I was recently watching this scene from Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (a great show; you should watch it), where Miriam basically has a whole night routine that she starts after her husband goes to bed.

She takes off her makeup, puts on her skincare, her haircare, and then sneakily gets into bed, so her husband doesn’t notice. Then she wakes up before him to remove all of that and do her makeup again and then gets back into bed so that she can wake up as this “naturally beautiful woman” who her husband is in awe of.

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I’ve personally never done that, but I have put in a lot of effort into my appearance to look “effortless” or like “I woke up like this.”

And recently that has started to bother me.

Because I realised that almost nothing good in life is actually effortless.

Looking good takes effort. Being fit takes effort. Being interesting takes effort. Being good at your job takes effort. Having great relationships takes effort. Being good at literally any creative pursuit requires hours of being quite bad at it first.

Even the people who make things look completely natural usually have a tremendous amount of effort happening somewhere behind the scenes.

So why are we so obsessed with pretending otherwise?

Why is putting in effort completely acceptable, but being seen putting in effort is somehow embarrassing? Why do we want people to think we naturally have great skin rather than admit we have a seven-step skincare routine? Why does saying “I barely studied” somehow sound cooler than “I studied really hard for this”?

Why do we want to casually be good at painting, dancing, writing, running, public speaking, cooking, or whatever without enduring the deeply uncool period where we have to practise?

And why is being called a try-hard still an insult?

Because when you really think about it, a try-hard is just… someone who is trying hard. Terrible behaviour, apparently.

I think what we’re actually scared of isn’t effort. It’s visible effort.

Because the moment people know that you really tried, they also know that you really cared. And caring makes you vulnerable.

If you tell everyone you desperately want a promotion and don’t get it, people know you failed at something you wanted. If you start learning to paint, people might see the ugly paintings before the good ones. If you launch something new, people might watch it flop. If you say you worked incredibly hard on a video and it gets 12 views, you can’t fall back on, “Oh, I was just messing around.”

Pretending not to try gives us an escape hatch. If I wasn’t really trying, then I didn’t really fail.

Which is excellent for the ego. Less excellent for building an interesting life.

But what exactly is this costing you?

At first, almost nothing.

You skip mentioning how much you prepared. You pretend something came naturally. You laugh off the compliment with an “Oh, I barely did anything.”

Harmless.

Until slowly, the need to look effortless starts influencing what you’re willing to attempt.

And then it starts costing you everything you once wanted.

You stop applying for things unless you’re reasonably sure you’ll get them. You don’t start the hobby because you know you’ll be terrible at it initially. You don’t post the work until it feels perfect. You don’t admit how ambitious you are because wanting something too badly feels embarrassing. You become so committed to looking like someone who naturally has it all together that you stop permitting yourself to be the person who is visibly figuring it out.

And perhaps the strangest part is that everyone else is doing the same thing.

Imagine a room full of women, all performing ease for each other while privately convinced they are the only ones working this hard. You look at another woman’s effortless life and wonder why everything seems to come so easily to her. She looks at yours and thinks exactly the same thing.

Neither of you says anything because saying it would require admitting that you tried. That your career took work. That your body takes maintenance. That confidence had to be built. That the thing you’re now very good at once made you feel incredibly stupid.

So everyone keeps performing. And everyone keeps feeling slightly inadequate. Which is a fairly ridiculous arrangement when you think about it.

The real cost of effortlessness isn’t the effort you’re hiding. It’s everything you eventually stop doing because you’re afraid somebody might see you trying.

So now that you know the cost, the question is: Do you still want to pay it?

Because if not, there is another option.

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How to not destroy yourself performing effortlessness

1. Stop making “natural” the highest compliment you can receive

There is nothing inherently superior about being naturally beautiful, naturally confident, naturally intelligent or naturally talented. If anything, I’ve started finding cultivated qualities far more interesting.

You learnt how to dress well? Great. You taught yourself how to speak confidently? Even better. You became stronger because you trained three times a week for two years? That is considerably more impressive to me than accidentally having good genetics.

Start allowing effort to add value to the result instead of subtracting from it.

2. Become comfortable being visibly bad at things

This might be the hardest one.

Go to the beginner class. Speak the language badly. Make the ugly ceramic bowl. Post the slightly awkward first video. Ask the stupid question.

There is no route to competence that cleverly bypasses incompetence. The people you admire simply survived that stage long enough to become good.

3. Say “I worked really hard on this” without immediately making a joke

Someone compliments your presentation? Instead of “God, honestly I threw it together last minute.” Try: “Thank you. I put a lot of work into it.”

I know. Horrifying.

But notice how often we instinctively minimise our own effort because we think admitting we tried somehow makes the achievement less impressive.

It doesn’t. You are allowed to care.

4. Stop using nonchalance as protection from rejection

• “I didn’t even really want it.”

• “I was just seeing what happens.”

• “I’m not taking it that seriously.”

Sometimes those things are true. And sometimes they’re emotional bubble wrap.

