Hi, I’m Rochi! Welcome to The Untitled Career, a space where I share ideas, thoughts and lessons from my own experience for corporate high-achievers wanting to make it on their own.

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Happy Sunday my people :)

Last Wednesday I asked you to notice something: every time you thought about sharing an idea, who exactly it would actually help. If you’re holding onto someone right now, good, hang onto her a little longer. We’re about to build that person properly.

But first I want to push back on some advice you’ve probably already heard, because I think it’s sending people in the wrong direction.

The advice that never quite fit

Somewhere along the way, “build a personal brand” turned into “pick a niche and become the go-to person for it.” One topic. One lane. Say it enough times and eventually someone believes you’re the expert.

If you spent years in corporate, that advice probably never sat right with you, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. You didn’t get good at one thing. You got good at reading a room, managing a messy project, writing the email that actually gets a response, negotiating a deadline nobody thought was possible. Picking a lane means quietly retiring the other three, and something in you resists that, for good reason.

Why “niche down” is aging badly

Here’s the part worth saying out loud: narrow, how-to information is exactly what’s getting cheaper by the month. Ask any AI tool how to write a cover letter or structure a five step morning routine and you’ll get a decent answer in about four seconds. That used to be worth building an entire personal brand around. It isn’t anymore.

What still can’t be copied is a specific point of view, shaped by a specific life, aimed at a specific person. That’s not a skill you specialize into. It’s a relationship you build with someone, over time, by consistently showing up for exactly them.

The actual reframe

So here’s my personal take on this: the specificity was never supposed to live in what you do. It’s supposed to live in who it’s for.

You can do five different things and still be completely clear, as long as all five are in service of the same person. The niche isn’t a topic. It’s a person.

Where this leaves your Ikigai and Johari answers

If you did the exercises the last two Sundays, you probably didn’t come out with one tidy answer. You came out with a handful of things: something you’re good at, something people keep asking you for, maybe a skill you didn’t even think counted.

That’s not a problem to solve by picking your favorite and dropping the rest. It’s raw material. The question isn’t which one. It’s who all of them are for.

A quick example

Say your list has writing, project management and a knack for calming people down before a big meeting. On their own, those sound like three unrelated skills, maybe even three different accounts. But run them past one specific person, a manager who’s good at her job and quietly burning out, wondering if leaving is even allowed, and suddenly all three make sense together. She needs someone to help her think clearly, get organized, and stay calm while she figures out her way out. That’s not three niches. That’s one person, served three ways.

The One Person Worksheet

Take whoever you’ve been holding onto since Wednesday and actually describe him/her in detail. This is our starting point to define an offer for that person. Here are some of the things you should be looking at:

• Who he/she is: age range, where he/she is in her career right now, what an average day actually looks like for her.

• What’s true for that person right now: the specific thing that’s wearing him/her down on an ordinary Tuesday.

• His/her fears: not in general, but specifically what that person thinks will happen if things start to change (starting and failing for example).

• What that person secretly wants: what his/her life would ideally look like a year from now.

• What’s stopping that person from starting today: the obstacles that person is finding (if possible, let’s try to narrow it down and focus on the real obstacles and not the ones that are visible in the surface).

You don’t need this polished. You need it real enough that you could picture her reading this email.

Keep it somewhere you’ll actually look at again. Every piece of content you make, any offer you come up with should be made with this person in mind.

See you next Sunday :)

Rochi

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Hi, I’m Rochi! Welcome to The Untitled Career, a space where I share ideas, thoughts and lessons from my own experience for corporate high-achievers wanting to make it on their own.

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Happy Wednesday my people!! :)

For the last two Sundays, you did two very different exercises. First Ikigai, looking inward at what you’re good at and what you actually enjoy. Then the Johari Window, asking other people what they see in you that you don’t. Two very different angles, both pointing at the same handful of things.

If you actually did both, you’re not starting from zero anymore. You have real data, written down, from more than one source.

The trap most people fall into right here

This is usually the point where people stop moving and start thinking. They sit with what they found and try to turn it into a perfect plan before doing anything with it. What’s my niche. What’s my positioning. What do I actually sell. How do I say it. All of it worked out in their head, none of it tested anywhere.

