do this, why can't I?

That thought is never about certainty. It's never "I know this will work." It's just: I haven't tried yet, and that's the only real difference between us right now.

The people who stay in their version of the beginning long enough to reach the middle aren't the ones who had it easier. They're the ones who stopped comparing their beginning to someone else's middle.

I've worked out a few specific things that actually help you stay in it. What to stop measuring. What to do instead. That's below.

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It was full of things I'd started writing and didn't finish. Half-sentences, rough thoughts, ideas I'd type out at 11pm and then close without saving because who was going to read this? Who was I to be saying any of it?

I was busy. I was building something. I was figuring it out as I went, alone, in the middle of something that was constantly demanding more than I had. The idea of putting content out into the world felt absurd. Almost embarrassing. Like showing up to a dinner party and announcing you have something important to say.

So I didn't. For years, I just didn't.

What I told myself was humility. What it actually was, was fear with good manners.

I watched other people post. Share their process. Talk about what they were building, what they were learning, what went wrong. And I remember thinking: they must be further along than me. They must know something I don't. They must have it more figured out.

They didn't. They were just willing to show up while it was still messy.

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Eventually I started. Not because I figured it out. Not because I finally felt ready. I started because staying quiet stopped feeling safe and started feeling like a choice I was making against myself.

The first note I posted was about something I was still in the middle of. I hadn't solved it yet. I published it anyway, half-convinced I'd wake up to silence or worse, something unkind.

What I got instead was people saying: me too.

Not from experts. From other people in the middle of it, just like me, running something, figuring it out, wondering if anyone else was dealing with the same thing. It turns out the thing I was afraid to say was the exact thing someone else needed to hear.

"Nobody wants to hear from me" is not a conclusion. It's a feeling. And feelings are not facts, even when they're loud.

The question isn't whether you're ready. It's whether you're going to let fear make the decision for you.

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For years, the problem had a name in my head: I need an assistant.

I knew what that looked like. Someone who could take the tedious stuff off my plate. Follow up when I couldn’t. Handle the things that kept slipping through. I needed a person.

So I tried to find one.

I hired a VA. Spent eight weeks training her. She made errors, stopped responding, stopped following through. I let her go in the fall. I’d invested the time hoping it would pay off. It didn’t.

Then I tried a family member. That worked for a while. Then she moved out of state. Then I was back where I started, doing the work myself anyway.

I kept thinking the next person would be the one who got it. I kept being wrong.

What I didn’t understand at the time: I wasn’t bad at hiring. I wasn’t unlucky. The problem wasn’t the people. The problem was that what I needed didn’t actually exist in a person.

I needed someone available at 2 AM when the anxiety hit. I needed someone who would send a follow-up without being reminded and never forget a deadline. I needed someone who would handle the tedious, repetitive work without requiring me to manage the managing of it.

That person doesn’t exist. I was looking for something that wasn’t a person.

The assumption I kept making: the right fit is out there. I just haven’t found them yet.

I held that assumption for years. It made me keep looking in a direction the answer wasn’t in.

The thing I actually needed was a tool that could act like a person without the people problems. Without the sick days and the learning curves and the conversations where you have to explain, again, why this matters. Without the emotional labor of managing someone else’s relationship to your work.

I found it. Not where I expected to find it.

The tool is AI. Specifically, I use Claude, and the automations I’ve built around it.

I know that might sound like a tech solution to a people problem. It’s not. It’s a reframe of what the problem actually was.

I wasn’t missing a person. I was missing capacity. The ability to do the work of more than one person without the overhead of actually managing more than one person. That’s what AI gave me.

The day-to-day looks like this: the tedious parts of my business, the follow-ups, the reminders, the documentation, the coordination, those run. Not because I did them. Because I built something that does them.

What’s left is judgment. Deciding. Adjusting. Approving. The parts that actually require me.

The mental shift that changed everything: I stopped trying to hire someone to do the work, and started building systems that do the work. One requires managing people. The other requires building once and letting it run.

The ROI isn’t just the hours saved. It’s the hours I stopped spending dreading the hours I used to dread.

That’s the part that surprised me. I expected to feel more efficient. I didn’t expect to feel less heavy.

The version of this I’d tell anyone stuck in the same loop: the thing you’re looking for might not look like what you’ve been trying. The VA might not be the answer. The family member might not be the answer. The answer might exist in a category you haven’t tried yet because it didn’t exist two years ago.

What I needed had to be built. Not hired.

