Give me a difficult week, and suddenly I have a business idea, a new project, a workout schedule, a reorganized planner, and approximately 47 things I want to accomplish before next Sunday.

Productivity has always felt like something I can control.

When everything else feels uncertain, there’s something comforting about a to-do list. You can check things off. You can see progress. You can convince yourself you’re moving forward.

But I’ve been thinking about something this week.

Sometimes the urge to get your life together is really just the urge to stop feeling whatever you’re feeling.

And there’s a difference.

I have a lot of things I genuinely want to accomplish right now.

I want to grow my consulting business. I want to take better care of myself. I want to build something that belongs entirely to me. I want to become the version of myself I’ve spent so much time imagining.

None of those things have changed.

But I’m starting to recognize that there’s a difference between working toward something because you want it and working toward something because you desperately need a distraction.

The tricky part is that they can look exactly the same from the outside.

Both versions of you get up early. Both make plans. Both set goals. Both look incredibly motivated.

Only one of them is giving herself permission to be human along the way.

I don’t have some profound lesson to share this Sunday.

I’m still figuring it out.

What I do know is that I don’t want to look back six months from now and realize I spent all that time trying to become someone else instead of learning how to take care of the person I already am.

I still want to accomplish everything on my list.

I’m just trying to remember that I don’t have to accomplish it all this week.

Maybe getting your life together doesn’t have to start with changing everything. Maybe it starts with showing up for yourself exactly where you are.

And maybe that’s enough for this Sunday.

Until Next Sunday,

And dollars.

A lot of dollars, actually.

Not because anyone is intentionally trying to waste money.

Not because the people making the decisions aren’t smart.

But because somewhere between the meeting, the strategy, the approval, the handoff, the follow-up meeting about the first meeting, and the spreadsheet created to track the thing we discussed in both meetings…

we created work.

And then we created more work to manage the work.

And somewhere along the way, nobody stopped to ask:

Wait. Why are we doing this again?

The longer I’ve worked in ecommerce and operations, the more I’ve realized that one of the strangest parts of becoming experienced is that you start seeing the cost of things differently.

Not just the invoice.

The actual cost.

A request that sounds simple might require five teams (or more!)

A “quick change” might mean design, copy, development, QA, analytics, project management and another round of QA because something changed while everyone was doing the first round.

A meeting with ten people isn’t a one-hour meeting.

It’s ten hours.

And sometimes the person sitting in that meeting is me, quietly doing the math.

Ten people.

One hour.

Again next week.

Interesting.

Once you start thinking this way, it becomes nearly impossible to stop.

Every process starts looking like a tiny P&L.

Early in your career, you’re mostly focused on doing the work.

Someone asks for something, and you figure out how to get it done.

You want to prove you’re capable.

Responsive.

Reliable.

You become the person who can figure things out.

And that’s valuable.

Then you get a little more senior.

You start understanding why the work exists.

You understand the systems behind it.

The dependencies.

The politics.

The decisions that happened three steps before something landed on your desk.

You realize that what looks like a simple request is usually connected to five other things.

Then you get more senior again.

And suddenly you’re asking a completely different question:

Should this work exist at all?

That question has probably saved me more time than any productivity system ever has.

Because efficiency isn’t always about doing something faster.

Sometimes it’s about realizing we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

I think this is one of the biggest shifts that happens when you move from being someone who executes work to someone who operates a business.

You stop measuring productivity by how much gets done.

You start paying attention to what deserves to get done.

Those are very different things.

I can make almost any process more efficient.

Give me enough time and I’ll create the tracker.

I’ll build the workflow.

I’ll define the owners.

I’ll create the timeline.

I’ll add the status column.

I’ll probably color-code something.

And it will work.

But eventually you realize there is a question that should come before all of that:

Do we actually need a process for this?

Because the best process improvement sometimes isn’t a better process.

It’s deleting the process.

Operations people develop a particularly inconvenient superpower.

We see the invisible work.

The handoffs.

The duplicated effort.

The spreadsheet someone manually updates every Monday even though the information already exists somewhere else.

The report three people are producing in slightly different formats.

The process that requires six approvals because something went wrong once in 2019.

The “temporary” workaround that has quietly become infrastructure.

The recurring meeting everyone attends because everyone has always attended it.

The request that takes two minutes to make and six hours to fulfill.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You also start translating everything into two currencies:

time and money.

How many hours does this take?

How many people touch it?

How often do we repeat it?

What isn’t getting done while we’re doing this?

And eventually:

What is this actually costing us?

The funny thing is that the most expensive processes rarely look expensive.

They’re usually made up of tiny things.

Fifteen minutes here.

Thirty minutes there.

A meeting.

A follow-up.

A manual check.

A Teams message.

Another spreadsheet.

One more approval.

None of those things individually trigger an alarm.

No one submits a purchase order for them.

There’s no giant invoice sitting in someone’s inbox.

But multiply them across teams, weeks, months and years?

Suddenly the process everyone describes as “just how we do it” has a very real price tag.

And that’s before you account for the opportunity cost.

Because every hour someone spends doing unnecessary work is an hour they aren’t spending on something that could actually move the business forward.

That’s the part that’s harder to put into a spreadsheet.

I think companies underestimate this kind of cost because it doesn’t sit neatly on a budget line.

You can see what software costs.

You can see what an agency costs.

You can see what a contractor costs.

It’s much harder to see the cost of twelve people spending thirty minutes every week talking about something that could have been resolved by three people in ten minutes.

But the money is still being spent.

It’s just hiding inside payroll.

And more importantly, it’s hiding inside people’s capacity.

The person sitting in that unnecessary meeting might also be the person who has been saying for three months:

“I haven’t had time to get to that.”

Sometimes they don’t have a time-management problem.

Sometimes the organization has a work-creation problem.

And here’s the part nobody really teaches you about leadership:

Sometimes you can see all of this…

and still have to do the thing.

You can explain the tradeoffs.

You can recommend a simpler path.

You can show the hours.

You can show the risk.

You can probably even show the dollars.