And it never really resolves, because clarity was never a thinking problem. It’s a doing problem. You don’t think your way into knowing what works, you find out by putting something out and watching what happens to it.

What you actually need before you start

Here’s the part I want to be honest about: you don’t need all of it figured out before you begin. Most of what you’re trying to nail down in your head, the exact offer, the perfect wording, the whole content plan, sharpens itself once you’re actually doing something. It doesn’t come before.

But there’s one piece that isn’t like the others. One thing that genuinely does need to be clear before anything else works, and it’s not your offer.

It’s who you’re talking to.

Not “corporate people who want out.” One person. Specific enough that you could describe her to a friend and they’d recognize her.

Everything else, what you post about, how you say it, what you eventually sell, gets figured out by doing, once that one thing is in place. Without it, you can do everything else “right” and still watch it go nowhere, because it isn’t landing on anyone in particular.

Your only job this week

Nothing to write yet. Just notice, this week, whenever you think about sharing something (a post, an idea, a lesson from your Ikigai or Johari answers), ask yourself one question: who exactly would this actually help?

Not “who might find this interesting.” Who needs to hear this specifically, right now, in their actual situation.

Hold onto whoever comes to mind. Because this Sunday, we’re going to take that person and make her real: name her, define her, and build the one thing every piece of content you make from here on out is going to point back to.

See you then :)

Rochi

The Untitled Career exists because people like you are on the other side. If you want to receive this newsletter on a weekly basis in your inbox, subscribe as a free or paid member in the following link:

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Hi, I’m Rochi! Welcome to The Untitled Career, a space where I share ideas, thoughts and lessons from my own experience for corporate high-achievers wanting to make it on their own.

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Happy Sunday my people :)

Last week we did the inward version of this exercise. We used Ikigai to look at what you’re good at and what you enjoy, and I asked you to find the overlap between what you’re good at and what someone would actually pay for.

And if you did the Wednesday exercise too (thinking of a moment someone outside your job came to you for help, not because you offered, but because they thought of you first), hold onto that answer. We’re going to use it today.

Because I ended last week’s edition with a warning, and I want to start with it again: looking inward has a blind spot. There are things you’re so good at that they feel effortless to you. So effortless that you don’t even count them as skills. You can’t see your own value clearly, because you’re standing too close to it.

So today we’re flipping the camera around.

What the Johari Window actually is

The Johari Window was built in 1955 by two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham (yes, “Johari” is just their two first names mashed together). It was designed to map how well we understand ourselves compared to how others understand us, and it splits that into four boxes.

There’s the Open self: what you know about yourself and what others know too. There’s the Hidden self: what you know about yourself but keep from others. There’s the Unknown self: the stuff nobody’s found yet, not even you. And then there’s the one we actually care about today, the Blind Spot: what other people can see in you that you genuinely cannot see in yourself.

That last box is where I think most first offers are actually hiding.

Why the blind spot matters more than you’d think

Here’s the thing about a skill that lives in your blind spot: it doesn’t feel like a skill to you. It feels like just how you are. So when someone tells you “you’re really good at that”, your instinct is to shrug it off, because it didn’t cost you anything to do it.

But easy for you is not the same as easy for everyone. The things that come effortlessly to you are usually the exact things other people are quietly struggling with, and would pay to have done for them.

You can’t see this one on your own. That’s the whole point of a blind spot. You need other people to hand it to you.

How to actually use it

This one’s simple, and it works better the less you overthink it.

Message 3 to 5 people who know your work. Former colleagues, a manager, a friend who’s watched you operate, someone you helped with something recently. Ask them one of these, or all three:

• What do you come to me for?

• What do I make look easy that you find hard?

• If you had to describe what I’m good at to a stranger, what would you say?

Don’t explain why you’re asking. Don’t soften it. Just ask, and then actually sit with what comes back.

A quick example

Say you spent years in corporate operations. You ask five people that question, and three of them say some version of the same thing: “you’re the person who makes chaos make sense.” One mentions the way you pulled a messy project back on track in a week. Another says you’re the one people go to before a big meeting to help them figure out what to actually say.