If you want the job, admit you want the job. If you want your business to succeed, care loudly enough to work on it. If you want to become excellent at something, stop pretending you’d be completely indifferent if it never happened.

Wanting something creates the possibility of disappointment. It also creates the possibility of getting it.

5. Show more of the middle

We are very comfortable showing beginnings and endings. “I’ve decided to start running!” Then six months later: half-marathon medal. The four months in between where you were wheezing after 2.7 kilometres mysteriously disappear.

But the middle is where almost everything happens.

Talk about the thing you’re still learning. Tell your friends when something is difficult. Let people know when you’re practising rather than waiting until you can present yourself as mysteriously accomplished.

You might accidentally give someone else permission to do the same.

6. Replace “effortless” with “well-practised”

This has probably been the biggest shift for me. I no longer want things to be effortless. I want them to become easier because I’ve done them enough.

There are people who speak beautifully on stage because they have spoken on a hundred stages. There are people who make getting dressed look instinctive because they have spent years understanding their taste. There are people who seem incredibly confident because they have repeatedly done things while terrified.

Ease is often not the absence of effort. It is the result of accumulated effort. And that is a much more useful thing to aspire to.

Because the goal was never to wake up one morning magically excellent, beautiful, confident, successful, and interesting. The goal is to become someone willing to put enough care into her life that, eventually, some of it starts to look easy.

And if somebody catches you trying along the way?

Good!

At least they caught you doing something.

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If you’re not familiar with the politics in Delhi, India, the last couple of weeks have been super tense. Protests across the city became chaotic, videos began flooding social media, and within minutes, the entire country seemed to have an opinion on what had happened.

Even if you were nowhere near Delhi, you probably saw the footage. Some clips showed protesters, some showed police action, and almost all of them showed a few seconds from a much larger and more complicated event.

That did not stop anyone from reaching a conclusion, of course.

Within minutes, a fifteen-second clip had become evidence. A caption had become context. The comment section had somehow become the Supreme Court.

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Everyone knew who was right, who was wrong, who deserved sympathy and who deserved punishment. People who had not thought about the issue an hour earlier suddenly had a complete verdict, delivered with the confidence of someone who had personally investigated the entire matter.

The same footage produced two completely different certainties. Often, the conclusion depended less on what had actually happened and more on which existing narrative supported the viewer’s preconceived beliefs.

That was the part that unsettled me.

Most of us are no longer forming opinions. We are recognising the side we belong to, downloading its conclusion and calling it critical thinking.

We see a familiar villain, a familiar victim or a phrase we have heard before, and our brains fill in the rest of the story. Apparently, context is now a premium feature.

We call it having an opinion. Most of the time, it is just pattern recognition dressed up as thought.

Doubt has become expensive

Try saying, “I don’t know enough about this yet,” online and see how quickly people diagnose your character. You are a fence-sitter. A coward. Too privileged to pick a side. Possibly the reason society is collapsing.

Of course, there are times when silence is convenient. Refusing to take a position can itself be a position. But not every pause is apathy, and not every confident statement typed in all caps is an act of courage.

Sometimes, pausing simply means the information available has not yet earned a conclusion. But doubt carries a social cost, which is why many of us skip it. We go directly from seeing to knowing. Certainty tells people which team we belong to. It gives us entry into the conversation and saves us from admitting that the situation may be more complicated than the Reel we just shared.

The subject changes every week, but the mechanism stays the same. A protest. A war. A celebrity controversy. A breakup. A court case. A thirty-second podcast clip.

The internet assigns everyone a role. Villain. Victim. Brave person. Problematic person. Then we pick a team and begin speaking with the confidence of someone who was personally present at every relevant meeting.

Certainty feels good

Certainty offers instant relief. Doubt makes us sit with the possibility that we do not know enough, that someone we trust could be wrong, or that someone we dislike might occasionally make a valid point. Horrifying, obviously.

Given a choice between “I don’t know yet” and “I know exactly what this is,” most of us choose the second. Even when that certainty was borrowed from a headline, a creator or a comment section full of people who also watched the same fifteen seconds.

But relief is not thinking.

It is the absence of thinking, packaged convincingly enough to make us feel like we did the work.

Whoever gives you the frame often gets to give you the conclusion too. A headline tells you what matters. A caption tells you how to interpret it. A creator you trust tells you who the villain is. A clip ends at precisely the moment required to make you angry.

You believe you arrived at the opinion yourself. Often, you were simply escorted there. Borrowed opinions feel exactly like original thoughts until someone asks you a follow-up question.

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So, how do you know whether an opinion is actually yours?

A few months ago, I started running my strongest opinions through four questions. I still get things wrong, but these make it harder to confuse reacting with reasoning.

1. Where did I actually get this opinion?

Not, “What do I believe?” Ask, “Where did this belief come from?”
Did I read about the issue properly? Did I look at the original source? Did I spend time trying to understand it? Or did I pick it up from a headline, a Reel, a quote tweet or a comment section I scrolled through at midnight?