And the answer can still be:

We’re doing it anyway.

That used to frustrate me more than it does now.

Because I’ve learned that part of being a good operator isn’t believing every decision will be the decision you would make.

It’s knowing when to challenge something.

Knowing how to explain the impact.

Knowing when there’s a better way.

And also knowing when the decision has been made and it’s time to execute.

There is a difference between having a point of view and needing to win every argument.

That took me a while to learn, a long while.

Earlier in my career, I thought being good at my job meant having the answer.

Now I think a lot of leadership is knowing which questions are worth asking.

Why are we doing this?

What problem are we actually solving?

Who needs to be involved?

What happens if we don’t do it?

Is there a simpler way?

Those questions sound obvious.

They’re not.

Because organizations accumulate work the same way houses accumulate junk drawers.

Slowly.

One reasonable thing at a time.

A process gets added because of a problem.

A meeting gets added because communication broke down.

An approval gets added because someone made a mistake.

A report gets created because someone needed visibility.

Every individual decision makes sense in the moment.

Three years later, nobody remembers why half of it exists.

But we’re all still doing it.

That’s why I think companies should pay attention to the people who keep asking:

Why?

They’re sometimes mistaken for being difficult.

Or negative.

Or resistant.

Especially when everyone else is ready to move on to execution.

But “why?” is one of the most valuable operational questions a company can ask.

Why does this require three teams?

Why are we manually doing something a system could do?

Why are twelve people in this meeting?

Why does this approval exist?

Why are we creating another report?

Why are we solving the same problem for the fourth time?

Why are we spending money here?

And my personal favorite:

What would actually happen if we stopped doing this?

Sometimes there’s a very good answer.

There might be a legal requirement.

A customer impact.

A financial risk.

A dependency you didn’t know about.

Great.

Now we understand why the work exists.

But sometimes?

There’s just silence.

And that silence can be expensive.

This is also why I have become increasingly skeptical of the word busy.

Busy can feel productive.

Calendars are full.

Teams is popping off.

Meetings are happening.

Decks are being built.

People are working late.

There is activity everywhere.

But activity and progress are not the same thing.

I think some of the best operators I’ve worked with have an almost ruthless ability to separate the two.

They don’t ask:

“How do we get all of this done?”

They ask:

“What actually matters?”

Then they build around that.

Remove a step.

Automate a handoff.

Kill a meeting.

Clarify ownership.

Fix the root cause instead of building another process around the symptom.

Because the goal isn’t to make everyone work faster.

The goal is to stop spending incredibly capable people’s time on things that don’t deserve it.

And maybe that’s why this has become such a big part of how I think about work now.

I don’t want my teams to be impressive because they’re constantly busy.

I want them working on things that matter.

I don’t want someone staying online until 9 p.m. because they successfully completed fourteen unnecessary tasks.

I’d rather figure out why eight of those tasks existed.

That’s operations to me.

Not just making the machine run.

Looking at the machine and asking why there are seventeen gears when we only need nine.

And occasionally realizing one of the gears is actually just a spreadsheet someone named “FINAL_v7_USETHISONE.”

Of course, none of this means every complicated process is bad.

Businesses are complicated.

Ecommerce is complicated.

People are complicated.

Sometimes there really are twelve stakeholders.

Sometimes you really do need the approval.

Sometimes the annoying process exists because the alternative creates a much bigger problem.

Complexity isn’t automatically waste.

Unquestioned complexity is.

That’s the distinction.

I don’t think the answer is to walk into every meeting and announce that everything is inefficient.

Please don’t do that.

The answer is to develop enough understanding of the business that you can tell the difference between necessary complexity and organizational habit.

And then be willing to ask the question.

The more senior I’ve become, the less impressed I am by someone’s ability to manage an enormous amount of work.

I’m much more interested in their ability to make the amount of work smaller.

That’s a different skill.

And I think it’s one we’re going to value more and more.

Because we have better tools now.

More automation.

More AI.

More data.

More software promising to make every part of work faster.

But making unnecessary work faster doesn’t suddenly make it necessary.

Automating a bad process just gives you a faster bad process.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do isn’t add another tool.

It’s delete something.

So yes.

Sometimes in my job, I have to do things that make absolutely zero sense.

Sometimes I challenge them.

Sometimes I change them.

Sometimes I understand the context and realize they actually make more sense than I thought.

And sometimes the decision has already been made.

So we do it.

Professionally.

Efficiently.

Probably with a spreadsheet I created because the original process made absolutely zero sense.

And dollars.

Until next Sunday,

And apparently, that makes the way I’m building my life a little harder to explain.

For a long time, I thought having a side project meant you were trying to leave your job.

You know the story.

Start the business. Replace your salary. Quit your 9-to-5. Post the laptop-on-the-beach photo. Tell everyone you’ll never work for someone else again.

But the more I build outside of my career, the more I realize I’m not trying to escape anything.

I’m trying to build a portfolio.

And those are two very different things.

I actually like my career.

That feels important to say.

I’ve spent years building it. I’m proud of it.

I like being good at what I do. I like solving complicated problems. I like leading teams, figuring out how all the pieces fit together and being the person people trust when something needs to get done.

I still have career goals.

I still want bigger opportunities.

I still want to learn, grow and see what I’m capable of professionally.

But somewhere along the way, I started questioning why all of that capability had to live inside one job description.

Why should one company get every good idea I have?

Why should one title define what I’m good at?

Why should one paycheck represent everything I’m capable of earning?

And maybe most importantly:

Why does building something outside of my career automatically have to mean I want to leave it?

I don’t want an escape plan. I want a portfolio.

An escape plan assumes there’s something you need to run from.

A portfolio assumes there are things you want to build toward.

That distinction has changed the way I think about almost everything I’m working on right now.

I’m consulting.

I’m writing here.

I’m experimenting with business ideas.

I’m taking skills I’ve spent years developing for other companies and asking what they might look like if I used some of them to build something of my own.

Some of those things may turn into meaningful businesses.

Some may make a little money.