None of that sounds like a job title. But run it through last week’s filter (what you’re good at, meeting what someone would pay for) and you’re looking at something like: “I help small teams turn a messy plan into something they can actually execute”, which is a real, sellable thing.

That’s the blind spot doing its job. Nobody handed you that sentence. Five people, without knowing it, handed you the raw material for it.

The trap to avoid

The trap here isn’t that people won’t answer. It’s what you’ll do with the answer when it comes back.

You’re going to want to dismiss it. “That’s nothing, anyone could do that.” “That’s not a skill, that’s just how I am.” That instinct is exactly why this is a blind spot in the first place. If it were obvious to you, it wouldn’t need someone else to point it out.

When the answer feels too small or too obvious to count, that’s usually the sign you’ve found the right one.

The takeaway

Between last week and this week, you now have two very different sources pointing at the same thing: what you notice about yourself, and what other people notice about you without being asked. Where those two things overlap is about as close to “your first offer” as you’re going to get without actually trying anything yet.

Your only job this week

Send the message. Three to five people, one question, today or tomorrow while it’s fresh in your head. Write down what comes back, next to what you already found in the Ikigai exercise last week.

You’re not committing to anything. You’re just collecting the data you’ve never actually asked for.

Next Sunday, we bring both weeks together and talk about why you already have enough to start, and what’s actually stopping you isn’t a lack of clarity.

See you then :)

Rochi

The Untitled Career exists because people like you are on the other side. If you want to receive this newsletter on a weekly basis in your inbox, subscribe as a free or paid member in the following link:

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Hi, I’m Rochi! Welcome to The Untitled Career, a space where I share ideas, thoughts and lessons from my own experience for corporate high-achievers wanting to make it on their own.

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Happy Wednesday my people :)

I was speaking to a friend last week who is extremely tired of working for someone else. She’s been in corporate for almost a decade.

When I asked her why she’s not starting something, she told me she had nothing to sell…

Let me be honest, this answer did not catch me by surprise. This is what most people think.

But it actually makes me mad. What do you mean you have nothing to sell? Are you seriously telling me that after almost 10 years in corporate you don’t have one single skill that someone would be willing to pay for?

Come on!!

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “I’m good at my job, but I don’t actually have anything of my own to sell”, I want to gently push back on that. Not with a pep talk. Just with a different way of looking at it.

One buyer, one verdict, once a year

Think about how you’ve actually measured your own worth for the last however many years. One review a year, from one manager, in one room you probably weren’t even sitting in when they decided what number to give you. Maybe a bonus that moved a little. Maybe a title that didn’t move much at all.

That’s the whole dataset most of us have been working with. One buyer. One opinion, repeated often enough that it started to feel less like an opinion and more like the truth.

Why it feels so convincing

Here’s the part I find genuinely interesting: your brain isn’t being dramatic when it believes this. It’s just working with the only information you’ve ever given it. If the sole voice that’s ever assessed your work is one company, once a year, of course that voice starts to sound like the final word. It’s not that your brain is wrong, it’s that it’s been underfed.

You can’t really know what your work is worth from a sample size of one. And yet that’s the exact sample most of us have been using to decide something as big as whether we’re good enough to build something of our own.

What this actually means for you

It means “I have nothing to sell” was never really a fact. It was a conclusion you reached with one data point. You’ve spent years solving problems that people, real people, would happily pay for. You just called it “my job”, because the only person ever telling you what your work was worth was the one signing your paycheck.

Outside that one room, you genuinely don’t know what your work is worth. Not because it isn’t worth anything. Because you’ve never actually asked.

Your only job this week

I don’t want you to start thinking about a business plan or a content strategy.

I just want you to think back to a moment in the last year when someone outside your job came to you for help with something, not because you offered, but because they thought of you first. A friend, a former colleague, someone in your family.

Write down what it was. That’s genuinely all I’m asking.

Hold onto it, because on Sunday I’m handing you a tool to go find a few more of those moments on purpose, and there’s a good chance one of them turns out to be the first thing you build.