There is nothing wrong with learning from other people. Almost everything we know begins that way. But hearing something is not the same as understanding it. If I cannot trace an opinion back to any work I did myself, I may not have formed it. I may have inherited it.

2. Can I explain the opposing position fairly?

Most of us can argue only against the weakest, most ridiculous version of the other side. We turn their argument into a cartoon and then congratulate ourselves for defeating it. Can you explain their position in a way they would recognise as fair? Can you understand what they fear, what shaped their opinion and what evidence they think supports it?

Understanding an argument does not mean agreeing with it. It means proving that your position is based on more than memorising your side’s talking points. If you cannot explain why a reasonable person might disagree with you, you probably do not understand the issue as well as your Instagram Story suggests.

3. Is my certainty proportionate to what I know?

Five minutes of scrolling should not create the same confidence as five years of study. Online, however, both are usually delivered in the same tone.

Certainty should scale with information. If I have watched one clip, read one post and heard one person’s account, perhaps my conclusion should contain some room for doubt. This does not mean every issue has two equally valid sides. It means the strength of your conviction should reflect the strength of your evidence.

When your certainty is much bigger than your knowledge, the difference was probably filled by someone else’s narrative.

4. Do I want to be right, or do I want to have been right all along?

Wanting to be right means wanting the most accurate conclusion, even if it requires changing your mind. Wanting to have been right all along means choosing the conclusion first and collecting supporting evidence afterwards. It is less like research and more like building a legal defence for your ego.

One is curious. The other is defensive. One asks, “What would change my mind?” The other has already decided that nothing will.

Only one of those is thinking. The other is an opinion wearing thinking’s coat.

“I don’t know yet” is a complete sentence

Not knowing something is not a weakness. We have simply spent so long being punished for it in classrooms, workplaces, family group chats and comment sections that uncertainty now feels embarrassing.

We mistake speed for intelligence. The person who responds first must surely understand the most, even though they had just enough time to read the headline and examine the thumbnail.

Real thinking requires restraint. You have to resist reacting immediately. You have to read beyond the caption, look for missing context and consider the possibility that your first instinct was incomplete.

Critical thinking does not mean distrusting everything. Cynicism is also a shortcut. It just wears darker clothes. It means allowing the evidence to catch up before you reach a conclusion. It means leaving your beliefs unfinished for a while.

“I don’t know yet” is not the absence of thought. It is often where thought begins.

The next time a verdict arrives faster than the information could possibly justify, sit in the gap for a little longer. Ask where the belief came from, what you might be missing and what could change your mind.

That space between seeing something and deciding what it means is where actual thinking happens. Everything before it might simply be inheritance.

I am not asking you to doubt everything. I am asking you to earn what you believe.

So before your next opinion, ask yourself:

Did I arrive here, or was I delivered?

What is one opinion you changed after learning more?

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Insecurity isn’t a personality flaw.

I know that’s not what most people will tell you. Most people will say you need to “believe in yourself more” or “fake it till you make it,” which, honestly, is some of the most useless advice ever given to a woman trying to build something.

Because here’s what’s actually happening inside your brain when you feel insecure:

Your amygdala (the part of your brain responsible for detecting threats) doesn’t know the difference between a lion chasing you and you breaking a promise you made to yourself.

Both register as danger. Both trigger a cortisol spike. Both make your prefrontal cortex (the rational, decision-making part) go offline.

So when you say you’ll start that project this week and then you don’t do that, your brain logs it, not as a small slip, but as evidence that you can’t be trusted.

Do that enough times, and insecurity isn’t a feeling anymore. It’s a trained neural response.

Think about it for a second

• How many times have you promised yourself you’d wake up early and then didn’t?

• Said you’d start something this week and pushed it to next month?

• Told yourself you’d hold a boundary and then folded the moment someone pushed back?

I’m not asking to make you feel bad. I’m asking because I’ve done every single one of these things repeatedly for years.

And at some point, I stopped wondering why I felt so unconfident and started looking at what was actually underneath it.

I had broken so many promises to myself that my brain had genuinely stopped believing my own word.

And as women, we’re already conditioned to sideline our own needs for everyone else’s, which means we break promises to ourselves constantly and then wonder why we feel so untethered.

That’s not a mindset problem. That’s a neurological pattern you’ve been reinforcing without knowing it.

So, here’s the actual neuroscience of confidence (and no, it’s not about affirmations)

Confidence is not a personality trait. It’s not something you have or don’t have from birth.

Confidence is built through a very specific brain mechanism: the self-efficacy loop.

Every time you do what you said you would do, even something small, even when nobody is watching, your brain releases a small hit of dopamine. That dopamine reinforces the neural pathway. Your brain then starts to encode signals that read like “She follows through.”

And the more that pathway gets used, the stronger it gets. That’s neuroplasticity.

However, the reverse is also true.

Every broken promise? Your brain encodes that too. She says things she doesn’t mean.

And the amygdala starts treating your own intentions as low-reliability data, which is why you can have the best plan in the world and still feel paralyzed by self-doubt when it’s time to execute.