Some may go absolutely nowhere.

And I’m becoming surprisingly okay with that.

Because for the first time in a long time, I’m not asking every idea to become the thing.

It can just become a thing.

One piece of the portfolio.

We’ve been taught to pick a lane.

There’s something incredibly neat about the traditional career story.

Choose what you do.

Get good at it.

Move up.

Get the bigger title.

Make more money.

Take on more responsibility.

Repeat.

Eventually, if everything goes according to plan, you arrive somewhere.

Except I’m not entirely sure where “somewhere” is anymore.

For most of my career, ambition meant climbing.

How do I get to the next level?

How do I earn the next promotion?

How do I get into the room?

How do I get a seat at the table?

Those questions still matter to me.

But lately, there’s another question competing for my attention:

How much can I build?

Because climbing and building aren’t necessarily the same thing.

You can climb incredibly high inside someone else’s organization and still realize you’ve never built anything that belongs to you.

I want both.

I want a career I’m proud of.

And I want work that belongs to me.

I want ideas I can test simply because I’m curious about them.

I want to write things that don’t need six rounds of approvals.

I want to see what happens when the skills I’ve accumulated over my career aren’t confined to a job description.

And yes, eventually, I want income that comes from more than one place.

Not because I’m planning my exit.

Because options matter.

Maybe this is what ambition looks like now.

At 21, ambition looked like getting the job.

Then it looked like getting promoted.

Then it looked like getting a seat at the table.

Now?

I’m starting to think ambition might look like having several tables.

A career.

A consulting practice.

A body of writing.

A business idea or five that may or may not work.

Something I haven’t even thought of yet.

None of them have to replace the others.

Together, they can become something bigger.

A portfolio of work, income, ideas, skills and opportunities that doesn’t require one single thing to carry the weight of my entire professional identity.

And maybe that’s the part I’ve misunderstood for years.

Building something of your own doesn’t automatically mean you’re planning your exit.

Sometimes you’re just expanding.

I’m writing this from the middle.

There is no screenshot of a giant revenue month coming at the end of this article.

I haven’t replaced my salary.

I don’t have a perfectly diversified portfolio of businesses making money while I sleep.

There isn’t a course to buy at the bottom of this page explaining how you can do it too.

I’m figuring it out in real time.

And weirdly, I think that’s exactly why I want to write about it now.

It’s easy to tell the story once you know how it ends.

“Here’s how I built a six-figure business while working full-time.”

“Here’s why I finally quit corporate.”

“Here are the five income streams that replaced my salary.”

Maybe someday I’ll have one of those headlines.

Maybe I won’t.

But there’s another story happening before that one.

The story of realizing your career doesn’t have to be the only thing you’re building.

The part where you try things before you know whether they’ll work.

The part where your first dollar from something you created feels completely different from another raise.

The part where you slowly start seeing yourself as more than the title underneath your name on LinkedIn.

The middle isn’t particularly glamorous.

But I think it might be the most interesting part.

Because I’m not building all of this so I can dramatically walk away from the career I’ve spent years creating.

I’m building it because I want options.

I want ownership.

I want curiosity.

I want to know what else I’m capable of.

I’m not building an escape plan.

I’m building a portfolio.

Maybe the goal isn’t to escape the table.

Maybe it’s to build enough of your own that you get to choose where you sit.

Until Next Sunday,

I had two paid subscribers almost immediately.

They were my friends.

I feel like that’s important context before anyone mistakes this for one of those “how I made $10,000 in my first 30 days on Substack” articles.

I did not.

I started with no real idea what I was doing.

I didn’t know what made a good Note. I didn’t know how often I should post. I didn’t know whether anyone would care what I had to say. And I definitely didn’t know why something would get 13 likes one day and practically disappear the next.

Basically, I went from being very good at my actual job to being a complete beginner again.

Which, as it turns out, is both incredibly frustrating and probably very good for me.

Thirty-ish days later, I’ve published five articles and built an audience of 23 subscribers.

Five are my very supportive friends and family who signed up on day one. Some of the others are people I know.

And some aren’t.

Some people have found something I wrote, subscribed, commented, or told me that I managed to put words to something they’d been feeling too.

That part still feels a little wild.

But the number itself isn’t really the interesting part.

The interesting part is everything I’ve learned trying to get there.

So rather than pretending I’ve cracked some secret Substack growth formula after a month, here’s what my first 30 days actually taught me.

1. I thought I knew who I was writing for. I didn’t.

When I started this newsletter, I knew the things I wanted to talk about.

Career.

Leadership.

Ambition.

Starting over.

Building things.

Life in your 30s.

And, apparently, whatever thought happens to be occupying one of the 47 tabs open in my brain that week.

But topics aren’t really an audience.

I thought I needed to sit down and perfectly define my niche before I could figure out who I was writing for.

Instead, the most useful audience research came from actually publishing.

I started noticing which sentences people responded to.

Which Notes brought people into the comments.

Which ideas resulted in subscribers.

Which thoughts people repeated back to me in their own words.

And slowly, the person on the other side started becoming clearer.

She’s ambitious.

She’s spent a significant part of her adult life building a career she’s proud of.

She’s good at what she does.

She’s responsible.

She’s probably the person other people depend on.

And lately, she’s started wondering what else she might be capable of building.

Maybe she wants to write something.

Start a business.

Make something.

Try something completely unrelated to the thing she’s spent the last decade becoming good at.

She doesn’t necessarily hate her career.

She just doesn’t want her career to be the only interesting thing about her.

That’s much more useful to me than picking “career content” as my niche.

I’m learning that sometimes you don’t perfectly define your audience and then start writing.

Sometimes you write until your audience starts recognizing themselves.

2. Notes started working when I stopped treating them like advertisements for my articles.

This was probably my biggest tactical learning.

At first, I thought Notes were essentially mini promotional posts.

Publish article.

Post quote from article.

Link to article.

Post another quote.

Link to article.

Hope someone clicks.

Repeat.

Then I started experimenting with Notes that had absolutely nothing to click.