The problem wasn’t the people. The problem was that I kept trying to solve a systems problem with a staffing solution.

If you're in that exact loop right now, still looking for the right hire instead of the right system, I put together a free guide on exactly this called One Person, Full Control, free to read right now.

I didn’t choose nursing because it was a calling.

I chose it because I didn’t want to sit in heels in front of a computer. Scrubs and comfortable shoes sounded like freedom. That’s the real answer. Most people expect something more meaningful. That’s the true one.

But something shifted. I wanted more than what the work alone could give me. More control. More say over what I built. More of a life that felt like mine.

And then, in the middle of a PRN shift at a staffing agency, I noticed something I couldn’t un-notice.

The person who owned the agency I was working for was a nurse.

Not a business school graduate. Not someone who had raised capital or figured out some angle I hadn’t considered. A nurse. Same license. Same scrubs. Same years of walking into strangers’ homes at the hardest moments of their lives.

If she could build this, why couldn’t I?

That thought didn’t feel like ambition. It felt like noticing that a door I’d been standing in front of the whole time wasn’t actually locked.

I didn’t wait to feel ready. I got a business name, a logo, a state license, and professional liability insurance. I applied. I made calls. I followed up with hospice companies that didn’t call me back. For months, nothing happened. I kept going anyway. Not because I was confident. Because I had already decided.

The first contract came from a hospice I had worked shifts for. They already knew my name. I didn’t have to convince them I was credible. The relationship was already there. I just had to ask.

The plan was never “build a successful company.” The plan was “do what she did.” That’s the whole thing.

Sometimes that’s enough of a plan.

For the first year and a half after starting the business, I was running it while also working shifts as a nurse.

I needed the income. I also wasn’t ready to fully let go of being in the field. So I did both. Owner in the morning. Nurse at night. I managed the calls, the contracts, the follow-ups. Then I drove to patient homes and worked shifts alongside my own nurses.

It didn’t feel like burnout at the time. It felt like a math problem I kept trying to solve. Two full-time jobs, one person, not enough time for either.

The decision to stop taking shifts was practical, not emotional. Once I had enough nurses in the field, I stopped. Just stopped. And I stepped fully into being the owner instead of the owner who also happened to be nursing.

The scrubs stayed in my closet longer than made sense. Not because I was grieving them. Just because I hadn’t decided yet. One day I packaged them up without thinking twice. That’s usually how you know a chapter has actually closed. It goes quietly, without a ceremony.

Here’s what that transition taught me that I couldn’t have learned any faster: running something is a different job than being good at the thing the business does. The skills that make you an excellent nurse do not automatically make you a good operator. They give you credibility. They give you the why. But the actual work of building: chasing clients, managing contracts, making calls no one taught you to make, that’s a separate education.

The good news is it’s learnable. You learn it by doing it badly first, then slightly less badly, then eventually pretty well.

You don’t need the perfect background. You need the right observation at the right moment, and the willingness to act on it before the feeling fades.

She was a nurse. So was I. That’s all it took to start. The rest was just showing up.

Nobody warned me that starting a business would be the fun part.

I know that sounds backwards. Everything I’d ever heard about entrepreneurship was about the terror of beginning: the risk, the uncertainty, the “how do I even get my first client” phase. I went through all of that. It was hard. But it was also energizing in a way I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, because there was a finish line in sight. File the paperwork. Get the license. Land the client. Place the first nurse. Each step had a clear completion. The beginning had a shape.

Four years later, the beginning is long over. The business runs. The clients are real, the nurses are real, the revenue is real. And most mornings I sit down and none of that provides any particular energy for the day.

That’s the part nobody warned me about.

Starting gives you something sustaining doesn’t: novelty. Everything is new, everything is a milestone, every small win feels significant because it’s also proof of concept: proof that this thing you decided to try might actually work. Once it works, the proof is in. You don’t get that rush anymore. You just have to keep going.

I spent my first year obsessed with building. My second year stabilizing. Somewhere in year three, I realized the question had changed. It wasn’t “can I make this work?” It was “can I keep making this work, indefinitely, on the days when nothing about it feels exciting?”

That's the real test of a builder. Not the launch. The Tuesday.

And I don’t mean Tuesday as a bad thing. I mean Tuesday as the specific experience of something you built, functioning as intended, with no fanfare and no crisis, just... continuing. Everything runs. The right things happen. And you sit there and think: great. And then you open your laptop and do it again.