No amount of positive thinking overrides this. What overrides it is evidence. Small, repeated, consistent evidence.

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So here’s what I actually changed

Three shifts. That’s it, and the rest followed as a by-product.

1. I cut my commitments in half

Whatever I thought I could do in a week, I took out half of it. Not because I was being lazy, but because I’d rather keep five promises to myself than break ten. The math on self-trust is straightforward: fewer promises kept consistently beat ambitious promises broken repeatedly. Every time.

2. I started treating my own word like a client deliverable

I had never missed a deadline for a brand deal or a work commitment. Never. But I’d casually skip my own commitments like they were optional. So I started putting my personal promises on the same list, with the same weight, as a paid deliverable. If I said I’d do it, it was on the list. Non-negotiable.

3. I made my non-negotiables embarrassingly small

I set the bar so low that skipping it would feel ridiculous, and that’s the whole point. You want the follow-through to be almost guaranteed, so you can start feeding your brain the evidence it needs. Not “work out for an hour every day.” More like “move your body for fifteen minutes.”

It might look small, but it is genuinely life-changing.

So if you take one thing from this edition, let it be this:

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Stop making promises you can’t keep. To yourself or anyone else.

→ Start smaller than feels reasonable

→ Track it like it matters, because it does

→ And watch what happens when you become someone your own brain actually believes

Trust me, that shift is worth more than any course, tool, or strategy.

Now, which promise are you starting with? Reply to this edition and let me know.

You had told yourself this morning that today would be different. You would start that thing, make that call, and finally sit down and figure out what’s next. But then the day happened, work happened, errands happened, and now you’re here again, telling yourself that tomorrow is the real day.

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Except you said that last Tuesday, too. And the one before that.

Sound familiar?

Good. Because that’s not you being stuck. That’s you being comfortable.

And those two things look very identical until you’re honest about which one it actually is.

Let me explain the difference

Being stuck means you genuinely have no options.

You are left with no exits.

But on the other hand, being comfortable means the exits are right there, but taking them would mean giving up something that currently feels fine.

Not something essential for you, just simple "fine."

And this “fine” is the most dangerous word in your vocabulary because nobody ever changed their life while things felt fine.

But you might be wondering, “Adete, how do I figure out if what I am feeling is comfort or if I am actually stuck?”

Here’s how:

Read through this list, and if you tick more than three, you have your answer.

• You’ve had the same business idea saved in your notes for months, and you’ve opened it twice.

• You spend more time consuming content about productivity than actually being productive.

• You know exactly what you need to do next, but you keep “researching” instead of starting.

• Your morning routine is someone else’s morning routine that you watched on a reel and half-adopted.

• You’ve told at least three people about your “plan” but haven’t taken a single step toward it.

• You go to bed most nights with a vague sense that you wasted the day but can’t point to what went wrong.

• You open your laptop every morning knowing exactly which task you’ll avoid first

• You’ve stopped setting goals because ‘going with the flow’ sounds better than admitting you gave up on the last ones.

None of these is catastrophic, and that’s the whole problem.

Comfort doesn’t announce itself as a trap. It feels stable, manageable, and normal, and you can stay there for years without a single crisis forcing you out.

I know because I’ve ticked most of that list at different points in my life.

See, I’m not writing this edition from some high ground. I’m writing it because I caught myself and decided to do something about it.

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What I actually did about it —> the Discomfort Audit

I started calling it that because it helped me take it seriously. It has just 3 steps, and it’s simple, so take notes, and you can even start today.

Move 1: I announced before I was ready

I told people what I was going to do before I had a plan for it. Publicly. Which meant backing out would mean going back on my word in front of an audience.

Now, this is not motivation; what I created for myself is a form of manufactured accountability, and it works because your ego won’t let you quit once people are watching.

For example, every time I start something new in life where I need accountability, I share it on my IG stories so it becomes ingrained in my brain that there is no backing out now.

Move 2: I killed the “decide later” option

For me, if something needed a yes or no, it got one within 24 hours.

No sitting on it for weeks.

No “let me think about it” as a polite way of avoiding the discomfort of choosing. Most decisions don’t need more information; they simply need less hesitation.

Move 3: I tracked what I actually did versus what I planned to do

Every night for two weeks, I wrote down what I planned for the morning and what actually happened.

Initially, the gap between those two lists was embarrassing, and that embarrassment was more useful than any motivational quote I’ve ever saved and never looked at again.

That’s it.

Now it’s your turn

I’m not going to ask you to blow up your life. I’m going to ask you something smaller.

Think about that list above.

The one where I asked you to count how many you ticked.

Pick the one that stung the most.

Not all 8, just the one that made you go, "Okay, that one’s about me.”

Now give it 24 hours. Just one decision about that one thing. A simple yes or no works too.

Because once you cross that 24 hours mark, you would realise that the real question was never "Why am I stuck?”

It was always "What am I comfortable with that I shouldn’t be?”

And only you get to decide when that answer stops being acceptable.