They were just thoughts.

Different lengths.

Different openings.

More humor.

More personal observations.

More career realizations.

More of the things actually running through my head.

Some worked.

Some absolutely did not.

Then I posted this:

It got:

153 impressions.
13 likes.
3 comments.

And the comments ended up being more interesting to me than the impressions.

One person talked about spending more than a decade becoming very good at what she does and then suddenly finding herself a beginner again while creating content, publishing and building her own brand.

Another simply said:

“This is exactly, exactly it.”

Someone else pointed out another part of becoming a beginner that I hadn’t really thought about:

You might know you’re good at what you do.

Your new audience doesn’t know that yet.

You’re building their trust from zero, too.

And that was probably more useful to me than seeing 149 on a stats screen.

Because now I didn’t just know that something traveled.

I knew something about why it resonated.

3. Specific seems to beat broadly relatable.

That Note didn’t say:

Starting something new is hard.

Which is true.

It’s also something approximately every motivational coffee mug has already told us.

Instead, it described a very specific frustration:

Being highly competent in one part of your life while voluntarily becoming a beginner in another.

There’s a particular person who reads that and immediately thinks:

Oh.

That’s me.

Once I noticed that, I started seeing the same pattern elsewhere.

I wrote:

At 21: I want a successful career.
At 25: I need to prove myself.
At 30: I need to keep moving up.
In my late 30s: Okay but what if I also want to write things, build things, make things, start businesses and generally have 47 tabs open in my brain at all times?

135 impressions.

Another:

A career realization I’m having in my late 30s:

Being successful at your job and wanting to build something outside of it can exist at the same time.

84 impressions and a new subscriber.

Then:

If you’re a woman who is really good at her actual job, constantly thinking about what else she could build...

65 impressions and another subscriber.

At some point, it stopped looking completely random.

I don’t think I’ve found some magical Note formula.

I think I’m starting to understand the conversation I’m actually here to have.

Career ambition isn’t the whole thing.

Entrepreneurship isn’t the whole thing.

Writing isn’t the whole thing.

It’s that weird middle ground of being an accomplished adult who has built a life and a career and then deciding to become a beginner again because some part of you keeps wondering:

What else could I build?

Apparently, I’m not the only person standing there.

If you’re somewhere in that middle too, proud of what you’ve built, but curious about what else you could build, that’s what I’m figuring out here.

Subscribe and figure it out with me.

Subscribe now

4. The biggest number isn’t necessarily the best result.

One of my Notes this month got only 26 impressions.

Not particularly exciting.

Except it got 7 likes, 1 comment and 1 new subscriber.

Suddenly 26 doesn’t look quite so bad.

I’m starting to think about performance in three separate buckets:

Reach tells me whether something traveled.

Engagement tells me whether something landed.

Subscriptions tell me whether someone wants more.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with my articles.

My best-performing article (& favorite to write) by views so far is An Open Letter to Every C-Suite.

135 views.
12 likes.
3 comments.
2 free subscribers.

My latest article, Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Consistency, got:

34 views.
4 likes.
8 comments.

One reached more than four times as many people.

The other created more than twice as many comments.

So which one performed better?

I’m not sure that’s even the right question anymore.

They did different things.

I’m trying to stop asking:

Did this perform well?

And start asking:

What did this piece of content actually do?

I’m collecting data.

Not verdicts.

5. Apparently, I also have to be my own marketing department.

There’s another important piece of context behind those 34 views.

I didn’t really market that article.

For previous articles, I’d created social carousels and shared them across other platforms.

I gave the article multiple opportunities to find people outside of Substack.

For this one, I didn’t.

I published it.

I posted some Notes around the topic.

And that was mostly it.

Then I looked at the number and wondered why fewer people had read it.

Mel.

You didn’t take it anywhere.

This should be obvious to me.

I work in ecommerce.

I understand marketing.

And yet, when it’s my own work, there’s apparently still a tiny part of my brain that thinks I should be able to hit publish and then wait patiently for the internet to discover me.

Apparently, that is not a distribution strategy.

And when you’re building something yourself, both jobs belong to you.

You’re the writer.

The editor.

The creative director.

The social media manager.

The analyst.

The marketing department.

And occasionally the person refreshing the stats page wondering why three more people haven’t discovered your brilliance since lunch.

Very humbling.

It also means I can’t look at those 34 views and definitively decide the article didn’t work.

Eight comments suggest it resonated pretty deeply with at least some of the people who found it.

What I don’t know is what would have happened if I’d given it the same distribution support as the others.

You can’t fairly evaluate something you didn’t fully give the opportunity to perform.

Another data point.

Another experiment for next time.

6. Some things are going to flop. That’s useful information.

I have Notes with 153 impressions.

I also have Notes with 20.

I wrote:

Maybe you’re not bad at consistency.

Maybe you’ve just gotten really good at starting over every time the middle gets boring.

The problem is that starting over keeps resetting the clock.

I’m trying to stop resetting mine.

20 impressions.
2 likes.

Not exactly breaking the internet.

And when you’re new, the difference between those numbers can feel strangely personal.

153 impressions:

I’ve cracked it.

20 impressions:

Interesting. Perhaps I should shut down the publication and enter witness protection.

In fact, I wrote a Note making fun of myself for doing exactly that:

Me: I want to build something meaningful over time.

Also me after posting something that gets 3 likes:

Interesting. Perhaps my entire strategy is wrong.

That one only got 26 impressions.

Naturally.

Except, as I mentioned earlier, it also got 7 likes and a subscriber.

Which feels like Substack personally making fun of me.

The temptation is to make a sweeping strategic decision after every result.

This topic works.

That topic doesn’t.

People like this.

Nobody likes that.

But I don’t have enough data for most of those conclusions yet.

I have a month of experiments.

That’s it.

So I’m trying something new:

Try something.

See what happens.

Try something slightly different.

See what happens.

Something works?

Figure out why.

Try again.

Something doesn’t?

Don’t immediately burn the entire strategy to the ground.