See you then :)

Rochi

The Untitled Career exists because people like you are on the other side. If you want to receive this newsletter on a weekly basis in your inbox, subscribe as a free or paid member in the following link:

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Hi, I’m Rochi! Welcome to The Untitled Career, a space where I share ideas, thoughts and lessons from my own experience for corporate high-achievers wanting to make it on their own.

Subscribe now

Happy Sunday my people :)

Last week I talked about the mindset shift that makes leaving corporate seem like something feasible: instead of trying to build a huge company in order to leave corporate, start with becoming self-employed. Build a small offer and start finding your first paid client.

If you haven’t read it, check it out before going into the rest of this article:

read here

Right after I sent it out, my inbox filled up with the same question, over and over:

“Okay… but how do I know what to sell?”

It’s the question that stops most people before they even begin. So I’m turning it into a little series. Over the next few editions, I’ll walk you through the exact ways I’d find your first offer: the thing you can actually start selling, even while you’re still in your job.

In today’s edition, we’re going to be looking inward, with a tool you’ve probably already heard about: Ikigai.

First, let’s set the scene of what Ikigai really is

If you’re interested in the personal development space and you’ve been in it for a while, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of Ikigai. But, Ikigai as we know it in the Western world is not really what it was meant to be.

So, before we go into how we’re going to use it, let’s unpack it a bit (feel free to skip this part if you feel you already know about Ikigai, but I do encourage you to read it).

What it actually means

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese term that roughly translates to “a reason for being” or more simply, “the reason you get up in the morning.” It comes from iki (life) and gai (worth, value). So literally: the thing that makes your life feel worth living.

It’s especially associated with Okinawa, one of the places where people live the longest, and researchers often point to a strong sense of ikigai as one of the reasons for that.

In the West, we've turned Ikigai into a productivity puzzle: four circles, one perfect career at the center, and the pressure to find your purpose. But in Japan, it was never about work, success or money at all: it's the small, everyday reasons that make life worth living, found in how you live, not in some grand answer you're supposed to figure out.

There’s a Japanese neuroscientist called Ken Mogi, who has a book called The Little Book of Ikigai that deeply explains this.

His whole argument is that ikigai has nothing to do with being successful. In his words, you can have ikigai “without necessarily being successful in your professional life.” It’s a democratic thing, available to absolutely everyone, no achievement required.

And it’s not one big answer, but rather a lot of small ones. Mogi says your ikigai can be as tiny as the first coffee you drink in the morning, or as big as going to space. But most of it lives in the small, ordinary moments.

Underneath it all, there’s one idea doing the heavy lifting: flow. Those moments where you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that you lose track of time completely. For Mogi, that’s where ikigai actually lives, not in some far-off goal, but in the doing itself.

In particular, he talks about 5 pillars to really find your ikigai:

1. Starting small: finding satisfaction in tiny, everyday actions and paying attention to the details.

2. Releasing yourself: letting go of your ego and the need for external validation.

3. Harmony and sustainability: living in tune with the people around you, your community and your environment. Building things that last, rather than chasing quick wins.

4. The joy of little things: savouring small daily pleasures with gratitude for the ordinary.

5. Being in the here and now: staying fully present in what you’re doing (this is where flow lives).

As you can see, it all revolves around the idea of finding meaning in the small details.

Ikigai was never a destination you arrive at after enough soul-searching. It’s a way of living, something you find by starting, paying attention, and noticing what pulls you in. Not something you’re supposed to figure out in your head before you start.

So here’s why I’m bringing all of this into this newsletter.

Most people, when they try to figure out what they could do on their own, treat it like one giant exam question: What’s my purpose? What am I meant to do with my life? And that question is so big, so heavy, that they freeze and never answer it. (I did exactly this for years.)

But if ikigai is really about small things, presence, and paying attention, then finding what you could do doesn’t have to be a dramatic search for your one true calling. It can be something much gentler and it can begin with just noticing.

Noticing what you lose track of time doing. Noticing what people always seem to come to you for. Noticing which tasks give you energy, and which ones drain you. None of that requires you to have your whole life figured out. It just requires you to pay attention to what’s already there.