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My partner Vedant and I are both creators. Different niches, similar skill sets, similar audience sizes.

A few months ago, we were both thinking about hosting workshops. His first question was: “What should I price it at?” Mine was: “How much free value can I give away first, so people feel like I’m worth paying?”

That tiny difference is the entire point of this essay.

It never occurred to him, for even a second, that he shouldn’t charge. He has knowledge. People want access to it. Of course, it has a price. End of thought process, straight to pricing strategy. Meanwhile, I was drafting a four-week free masterclass as an audition to eventually be allowed to charge for information I already had.

I’ve been sitting with that moment for months. Not because it was new, because it was the hundredth time I’d seen the same pattern, and I finally couldn’t unsee it.

I’ve been watching this for twenty years. Since I was a girl sitting at dinner tables where the men were fed first, while women were asked to wait. Since school, where the boys were called good at math and analytics while the girls were expected to be good at arts. Since my first job, where I watched men half as competent ask for twice as much and get it.

The men around me were operating from a script that the women around me had never been given. About money. About confidence. About time. About space. And the more I watched, the more obvious it became: it’s not that men are smarter, or more capable, or more deserving. It’s that they were handed a rulebook we weren’t.

What follows isn’t a list of rules. It’s a set of observations. And then, hopefully, a few things you’ll stop doing by next Tuesday.

I. Stop giving yourself away

Once you start looking, the pattern is impossible to unsee: women leak value everywhere.

Not in big dramatic ways. Quietly. In a hundred small exchanges a day, you don’t even register as exchanges.

Your time. Your emotional labour. Your expertise. All given away at a discount, because asking for anything back feels ungracious. Men are raised to see value as a two-way street. I give you something, you give me something. Not because they’re calculating, but because that’s their default. Women are raised on the opposite: the purest form of giving is giving without expecting anything back. If you’re even thinking about what you get in return, you’re being selfish, and probably also a bad friend, and also possibly a bad person.

So you leak value everywhere.

The film industry makes this visible in cold numbers. Priyanka Chopra has said female leads are often paid around 10% of what their male co-stars make. Deepika Padukone, for Padmaavat, was openly paid more than her male co-stars. Almost unheard of. She got it because she knew what she was bringing, and she asked.

Reciprocity is not greed. It is the baseline architecture of every healthy exchange — in business, in friendships, in relationships. The only person acting like your time and energy don’t have value has been you.

And it isn’t just money.

Watch a man on a Saturday. He plays video games for three hours. Watch an entire cricket match. Goes to the gym on a busy Wednesday. Meets his friends for no reason. At no point does he ask himself whether he should be doing something more useful. Whether someone is going to be upset. Whether he’s earned this.

He just does what he wants with his time. Imagine.

Now think about how you spend yours. Actually, think about whether you even have free time. Because for most women, time is the leftover. It’s what’s left after everyone’s been taken care of, the work is done, the house is handled, the calls are made, and the emotional labour is complete. If there’s a sliver left, maybe you’ll do something for yourself. Even then, there’s guilt. You’ll probably spend the first fifteen minutes of your free evening feeling bad that you’re not using it to reply to a friend you haven’t spoken to in three weeks.

Men treat their time as the starting point. Women treat it as the remainder.

His needs go in first; everything else fits around them. Your needs go in last, and whatever’s left is yours — which usually means nothing is.

The third version of this is the most literal. Space.

Watch a man walk into a room. He expands. His bag goes on a chair. His voice fills the space. He interrupts if he has something to say. He states his idea as an idea, not as a question, not with “this might be stupid but…” Just: here’s the thing I think.

Now watch a woman walk into the same room. She adjusts. She finds her corner. She waits for a pause that never quite comes. She makes herself small enough to hope she isn’t bothering anyone by being there.

And it isn’t just professional. It’s physical. How do you sit? How much of the couch do you take up? How loud do you laugh? How big are you willing to let your dreams be — in a relationship, in a conversation, in your own imagination?

Underneath all of it is fear.

Being visible has historically been dangerous for women. Too loud, too ambitious, too seen. It drew attention, and attention rarely meant opportunity. It meant scrutiny. Judgement. Sometimes danger. So we learned to make ourselves small as a survival mechanism. The women who didn’t, by and large, didn’t make it. And then we internalised the shrinking so deeply that we now do it on behalf of a world that no longer even has to ask.

Nobody is telling you to be smaller. You’re doing it automatically.

Value. Time. Space. Three different currencies. One consistent transaction: giving yourself away by default.

II. Claim what is yours

Once you see the giving, the next pattern is obvious. Men don’t just keep more for themselves. They actively ask for more. Everywhere. Constantly. With no apparent sense that this is an unusual thing to do.

And the places where women freeze are the exact places where the asking matters most.

Take a salary. A friend of mine landed her first job out of college. ₹20k a month. When I asked if she’d negotiated, she looked at me like I’d asked her to rob a bank. Her face said, “I’m just grateful to have a job.”

That gratitude is the whole problem.

I don’t blame her. I did the same thing with my first job.