I’m not trying to find the format anymore.

I’m trying to understand why certain ideas make someone stop scrolling.

There’s a difference.

7. The hardest part isn’t starting. It’s staying long enough to learn.

This is the lesson that has almost nothing to do with Substack.

And it’s probably the one I needed most.

Starting things?

Excellent at it.

I love an idea.

I love a plan.

I love buying the domain.

I love designing the logo.

I love the intoxicating first 72 hours when a new project has never disappointed me.

I could begin things professionally.

It’s the middle that’s dangerous.

The part where the novelty disappears but the results haven’t arrived yet.

Where you’re doing the work but don’t have enough evidence to know whether it’s working.

Where one thing gets 153 impressions and the next gets 20.

Where you have 23 subscribers and the person you’re comparing yourself to has 23,000.

That’s the part where my brain starts getting creative.

Maybe I should change the concept.

Maybe I should start this other idea.

Maybe I need an entirely new strategy.

Maybe I’ll just open Canva for a second...

And suddenly I’ve started something else.

But you can’t learn what works if you keep resetting the experiment.

That’s what this month has probably taught me more than anything.

You have to stay long enough to get the data.

23 subscribers isn’t proof that I’ve built something huge.

It isn’t supposed to be.

It’s been a month.

But 23 isn’t nothing either.

Some are people I know.

Some aren’t.

Some found me through Notes.

At least one came through Pinterest.

Two are my friends who believed in this enough to pay for it before I’d even really started.

Every one of those 23 represents someone who said:

Sure. Send me the next thing.

And I don’t want to rush past that because I’m busy looking at somebody else’s 10,000.

A month ago, there was nothing here.

Now there are five articles.

Dozens of Notes.

Conversations with people I’ve never met.

A clearer idea of what I want to write about.

A much clearer picture of who I’m writing for.

And 23 people waiting for whatever I write next.

That’s not the outcome.

That’s the beginning.

So, what happens in month two?

More experiments.

More Notes.

More attention to what creates subscribers instead of just what creates impressions.

More writing directly to the woman I actually want here.

More promoting the things I spend hours making instead of apparently expecting the internet to locate them through divine intervention.

More paying attention to the questions, comments and problems people bring back to me.

More looking at the data without letting every number become a referendum on whether I’m good at this.

And, most importantly:

Less starting over.

Because maybe the biggest lesson from my first month on Substack isn’t really about Substack at all.

The beginning gets all the attention.

The idea.

The launch.

The announcement.

The first subscriber.

But almost everything we actually want is built afterward.

In the boring part.

When the numbers are small.

When some things work and others don’t.

When nobody is clapping yet.

When you have enough evidence to question whether it’s working, but not enough evidence to know where it’s going.

That’s usually when I start looking for the next thing.

This time, I’m staying.

Thirty days down.

Let’s see what I know at 60.

Thanks for being early.

Until Next Sunday,

Not dramatically. I don’t announce it. I just quietly stop.

The posting slows down. The follow-through gets softer. “I’ll get back to that next week” turns into next month, and eventually the thing just... disappears.

And when I look back, it almost always happens at the exact same point: after I’ve done enough work to expect a result, but before I’ve gotten any proof that the work is actually doing anything.

Every time.

The pattern, once I actually looked at it

I started noticing it because it kept repeating across completely different projects, which is usually how you know something is actually about you and not about the project (shocking revelation!)

There was an earlier version of my Etsy shop that I worked on for months. I made the products. I built the listings. I wrote the SEO descriptions. I did all the things you’re supposed to do.

And when the sales didn’t come quickly enough, I quietly stopped.

Same with content. I’d post consistently for a few weeks, watch the numbers barely move, and decide that was enough information to know it wasn’t working.

No traction felt like proof of failure instead of what it actually was: a normal, boring, unremarkable early stage.

There’s a version of this story I could probably write about almost every meaningful thing I’ve tried to build.

I do the work.

I don’t see quick proof.

And some quiet voice tells me the absence of proof is the proof.

That I’m wasting my time. That nobody wants this. That this one isn’t going to be different.

It never really occurred to me in those moments that the proof might just not have arrived yet.

“No proof yet” always felt exactly like “no.”

Why “no proof yet” gets read as “no”

I think this is an operations-brain problem as much as anything else.

In my day job, everything has an answer, there are no mysteries (I say this to my team all the time). There’s a metric, there’s a target, there’s a trend line. You can usually tell within days or weeks whether something is moving in the right direction or if something is broken.

I’m used to systems that give you feedback fast.

But building something of your own doesn’t necessarily run on that timeline.

There’s no dashboard for is this Substack going to matter?

There’s no trend line for is this shop eventually going to become real income?

The proof, when it comes, often comes much later than feels reasonable and almost never on the timeline you decided it should.

So I’ve been applying a fast-feedback instinct to a slow-feedback process.

And then I’ve been doing something even worse:

Treating the absence of data like negative data.

No sales yet = nobody wants it.

No subscriber growth = nobody cares.

No traction = bad idea.

But nothing has happened yet and this isn’t working are not the same sentence.

I’m realizing I’ve spent a lot of time treating them like they are.

Everything you want is on the other side of consistency

This sentence has been living rent-free in my head for a week.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Hence the article.

Because I think consistency is the exact part I’ve underestimated.

Starting something? I can do that.

Getting excited about an idea? Very good at that.

Building the plan, making the thing, setting everything up, imagining what it could become?

Absolutely.

But continuing to do it after the excitement wears off and before the results arrive?

That’s where it gets harder.

Consistency isn’t particularly exciting in that part.

It’s posting again when the last thing barely got seen.

It’s making another product when the first one hasn’t sold.

It’s writing another article when you have no idea whether anyone is going to read it.

It’s continuing to show up when absolutely nothing is reassuring you that showing up is worth it.

And to be clear, I don’t think consistency means blindly doing the same thing forever.

Sometimes an idea really isn’t working. Sometimes the strategy needs to change. Sometimes the data actually does tell you to stop.

But that’s not historically where I’ve quit.