That’s the shift I want you to make before we go any further: you’re not here to find your purpose. You’re here to notice what you’re already good at, what already pulls you in and turn a small piece of it into something someone would happily pay you for.

So let’s make it practical. Here’s how we’re actually going to use Ikigai to find your first offer.

How to actually use it

Now that we’ve taken the pressure off, let’s bring back those four circles, but this time as what they really are: not a map to your destiny, just four simple prompts to help you notice what’s already there.

Grab a piece of paper (this genuinely works better on paper) and answer these fast, without overthinking:

1. What are you good at? think about all the things you’ve learned in corporate, all the things you already know how to do (analysis, project management, negotiation, writing, untangling messes). Plus, the things people always come to you for. Write as many things as you can come up with.

2. What do you enjoy doing? this doesn’t necessarily have to be something huge, but rather small tasks / topic you really enjoy talking about. You’ll likely find these in the things that make you enter into flow state.

3. What do the people around you actually struggle with? identify real problems that people face, ideally in a world you already understand. Start with finding problems around you.

4. What would someone genuinely pay to solve? from all the problems you identify, which ones would someone really pay for.

Now, here’s the part that matters. You’re looking for overlap. And for your first offer specifically, the one that counts most is where “what you’re good at” meets “what someone will pay for.” That’s where your first offer actually lays.

“What you love” and “what the world needs” are what make it sustainable over time, they’re your direction, your mission. But you don’t need the perfect four-way center to start.

A quick example

Let’s bring it down to earth through an example. Say you spent years in corporate marketing. “Marketing” feels too broad to sell. But run it through the filter: you’re good at writing emails that actually get opened, you don’t mind doing it, the small business owners around you are terrible at it, and they’d happily pay to have it done. There’s your first offer, not “marketing,” but “I write email campaigns for coaches who hate writing them.”

And then (this is the ikigai part) you start small. You offer it to one person, and you pay attention. Does it give you energy or drain it? Do people actually want it? That feedback is how you calibrate. You’re not figuring out your whole future on paper. You’re noticing your way toward it, one small offer at a time.

The trap to avoid

Don’t wait for the perfect four-way center before you start. Your mission isn’t a destiny you have to discover before you’re allowed to begin, it’s a direction you find by starting in the overlap and letting it sharpen as you go. Clarity is a reward for moving, not a requirement to move.

The takeaway

Your first offer was never something you had to invent out of thin air, or wait for a lightning bolt of purpose to reveal. It’s already sitting in the overlap between what you’re good at and what someone will pay for. Ikigai doesn’t hand it to you, it just helps you notice it.

So this week, your only job is to do the exercise. Four lists, on paper, no overthinking. You’re not committing to anything yet. You’re just starting to see what’s already there.

But here’s the catch with looking inward: you have a blind spot. There are things you’re so good at that they feel effortless to you. So effortless you don’t even count them as skills. You can’t see your own value clearly, because you’re standing too close to it.

That’s why next Sunday, in Part 2, we’re flipping the camera around. We’ll use a tool called the Johari Window to find the offer hiding in your blind spot: the thing other people already see in you, that you’ve been overlooking your whole life. It’s my favourite part of this whole process, and it’s usually where the real gold is.

Have an amazing week ahead!!

Rochi

The Untitled Career exists because people like you are on the other side. If you want to receive this newsletter on a weekly basis in your inbox, subscribe as a free or paid member in the following link:

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Happy Sunday my people :)

Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing my journey of leaving corporate and starting from scratch on social media. I’ve now built a community of 37k beautiful souls on Instagram and there’s a question I get almost every day: how do I make it out of corporate?

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, because it depends so much on the person and their background.

But after a year out of the corporate world, making my way on my own, I do have some thoughts I want to share.

The problem

Most people picture “leaving corporate” as starting this huge business that requires a team of 100 people, an office and thousands of dollars of investment. They picture the next Toyota or Nike.

And for obvious reasons, that image makes them freeze. “How am I going to do that when I’ve never done anything like it?”

Let’s be honest: it’s a reasonable thought. Building a business like that is genuinely hard, and if you’ve never done it, you probably lack the confidence, the knowledge and the resources (plus it can take months, if not years, to make a single euro).