Most people who talk about entrepreneurship talk about the hard work of starting. Fewer talk honestly about the discipline required to sustain. The discipline isn’t really about effort: most of what I do in a day isn’t that hard. It’s about not waiting to feel motivated before you show up.

Because motivation isn’t reliable. It spikes when things are new and dips when things are routine. The thing that kept me going wasn't motivation. It was something I set up that did the motivating for me.

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Four years ago I would have described success like this: own a business, work for myself, never answer to anyone else’s schedule again. That was the whole plan. Get there, and life would feel different. Better. Complete.

I got there. It took about two years. And then I sat with it for a while and realized that “getting there” had quietly moved.

This is the part nobody tells you when you’re building: the goal post isn’t fixed. You think you’re running toward something permanent: a place of arrival. But arrival isn’t a place. It’s a moment, and the moment passes, and then you’re standing in a life that looks exactly like what you wanted and it still feels like a question mark.

I run a staffing company that works. Real clients, a real service, better systems than I ever imagined when I started. I am genuinely proud of what I built. I am also building my way out of it.

Both things are happening at once. Neither cancels the other out.

The mistake is assuming that wanting something different means what you built wasn’t enough.

What it means is that you’ve grown past the version of yourself who needed it to be your whole answer. The person who started this business needed what it gave her: proof. Proof that she could build something, keep it alive, make something real from nothing. She got that. And now she’s asking different questions.

That shift isn’t ingratitude. It’s not a sign that something went wrong. It’s what happens when you actually got the thing you were chasing, and lived with it long enough to see past it.

The hardest part isn’t admitting you want something different. It’s doing that without dismantling what you already built.

The business still matters. The people it serves still matter. I’m not abandoning it. I’m making it something that doesn’t require me every day. And I’m building income elsewhere so that at some point, it becomes optional rather than necessary.

That distinction took me longer to land on than I'd like to admit. Here's how I think about it now, and why it changed what I'm building.

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I've been recommending the same products to people for years. Tools I use, things I actually like, stuff that solved a real problem.

For most of that time, I was doing it for free.

Not intentionally. Nobody told me I had to. I just gave away the recommendation and moved on. If someone asked what app I used or how I handled something, I told them. No link. No thought about it. Just the information, offered up like it cost me nothing.

It did cost me something. Attention. Credibility. Years of “you should try this” landing in someone’s inbox and going nowhere for me.

I think a lot of people do this. You become the person your friends text when they want to know what’s actually worth paying for. You’ve tested things. You’ve made the mistakes so they don’t have to. And you share it freely because it feels like the right thing to do.

At some point I started thinking about everything I’d recommended over the years and what it would have looked like if there had been a link attached.

It’s not a huge number. But it’s not nothing. And it represents something bigger than the dollar amount: there are people actively listening when I recommend something. That’s not an accident. That’s years of being someone who only recommends things she actually uses.

That’s an asset. I just hadn’t been treating it like one.

The shift happened when I realized that recommending something and monetizing the recommendation aren’t in conflict. What makes a recommendation worth anything is trust. Linking to something you genuinely use isn’t selling out — it’s just letting the recommendation do what it was already doing, with a result that comes back to you.

If this resonated, join the list — every week I share what’s actually working, what isn’t, and the tools that help me do more with less.

The tool I use for this is called Benable (referral link if you want to check it out: benable.com/i/TT5C2). It’s essentially a curated list platform — you build lists of things you actually recommend, and when someone buys through your link, you earn a commission. It works with over 40,000 brands, which covers most of what I’d naturally recommend anyway.

What I like about the format is that it’s not a blog and it’s not a storefront. It’s a list — organized by category, written in your voice, with a short note about why you like each thing. Mine looks like the texts I’d send a friend. That’s intentional.

Setting it up took less than an afternoon. I organized by category — tools I use in the business, things I actually travel with, stuff I use at home. I wrote a note for each item the way I’d explain it to someone who asked. Then I linked to it from places I was already showing up.

The income from something like this isn’t going to replace a business. That’s not the point. The point is that it’s a revenue stream running on something you were already doing, attached to content you were already creating.

That’s the income-stacking strategy in miniature: find the things that are already happening in your life and figure out where the link should have been.

I have a staffing company I’ve been running for years. I have this Substack. I have a TikTok. I’m building YouTube. I’m on Benable. None of these are meant to be the whole answer. Each one does something small and specific. Together they’re building toward the version of my finances where the business becomes optional — where I’ve stacked enough that I’m not dependent on any single one.