Those are two very different things.

The gap isn’t a red flag

What I’m trying to internalize now is that the gap I keep quitting in, the one between doing the work and seeing the proof, isn’t necessarily a warning.

It’s just the gap.

It’s supposed to be there.

Every single thing I’ve ever built that eventually worked had some version of that same quiet, proof-less stretch.

I just don’t remember those parts as clearly.

I remember the result.

The projects that I abandoned are different. I quit while I was still inside the gap, which means I never actually found out what was waiting on the other side of it.

That’s a hard thing to hold onto while you’re in it, because the gap doesn’t feel like not yet.

It feels exactly like no.

I don’t know if I can change that feeling.

But I can recognize it now.

And instead of asking myself:

Is this working?

I’m trying to ask:

Have I actually been consistent long enough to know?

A very small piece of proof

This Substack is actually a tiny, real-time experiment in doing this differently.

This is my fourth article. I’m not even a month in. (9/1 - Happy 1 Month!)

And for most of that month, I’ve experienced exactly the kind of silence I’m describing.

Then this past week, five new people subscribed because of a a few notes I almost didn’t bother posting.

Five people isn’t a viral moment.

It isn’t proof that I’ve “made it.”

But that’s almost what makes it more meaningful.

The prior notes didn’t suddenly perform because I found some secret formula.

I just kept posting. I kept testing. I kept learning.

And eventually something landed.

Maybe this is the middle

I don’t know if I’ve finally broken this pattern.

I’m probably going to have to choose not to quit a hundred more times before I can say that.

But now I know where the pattern lives.

It lives in the quiet part.

The part after the excitement wears off.

After you’ve done the work.

Before anyone notices.

Before the sales come.

Before the numbers move.

Before you have anything reassuring you that you’re not wasting your time.

That’s the part I’ve always mistaken for the end.

So if you’re in that gap right now, with a business, a newsletter, a career move, a project, or something else you’re trying to build, maybe don’t ask yourself whether it’s working yet.

Ask yourself whether you’ve actually given it enough time to answer.

Because maybe everything you want isn’t waiting on the other side of some huge breakthrough.

Maybe it’s just on the other side of consistency.

Until Next Sunday,

That’s how long I’ve led teams in operations.

Ten years of performance reviews, engagement surveys, exit interviews (the rare ones), and stay interviews (the much more common ones).

And across almost every metric that’s supposed to tell you whether you’re a good manager, I score well.

Low turnover. High satisfaction scores. People who transfer onto my team, not away from it.

By the numbers, I’m a good manager.

I am not, however, a great one.

And it took me a long time to understand why, because the thing holding me back was one of the things I was most proud of.

The story I told myself

For years, I thought my teams stayed because I cared about people.

I set clear expectations. I advocated for them when they weren’t in the room. I made myself available. I tried very hard to never be the kind of boss who left someone drowning while I watched from shore.

All of that is true.

But it wasn’t the whole story.

The fuller story is this:

I hold onto things I should hand off.

Not tasks. I delegate tasks constantly.

I’m talking about ownership.

The kind where someone else gets to make the call, potentially make the wrong call, deal with what happens next, and become better because of it.

That part is much harder for me.

And I wish I could tell you it comes from some noble place.

It doesn’t.

I’m good at my job. I’ve been doing this long enough that I can usually look at something and see three ways it could go sideways before they happen.

So I help.

Or at least, that’s what I’ve always called it.

Someone brings me a plan and I start asking questions.

Have you thought about this?

What if we did it this way instead?

Do you think we should account for this?

They sound like questions.

Sometimes they are.

But sometimes, “Have you thought about doing it this way instead?” isn’t really a question.

It’s a redirect wearing a question mark.

And because I deliver it warmly, because I’m not demanding or dismissive, because the whole conversation feels collaborative, the person walks away feeling coached rather than overridden.

For a long time, I walked away thinking the same thing.

I was helping.

Except multiply that interaction by ten years and hundreds of tiny decisions and you can accidentally build a team that’s incredibly good at working with you.

And not nearly as practiced at working without you.

That one stung.

The problem with being the person who always catches it

Here’s the really uncomfortable part.

This behavior gets rewarded.

People feel supported because I’m involved.

They don’t feel abandoned because I don’t let them get too far down the wrong road.

Projects run smoothly because I’m constantly scanning ahead for the potholes.

Stress stays low.

Confusion stays low.

Turnover stays low.

The numbers look great.

And somewhere along the way, I started treating those numbers as proof that my management style was working exactly as intended.

But there’s another number I’ve never had on a dashboard:

How many decisions did someone learn to make without me?

Because every time I remove the friction, I also remove an opportunity to build judgment.

Every time I give someone “guidance” that’s really my preferred answer, I’m teaching them how I would solve the problem.

I’m not necessarily teaching them how to solve it.

Those can look exactly the same when you’re trying to get through Q4.

They look very different when you’re trying to build the next leader.

Then I caught myself doing it when no one else was around

I didn’t fully recognize this pattern at work.

I recognized it while building something of my own outside of it.

Suddenly, there was nobody else to over-guide.

Nobody’s plan to redirect.

Nobody to ask my question-that-isn’t-really-a-question.

Just me.

And somehow, the same instinct was still there.

I’d redo something I’d already finished because the first version wasn’t quite right.

I’d hold something back because I could think of three more things I wanted to fix first.

I’d spend time solving edge cases for something that hadn’t even been given the chance to succeed or fail yet.

And eventually I had this uncomfortable realization:

At work, mine looks like over-involvement.

On my own, it looks like an inability to ship.

Same root. Different costume.

And that’s when I finally understood what I had been doing with my teams.

I wasn’t holding onto ownership because I didn’t trust them.

I was holding onto it because handing someone ownership means accepting that they may produce an outcome I wouldn’t have produced.

Maybe their deck looks different.

Maybe their process isn’t as clean or operationally-efficient.

Maybe they make a decision I wouldn’t have made.

Maybe something small actually does go wrong.