What’s funny is that this same friend will haggle ₹200 off a top at Sarojini without blinking, a cold fury in her eyes. Your mother will get free dhaniya from the kirana wala like it’s her birthright, possibly enshrined in the Constitution. Women are ruthless negotiators — at the market, at the street vendor, at the local shop.

But the second there’s a power dynamic — a boss, a client, a landlord, an institution — we freeze. Haggling at Sarojini is “being smart.” Negotiating your salary is “being difficult.” One is acceptable. The other, apparently, is a character flaw.

Men don’t make this distinction.

A male classmate joined the same company as me straight out of college. A year in, I found out he had negotiated a better salary and a better title. Simultaneously. On his way in. It just never occurred to him that the first number was the final number.

Recently, we renewed our gym membership. They quoted a price. I was ready to pay it. It genuinely did not cross my mind that this was a number you could do anything about. Vedant walked up to the desk, mentioned we were looking at other gyms, gave a few reasons why we deserved a better rate, and walked out with a lower price and two free months.

Same gym. Same membership. I would have paid full price without blinking. And tipped.

The first number is never the real number. The skill you already use at Sarojini works everywhere — you’ve simply decided, at some point, that professional contexts are too serious for you to use your actual skills in.

The same freeze shows up earlier in the pipeline, before negotiation is even on the table.

A widely-cited internal report from Hewlett-Packard found that men applied for jobs when they met about 60% of the listed qualifications. Women held back until they were at 100%.

That gap is not a reflection of actual competence. It’s a different relationship with readiness.

For men, readiness is something you build on the way there. For women, it’s a prerequisite. And because it never feels like enough, the applying never happens. You will take one more course. You will get one more certification. You will be a deeply qualified spectator.

Here’s the irony. Almost every good opportunity in my life came from something I had no business saying yes to.

Graphic design — I got into it because I needed money, not because I was trained. Video editing — I took on work for a European creator while still figuring out the software, frantically googling tutorials between deliverables. Every time: didn’t feel ready, said yes anyway, worked out.

Not because I was secretly qualified.

Because showing up and figuring it out is the qualification.

That’s what men have been doing their entire lives. This channel only exists because Vedant pushed me to commit to 50 videos regardless. Had I waited to feel ready, I would still be waiting, possibly also still in my third certification course.

The men who are further ahead of you weren’t ready either. They just didn’t let unreadiness stop them. While you were taking one more course, he already had the job. The client. The seat at the table.

Not because he was better. Because he moved before he was briefed.

Then, assuming you do get the seat, there’s the question of who gets credit for what happens in it.

I have a couple of friends who run a brand together. Equal hours, equal decisions, equal hustle. But when it’s time to talk about their wins, the asymmetry is stark.

He throws parties for milestones. Speaks about the business in glowing terms. “I’m really proud of what we’ve built.” He includes her. But he never removes himself from the story.

She defers. Every single time someone compliments their work. “It’s really his hard work.” “He’s the one driving it.” She takes herself out of the narrative of her own success. She doesn’t even notice she’s doing it. He’s started to.

It happens everywhere.

When a woman leads a team, the debrief is “such a team effort, everyone was incredible.” When a man contributes 40% of what she did, it’s “I’m really proud of how I drove the strategy on this one.”

Guess who senior leadership remembers when the next opportunity comes up.

There’s solid research on this. A study by Heilman and Haynes in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that on joint projects where it wasn’t clear who contributed what, women were consistently judged less competent, less influential, and less likely to have played a leadership role than their male counterparts — even when contributions were objectively equal. The moment individual contributions were made visible, the gap vanished.

Same work. Same quality. The only variable was whether people knew it was hers.

Men narrate their wins. Not out of arrogance. Out of habit. Women are taught that claiming a win is showing off, that real excellence speaks for itself. Real excellence does not, in fact, speak for itself. Real excellence usually shuts up and lets the person next to it take the credit.

The woman who does the work but doesn’t narrate it will sit permanently behind the man who does less but talks about it more.

Visibility is not vanity. Naming your contribution is not stealing credit from others. You can be warm, collaborative, generous — and very precise about what you specifically brought. These things are not in conflict, no matter how much the advice columns of your teenage years suggested they were.

Ask for the money. Ask for the job you’re not quite ready for. Ask for credit by name.

You don’t need to earn the right to be in the room. You need to stop waiting to be invited.

III. Stop letting guilt make your decisions

The longer I watched, the clearer the mechanism underneath became. Because once you see how much women give away and how little they claim, the real question is: why?

The conventional answer is that men are more logical and women are more emotional, and logic is what lets men make better decisions.

This is such a confident lie.

Men are extraordinarily emotional. A man will take a meeting to prove someone wrong. He’ll quit a job because his ego was bruised. He’ll negotiate harder, not because the numbers demand it, but because he feels disrespected, and that feeling — that feeling — drives him to ask for more.

Men make emotional decisions constantly. Entire industries exist because a man somewhere decided to win an argument.

The real difference is which emotions each gender is allowed to act on.