Benable is the smallest piece. But also the easiest — because I was already doing the work. I just needed the link.

Browse my Benable lists →

Four years ago I started a staffing company from scratch. No plan. No clients. No idea whether it would work. I just started, because someone showed me it was possible and I couldn't unknow what I'd seen.

It works now. Has for a while. I staff nurses across Florida, I've weathered a major client loss and rebuilt, and I've automated enough of the daily operations that most days the machine hums along without me in the room. By every metric I knew to care about when I started, it's a success.

And I'm already building something else.

Not because it's failing. Not because I'm burned out. Because I know now that “is it working” and “is this what I want” are two different questions, and I've been so busy answering the first one that I'm only now getting to the second.

The side projects started small. A Substack. A TikTok account. An affiliate setup I'm still figuring out. None of it is replacing anything yet. But I'm not building it to replace anything right now. I'm building it so that one day, when I'm ready, I have somewhere to go.

There’s something specific about the feeling of building a second thing while the first one is still standing. It doesn’t feel like escape. It feels like preparation. Like packing a bag before a trip you know is coming, even if you haven’t booked the flight yet.

The hardest part isn’t the work. It’s resisting the story that wanting more is ingratitude.

I built something real. I’m proud of it. I also want more than it. Both things are true at the same time, and for a while I didn’t know how to hold them without one canceling the other out.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the itch you feel when things are working isn’t a warning sign. It’s information. It’s your actual self sending you a message about what you want next. The people who ignore it longest are usually the ones who look up one day surprised to find they’ve been maintaining something they stopped caring about years ago.

I don’t want that.

So I’m building. Not away from the thing I have. Toward the thing I want.

The exit isn’t the end. It’s the point.

The practical version of this sounds simpler than it feels.

The rule I’ve settled on: the business gets my best professional hours. The side projects get the edges: early morning before the first text comes in, late evening when the weight of the day has lifted. This sounds easy. It is not always easy. Some days the business wants everything and there’s nothing left. Some days I open a draft and write one sentence and close the laptop. That still counts.

The second thing I’ve learned: you cannot build the exit with the same tools you used to build the thing you’re exiting. My staffing business runs on compliance, scheduling, relationship management, a specific, contained set of skills I’ve spent four years sharpening. The side projects require something different: creativity, patience with ambiguity, willingness to publish something before it’s ready. I had to learn to separate the modes. The operational brain and the creative brain don’t run well simultaneously.

The tool that made this possible (not to overstate it, but I won’t understate it either) is AI. Not because it does the work for me. Because it compressed the startup cost of starting something new. Ideas used to sit in my head because the execution cost felt too high. Now I can test something in a day. The gap between “I want to try this” and “I tried it, here’s what happened” is small enough that I’m actually trying things.

What I use day-to-day: Connecteam for the staffing operations: scheduling, communication, timeclock, it runs without me checking my phone every hour (affiliate link if you want to try it). Claude for content and automations. Make.com to wire together the pieces that need to talk to each other.

I wrote up the whole system, scheduling, communication, the works, in a free guide called One Person, Full Control, free to read right now.

The combination means I can run one thing while building another. Not perfectly. Not without trade-offs. But enough.

The exit might be a sale. It might be handing it to someone else. It might be something I can’t see yet. I don’t know the destination. I know the direction.

That’s enough to start.

If you want the honest version of how this works day-to-day, here are the three shifts that made it possible:

1. I stopped treating my business like it needed me every hour.

2. The shift wasn’t working less. It was building systems that could hold it without me. Automated texts go out to my nurses on schedule. Invoices get generated and sent. Onboarding moves through steps without me touching it. Once the machine could run a day without me checking in, I had actual time to put somewhere else.

2. I separated the work into two different jobs that don’t overlap.

3. Running the business is operational: decisions, relationships, execution. Building the next thing is creative: experimenting, publishing before it’s ready, tolerating not knowing if it’ll work. I used to toggle between them in the same afternoon. Now the business gets mornings, the side projects get evenings, and I don’t try to do both at once.

3. I used AI to collapse the gap between idea and action.

4. Make.com handles the automations that used to eat hours of manual work, and once those workflows are built, they just run. Claude helps me build, write, and think through problems faster than I could alone. What used to feel like a project that needed a whole team is something I can now test in a day. The startup cost of starting something new got small enough that I actually started things.