So here’s the real question: why are we picturing the next Nike instead of something more reasonable?

Before I give you the exact steps I’d take, there are two concepts I want to put on the table. They’ll shape the whole way you think about your corporate exit.

Concept #1 - The Cashflow Quadrant (Robert Kiyosaki)

If you’ve read Rich Dad Poor Dad, this might ring a bell. In its sequel, The Cashflow Quadrant, Robert Kiyosaki explains that there are only four ways to make money.

He splits them into four:

• E - Employee. You work for someone else’s system and trade your time for a salary. (This is where most of us start and where corporate keeps you.)

• S - Self-employed. You work for yourself: you own your skills and sell them directly (freelancer, consultant, coach…). Still trading time for money, but now it’s yours.

• B - Business owner. You own a system and a team that generate income without you having to be there.

• I - Investor. Your money works for you.

The left side (E and S) is where you trade time for money. The right side (B and I) is where systems and money work for you and it’s where real financial freedom lives.

Kiyosaki’s whole point is this: we’re raised and schooled to be excellent Employees: study, get the safe job, stay in the E box forever. But if you want freedom, the goal is to move from the left side to the right: from E, toward B and I.

And here’s where most people get it wrong: when they finally decide to leave, they try to jump straight from E to B (from employee to building a whole business). That’s the single biggest leap on the entire map.

The natural first step isn’t B. It’s S, becoming self-employed. You sell the skills you already have (or a new one you learn), directly, as yours. It’s the doable bridge out of the E box and, as you’ll see, you can start building it before you ever hand in your notice.

Concept #2 - The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The second one comes from the startup world. It was popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, and it might be the single most useful idea for anyone building something of their own.

A Minimum Viable Product (an MVP) is the simplest possible version of your offer that you can put out into the world to get real feedback from real people. Not the polished, complete, “perfect” version. The smallest one that already delivers value.

It was born as the antidote to a very expensive mistake: founders spending months (or years) and a ton of money building the “perfect” product in a cave… only to launch it and find out nobody actually wanted it.

The MVP flips that. Instead of building big and hoping, you start small, put it in front of real people as fast as possible, and let their response teach you what to build next. You launch, you learn and you improve with real customers and real money, not guesses.

And you can probably already see where I’m going, so let’s get right into it.

The easiest way out

So here’s the path I’d actually follow: the one that turns “leaving corporate” from a terrifying leap into a handful of small, doable steps.

Step 1 - Delete the “huge company” from your head

Before anything practical, this first move is mental and it’s the most important one. Stop picturing Nike. You are not building a company with a team, an office and investors.

You’re going to start providing services on your own. That’s it.

You’re moving from E to S on Kiyosaki’s map (from employee to self-employed) and nothing more for now. The second you shrink the goal from “build a business” to “get one person to pay me for a service,” about 90% of the fear disappears.

Step 2 - Audit your skills (and the ones you’d love to build)

Grab a piece of paper and make two lists.

List 1: what you already know how to do.

Everything your corporate years quietly taught you (analysis, project management, negotiation, writing, strategy, operations) plus the things people always come to you for. This is the fastest route, because you could start selling it tomorrow.

List 2: areas you’d actually enjoy building a skill in.

If nothing on List 1 excites you (completely valid), look at high-demand skills you can learn on the side: digital marketing, social media, copywriting, sales, design, personal branding.

Your first service is hiding somewhere in those two lists. And here’s the pressure-off part: you’re not looking for your life’s purpose. You’re looking for one skill someone would pay you for. That’s a much smaller (and much kinder) question.

Step 3 - Define your ideal client

Now, who is this for? And please, not “everyone.” The fastest way to land your first client is to get painfully specific: one type of person, with one problem you can solve, that you could realistically reach right now.

The easiest place to look is where you already come from (your industry, your world, people one or two steps behind where you are). You understand them, you speak their language, and you’re instantly credible to them. The clearer this person is in your head, the easier everything else gets: your offer, your message, and that first “yes.”