When a boy is competitive, he’s “driven.” Angry, he’s “passionate.” Ambitious, he’s “hungry.” Those emotions are fuel. They push him forward. The world rewards him for running on them.

When a woman feels the same things, the labels flip. Competitive — “intimidating.” Angry — “difficult.” Ambitious — “too much.” Too much is a category that only seems to exist for women, incidentally. No man in history has ever been told he wants too much.

The emotions left as socially acceptable for women are the ones that make you pause. Guilt. Self-doubt. Accommodation. Empathy for everyone except yourself. The emotions that make you shrink. The ones that make you decide maybe you should just be grateful for what you have.

That’s the trap.

You are not less emotional than men. You are running on the wrong emotions.

He feels disrespected and demands more. You feel guilty and stop asking. He feels competitive and goes bigger. You feel competitive and immediately feel bad about it, as if wanting more were a character flaw rather than the entire basis of human progress.

The emotion doing the most damage, by a wide margin, is guilt.

Every time you’re about to raise a price, set a boundary, say no — the first feeling that arrives isn’t fear. It’s guilt. “But they’ll be upset.” “But they were counting on me.” “But what kind of person does this make me?”

Guilt feels like wisdom. It feels like conscience. It is neither. It is conditioning dressed up as morality.

Men don’t carry this filter because nobody installed it. That software was only installed in us, sometime between the ages of four and forever.

And guilt doesn’t just stop you from asking. It makes you endlessly available, which is its own problem.

Men don’t run a mental check of “is this going to inconvenience someone?” before doing what they need to do. Women do. Every time. And we’ve been told this makes us good.

It doesn’t. It makes us tired.

When you constantly put yourself last, you are not being selfless. You are training every person around you to treat your time, your needs, and your comfort as optional. And once that training is complete, congratulations — you have built yourself a life in which nobody considers you, including, eventually, yourself.

Research in psychology calls this pattern self-silencing — suppressing your own needs, opinions, and preferences to maintain harmony. Dana Jack’s foundational work on the topic, and the decades of research that followed, found self-silencing to be significantly more common in women, and strongly linked to depression, a lowered sense of self, and reduced perceived authority.

The world does not reward the woman who silences herself for peace. It responds by treating her like someone whose voice doesn’t matter.

You can hear guilt operating at the smallest scale. Look at how women cancel plans.

Every woman drafts a paragraph: “Hey, I’m so so sorry, I’ve been meaning to reach out, things have just been insane, I feel terrible about this, can we reschedule for soon?”

Every man sends: “Can’t make it, sorry. Let’s catch up soon.”

Both texts get the same response. “No worries, let’s reschedule.” The emotional labour you poured into that paragraph served no one. Not you, not her, certainly not the cause of healthy friendships.

The paragraph protected nothing.

Women write it because a no without emotional labour feels selfish. What the paragraph actually does is train everyone around you to expect a full explanation every single time you have a boundary. And then it produces so much resentment around the process that the boundary either never gets set, or gets set with a week of guilt attached as a free bonus.

A boundary without an explanation is still a valid boundary. No is a complete sentence. It doesn’t owe anyone a paragraph, and it definitely doesn’t owe anyone an apology.

One last thing worth naming, because it trips women up.

If you’ve spent years being the person who always says yes, everyone around you has built their expectations on that. Your yes is their normal. When you start saying no, you are not just setting a boundary. You are disrupting a system built on your compliance.

People will push back. They will be annoyed. Some will tell you you’ve changed. Good.

That pushback isn’t evidence that you were wrong. It’s evidence that the ‘no’ was overdue.

None of this is about becoming like men. Men carry their own conditioning, their own damage, their own version of limitations they were handed. This was never a competition.

The version of femininity most of us were handed — soft, accommodating, grateful, selfless, endlessly available — was not designed to make you powerful.

It was designed to make you manageable.

Convenient. Easy to predict. Easy to please. Easy to underpay, overlook, and pass over while you wonder what you’d done wrong.

Learning to ask, to claim, to take up space, to say no without a paragraph — none of that is rebellion.

It’s just knowing the rules of a game you’ve always been playing, but were never briefed on.

Last year, I disappeared.

Not the aesthetic kind where you post a black-and-white photo captioned “brb, healing.” I mean, actually disappeared; from Instagram, from this newsletter, from most online interaction besides my weekly YouTube videos. And as a content creator, that might be considered blasphemous.

No dramatic story. No pivot. No, “I was quietly building something behind the scenes.” I got married, moved into a completely new house, and somewhere between the packed boxes and the unpacked life, I didn’t have the energy or the mental bandwidth to show up online.

And I’ve done this before. Multiple times. But here’s the part that made me actually sit down and write this.

It wasn’t the break that shook me. It was what the break showed me about how deeply wired I’d become to the idea that I need to stay connected. All the time. To everyone. Or else.

We live inside a machine that punishes silence.

I want you to really sit with that for a second.

Think about the last time you went quiet online — didn’t post a story, didn’t tweet, didn’t reply to that group chat for a few days. What happened inside your head?