And then I have to resist the urge to say:

I knew that was going to happen.

That’s the muscle I hadn’t built.

Not delegation.

Tolerance.

So I’m trying something different

I wish this were the part where I told you I figured it out and now I delegate beautifully.

I don’t.

I’m catching myself in real time.

But I’m starting with three things.

I’m separating “guidance” from “the answer.”

Before I weigh in, I’m trying to ask myself: Am I pointing out a risk they genuinely haven’t considered, or am I uncomfortable because they’re doing this differently than I would?

Those are two very different things.

And only one of them requires me to intervene.

I’m letting small things go sideways.

Not things with meaningful consequences. I’m still responsible for the work and for my team.

But there are plenty of low-stakes moments where learning something the harder way costs almost nothing.

Sometimes my intervention would save ten minutes.

Maybe those ten minutes aren’t worth stealing the lesson.

I’m tracking ownership, not just output.

Did the work get done?

Great.

But I’m trying to ask another question now:

Could this person make that decision without me next time?

Because if the answer is always no, I don’t think I get to call the output alone a success.

The part I’m still working out

I don’t have a tidy ending for this one.

I’m mid-pattern, not past it.

What I know is that for years, some of the things that made me feel like a good manager were also making it harder for me to see where I needed to grow.

My availability felt like support.

My intervention felt like coaching.

My ability to anticipate problems felt like leadership.

And sometimes, they were all of those things.

Sometimes they weren’t.

That’s the part I’m learning to distinguish.

Because maybe the goal isn’t to build a team that never falls.

Maybe it’s to build one that doesn’t need you standing behind them with your hands out, ready to catch them every time they wobble.

So now I’m looking at those good numbers a little differently.

Low turnover matters.

Engagement matters.

People wanting to work for you matters.

But I’m asking myself one more question:

Are the good numbers telling me people are growing or just that I’ve gotten really good at catching them before they have to?

I don’t know that I’ll fully answer that this year.

But I’m done pretending the good scores were the whole story.

Until next Sunday,

That part was hard enough.

But it was move-out day that really taught me what audacity means.

He showed up with a “friend” to help him carry boxes. Except the friend wasn’t a friend. She was the girlfriend he’d already been living with.

That’s audacity.

The bad kind.

The kind that takes something from someone and does it right in front of them like it’s nothing.

For a long time after that, I flinched at the word. Audacity felt like a synonym for cruelty, for people who do whatever they want without much thought for who they hurt.

And honestly, most of us are raised to think of it that way.

We’re taught to be polite. To ask permission. To wait our turn. To earn things before we claim them. Especially women.

So audacity reads like a character flaw.

Audacious people are the ones who overstep. Who don’t ask. Who assume they’re allowed when the rest of us were taught not to assume anything.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe since:

At its core, it’s the willingness to act without waiting for permission.

What determines whether that’s admirable or awful is what you’re being audacious about and who pays the price for it.

My ex used his audacity to take. To rewrite the rules of our life together without telling me and then make me watch him do it, boxes and all.

His audacity had a cost, and someone else had to absorb it.

Me.

It took me a long time to stop associating the word itself with that day.

But there’s another version.

Audacity turned into fuel instead of a weapon.

It’s leaving the job everyone tells you is smart to keep because it comes with a title and a salary and a 401(k) match.

It’s starting the business before you feel “ready,” before you have perfect product photos or a polished brand or any proof it’ll work.

It’s hitting publish on a newsletter with your real name attached to it, with no guarantee anyone will read it and no guarantee it won’t feel like shouting into an empty room for a while.

That’s audacity spent on yourself instead of taken from someone else.

Nobody wakes up robbed because you decided to bet on yourself.

I’ve needed that kind of audacity more than I expected these last couple of years.

I’ve needed it to imagine a career that doesn’t follow the one safe track I thought I was supposed to stay on. To start things before I had a perfect plan. To write under my own name instead of hiding behind an anonymous account “just in case.”

None of those decisions came with permission.

I just made them.

And that’s the part that took me a while to sit with.

Audacity is a tool, like ambition or confidence or speed. Neutral until you point it at something.

So maybe the question isn’t should I be audacious?

Maybe it’s:

What am I being audacious for?

And who’s on the other end of it?

Am I taking, or am I building?

Is someone else absorbing the cost of my boldness, or am I the one putting my own skin in the game?

Because I don’t think most of us struggle with being too audacious.

I think we struggle with the opposite.

We wait for a green light nobody is ever going to hand us.

We wait to feel ready, which is a feeling that conveniently never quite arrives.

We wait for permission that was never actually required in the first place.

I catch myself doing it all the time.

Before I hit publish. Before I say out loud that I’m building something beyond my job title. Before I claim something I want before I have enough evidence to prove I’m entitled to want it.

There’s still a version of me that wants to ask first.

To run it by someone.

To get the nod of approval before I let myself take up that much space.

And every time, I have to remind myself:

Nobody is going to tap me on the shoulder and say, you’re allowed now.

That moment doesn’t come.

You start.

And sometimes the starting is the permission.

I’ve also had to get honest about the difference between caution and cowardice dressed up as caution.

Caution says, let me think this through so I don’t hurt someone.

Cowardice dressed as caution says, let me wait until it’s safe.

But what it often really means is:

Let me wait until I can’t be blamed if it doesn’t work.

Those aren’t the same thing, even though they can feel almost identical from the inside.

The first is wisdom.

The second has a cost too. It’s just quieter.

Nobody notices the newsletter you didn’t send.

The business you didn’t start.

The opportunity you didn’t ask for.

The thing you wanted but talked yourself out of wanting because wanting it too openly felt a little too audacious.

I don’t think the goal is to become reckless. I’ve seen firsthand what audacity looks like when there’s no regard for who absorbs the fallout.

The goal is to get honest about which kind of permission you’re actually waiting for.

The kind that protects someone else?

That’s worth respecting.

The kind that’s really just fear wearing a more acceptable name?

Maybe that’s the permission you stop waiting for.