If you’re anything like me, the guilt showed up before anything else.

The first week off felt earned. By the second week, it got uncomfortable. By the third, I was spiraling. I’d open Instagram and see everyone else posting, launching, building. Here I was, sitting in a half-unpacked house, trying to find where I kept my gear & soft box, wondering if I’d already become irrelevant.

My brain cooked up an entire disaster story in advance. The subscribers would leave. The brand deals would dry up. Everything I’d spent years building would quietly crumble because I committed the cardinal sin of modern creator life: I went offline.

Except — none of that happened.

YouTube subscribers went from 625K to 659K. Newsletter subscribers crossed 30K from 23K. Revenue dipped for maybe two weeks and bounced right back.

The internet didn’t fall apart. But my nervous system had been so convinced it would that the relief itself became the lesson.

Here’s what I think is actually going on.

We’ve built an entire culture around the idea that connection equals safety. That being visible means being valuable. That if you’re not constantly in someone’s feed, you’re slowly being forgotten.

And social media, by design, reinforces this. The algorithms literally reward consistency over quality. Post every day, and you’re “disciplined.” Disappear for a week and the reach tanks. The system trains you like a lab rat: keep pressing the lever or the pellets stop.

So we stay connected. Not because we have something to say, but because silence feels dangerous.

I used to call that discipline. I have the Notion boards to prove it. Content calendars colour-coded by platform, posting schedules down to the hour, performance dashboards I’d refresh like a stock ticker. I genuinely believed that skipping one upload would undo six months of work.

But when I sat with that belief honestly — during a break I didn’t plan and couldn’t control — I realised something uncomfortable. That wasn’t discipline. That was anxiety wearing a productivity template.

The part nobody warns you about.

When you’ve been a full-time creator for years, or even when you’ve been chronically online for long enough. Your identity and your output start blurring into each other. And it happens so slowly you don’t even notice.

You start by introducing yourself by the platform you post on. You measure your weeks by what you published. Your mood on a random Tuesday depends on how your last reel performed. Your sense of self becomes this thing that gets recalculated every time you refresh your analytics.

And then, when you stop — when the output stops — you’re still there. But you don’t quite know who that person is anymore.

I know this might sound dramatic, reading it on a screen. But if you’ve ever tied your sense of self to your productivity, your visibility, or how “in the loop” you are, you know exactly what this feels like. It’s that hollow, slightly panicky feeling of: if I’m not producing, what am I?

That question sat with me for weeks. I haven’t fully answered it. I don’t think you do in a couple of months. But I sat with it long enough to understand something that I think matters:

My worth is not a number that refreshes.

What constant connection actually costs.

Here’s the thing about always being plugged in: it’s not just exhausting. It subtly rewires what you think matters.

You start optimising your life for content instead of making content from your life. You start seeing your marriage, your friendships, your morning walk through the lens of “is this postable?” And the stuff that doesn’t photograph well — the slow, boring, unglamorous work of building a life — starts feeling like it doesn’t count.

I got married. I moved homes. I was building something real and tangible and mine. But creator culture doesn’t really make space for that conversation. We talk about growth, scale, systems, funnels, hooks, and retention. We don’t talk about what happens when your real life needs more of you than your content life does — and you have to choose.

Because the internet will tell you that you don’t have to choose. That you can “document the journey.” That your wedding is content, your move is content, your breakdown is content.

But sometimes your life is just your life. And it deserves to exist without being optimised for engagement.

What I actually came back with.

For the longest time, I kept thinking that I’d return with some new strategy. Like the break was supposed to hand me clarity about algorithms and posting schedules.

It didn’t give me that. What it gave me is harder to fit into a carousel.

→ Fewer ideas, but ones I actually believe in.

→ Less urgency, but sharper filters for what gets my energy and what doesn’t.

→ A much smaller to-do list — and a much clearer understanding that half the things on the old one were there because they felt productive, not because they were.

And maybe most importantly: the evidence, not just the theory, but the lived proof, that the world doesn’t end when you go quiet for a while. That the people who care about your work will still be there. That the algorithm is not your boss.

Why am I writing this?

For those of you who come from my newsletter and are reading this, this is perhaps more raw than what you’re used to from me. There’s no framework. No acronym. No action steps.

But I think a lot of you are in your own version of this right now. Maybe you haven’t taken a break, but you’re tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix, the kind that comes from performing your life instead of living it. Maybe you’re wondering if the pace is actually sustainable or if you’ve just gotten so used to it that you’ve confused burnout for baseline. Maybe you’re doing the math on how long you can keep this up before something inside you quietly gives.

I don’t have a five-step solution for that. I just have this: several months of proof that disconnecting doesn’t destroy you. It just makes you uncomfortable long enough to hear what the noise was drowning out.

So if you’ve been waiting for permission — from an algorithm, from your audience, from some version of yourself that thinks rest is the same as falling behind — let me be the person who says it: It’s okay. The internet will be here when you get back. So will I.