So I’ll leave you with the question I’ve been asking myself:

Where are you waiting for permission you don’t actually need?

Reply and tell me one place in your life where you’re being too careful, too polite, or too willing to wait.

Maybe it’s time to have a little audacity.

Until next Sunday,

The employee who’s been with your company for 10 years may be making less than the person who starts next Monday.

They know your systems.
They train new hires.
They solve problems before leadership even knows they exist.

And yet they’re often paid below market, not because they’re less valuable, but because they stayed.

The longer I’ve worked inside large organizations, the more I’ve realized this isn’t an exception. It’s often how compensation systems are designed to work.

External hiring budgets flex to match the market in real time. Internal raises rarely do. They move on an annual cycle, capped by percentages that have little to do with what the role is actually worth today.

If I had five minutes with a room full of executives, here’s what I’d ask them to consider.

Every company talks about wanting loyal employees.

People who stay. People who know the business inside and out. People who carry institutional knowledge no process document could ever fully capture.

But loyalty has a cost, and most companies aren’t paying it.

They’re simply not printing the bill.

The bill arrives later, in the form of a resignation letter from someone who finally realized the raise they’d receive by leaving is larger than five years of annual merit increases combined.

By the time that resignation lands on your desk, the decision has already been made.

No counteroffer fixes what should have been addressed two years earlier.

Every time this happens, you’re teaching your highest performers that loyalty produces a lower return than leaving.

The market rate isn’t just for new hires.

It’s the real value of the role.

When a company hires someone into a role at a higher salary than the tenured employee already doing it, they aren’t necessarily saying the new hire is more valuable.

They’re unintentionally admitting what the role is actually worth.

The problem isn’t that the market suddenly changed.

The problem is that the employee who stayed never benefited from it.

Instead, they have to interview elsewhere, secure another offer, and effectively threaten to leave before anyone is willing to acknowledge the gap.

That’s an expensive way to discover what someone has always been worth.

It’s also a strange incentive system.

The smartest companies treat retention like recruiting.

Recruiting gets the budget.

Retention gets what’s left over.

The companies getting this right understand that compensation isn’t only about attracting talent. It’s about keeping the people who already know how to create value.

That means conducting regular market reviews, not simply for compliance, but as a retention strategy.

It means having honest conversations with long-tenured employees about where they stand against today’s market instead of hoping they never look.

And it means treating internal compensation decisions with the same urgency as external hiring decisions.

Because from the employee’s perspective, they’re exactly the same decision.

One just comes with a familiar parking spot.

What this really costs when companies get it wrong

The cost isn’t the resignation itself.

It’s the six months of productivity lost while someone new gets hired, onboarded, and learns what the previous employee already knew.

It’s paying a higher salary to replace someone you could have retained for less.

It’s the institutional knowledge that quietly disappears and never fully returns, regardless of how many documents get written during the transition.

But perhaps the biggest cost is the message everyone else receives.

The people who stay are watching what happens to the people who leave.

They notice who receives significant raises after accepting another offer.

They notice when new hires come in above existing salaries.

And they draw the same conclusion:

That signal spreads much faster than leadership usually realizes.

A different version of loyalty

Companies spend millions trying to attract great talent.

Sometimes the smartest investment isn’t finding someone new.

It’s making sure the people who’ve already helped build your business don’t have to leave before you recognize what they were worth.

The organizations that understand this don’t just retain employees.

They build trust.

And trust creates the kind of loyalty that isn’t based on comfort or fear of change.

It’s based on knowing that staying is still the smartest decision.

The best companies don't ask employees to prove they're worth more. They make sure employees never have to.

That’s the version of leadership worth building.
Next Sunday, I’ll share what loyalty looks like from the builder’s side of the desk.

If this resonated, share it with a leader who's building the kind of company people don't want to leave.

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Until next Sunday,

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For most of my career, I’ve built things that didn’t belong to me.

I’ve launched products. Built ecommerce experiences. Led teams. Solved operational problems. Sat in conference rooms making decisions that impacted millions of dollars in revenue.

It has been rewarding work.

But when the day ended, none of it had my name on it.

Over the last few months, something started to change.

A friend asked me to help launch his handyman business from scratch. Another reached out about ecommerce consulting. I found myself sketching website wireframes at night, redesigning business cards, writing marketing copy, and obsessing over how a small business earns trust before it ever earns a customer.

I realized I wasn’t just helping businesses.

I was remembering what I love.

I love building.

Not just companies.

Ideas.

Systems.

Brands.

People.

Momentum.

Somewhere along the way, I started believing that the only meaningful work happened inside large organizations with big budgets and impressive titles.

But lately I’ve been discovering something different.

Some of the most interesting problems don’t exist inside Fortune 500 companies.

They exist at a kitchen table where someone is trying to figure out how to get their first ten customers.

Or in a local business trying to compete against companies ten times its size.

Or in the blank page that appears when someone says, “I have an idea, but I don’t know where to start.”

That’s the work that energizes me.

This newsletter is where I’m going to document it.

Not from the perspective of someone who has everything figured out.

But from the perspective of someone who’s actively building.

Some weeks I’ll write about helping a small business grow.

Some weeks I’ll share lessons from corporate leadership that translate surprisingly well to small companies.

Other weeks, it’ll be AI workflows, marketing experiments, systems I’m testing, books I’m reading, or mistakes I’m trying not to repeat.

If it helps someone build something a little better, it’s worth writing.

I’m also writing this for a more personal reason.

For years, I kept waiting until I felt “ready” to put my work out into the world.

Ready to create content.

Ready to consult.

Ready to write.

Ready to build something with my own name attached to it.

I’ve learned that “ready” is usually just another word for “later.”

So this is me choosing now.

Not because I have all the answers.

Because I finally have the courage to ask better questions in public.

My hope is that, years from now, this becomes a record of everything I built, everything that failed, everything that surprised me, and everything that taught me something worth sharing.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to know what you're building. Leave a comment or simply reply to this email. I read every one.

Welcome.

I’m glad you’re here.

Until next Sunday,