Step 4 - Define your first offer (a.k.a. your MVP)

Here’s where the two concepts finally click together. Take your skill (Step 2) + your ideal client (Step 3) + the smallest version that delivers a real result (your MVP) and that’s your first offer (we’ll get into how to define that offer properly in upcoming editions).

One skill. One clear result. One person. Not a course, not an agency, not a five-tier menu. The simplest thing you could deliver this month, as clean as: “I help [this person] get [this result] through [your skill].”

That’s your MVP. And it’s everything you need to make your first euro outside of corporate.

Step 5 - Start looking for your first client (while you’re still employed)

This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that changes everything. You don’t wait until you’ve left to look for clients. You start now, while you still have your paycheck, your safety, and zero pressure. Reach out to people, offer your service, and land your first client while you’re still sitting in corporate.

And the goal here isn’t income. The goal is your first euro earned outside your salary, because nothing builds confidence like it. The day someone pays you for something you built, on your own, a switch flips. Suddenly “leaving corporate” stops being a scary theory and it’s something you’ve already started doing.

Step 6 - While you do all this: start building your personal brand

Everything above works even without an audience, but this is the piece that makes it compound. From day one, while you audit your skills, shape your offer and chase your first clients, start building your personal brand and your online presence.

Here’s why it matters so much: right now you’re going out to find clients one by one. A personal brand flips that: it slowly turns you into the person clients come to. You document what you’re learning and building, you show up consistently, and little by little you grow an audience that knows you, trusts you, and wants to work with you.

And here’s the long game: that audience is what will buy from you the day you finally go all-in. By the time you’re ready to leave, you won’t be starting from zero: you’ll already have a room full of people who’ve followed you build this, and who want in. Your personal brand is the bridge between “a couple of side clients” and “a real thing I can actually leave corporate for.”

So don’t treat it as a someday project: it’s the single highest-leverage thing you can build alongside your first offer.

(btw, I do have a 1:1 service where I help high-achievers looking to exit their corporate jobs build their personal brands on Instagram, so if this is something you’d be interested in, you can apply here).

The takeaway

That’s the whole reframe. We took that huge, paralyzing image of “I have to build the next Nike” and brought it all the way down to earth. We shrank it into something small, specific and doable: one skill, one client, one offer, started from inside the safety of your job.

Because here’s what actually happens when you do this: you prove to yourself that someone will pay you for your work, on your own terms. And that proof is everything. It’s the first real brick of confidence: the thing that lets you start planning your exit properly, from a place of certainty instead of fear.

And that first money? Don’t spend it, and don’t lock it away either. Reinvest it back into yourself and back into what you’re building (skills that make you more valuable, tools that help you serve your clients…). This isn’t about “investing” in the stock-market sense yet, it’s about pouring every early euro back into your own growth and your own business, so that small offer keeps getting bigger.

Because that’s how an exit actually happens: not in one brave leap, but one paid client, one reinvested euro, one bit of confidence at a time.

Have an amazing week ahead!!

Rochi

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This is the first edition in the new shape and I wanted to open with the question I get asked more than any other: do I actually need a personal brand, and if so, how do I even start?

I’ve been sitting with this one a lot lately. Partly because I’ve spent the last few months rebuilding my own brand from zero, and partly because I’m working one to one with a number of clients on this in my program The Brand Lab.

And listen, I know we’re all a little tired of hearing “you need a personal brand.” Me too. But the take I want to share today is a bit different from the usual advice, and I think it might shift how you see the whole thing.

When I made the decision of leaving the corporate world and venturing into doing something on my own, I didn’t know where I was going to start. I didn’t know what services to provide, what to sell and essentially what to build.

But I had one thing very clear: if no one knew me, no one would buy anything from me.

This simple realisation had actually been dancing around in my mind for quite some time. I’m obsessed with reading, listening to podcasts and trying to absorb anything I can from others who are one step (or many) ahead of me.

So many founders I had been following had built their whole businesses on top of a strong personal brand. So I thought: if these people who are successful and have “made it” are doing it, shouldn’t I be doing it too?

This idea resonated in my mind for a while, but since I never had a business idea or something I wanted to go for on my own, I guess my pull was never strong enough.

At some point, I started an Instagram account to share my running journey, but after a few months I stopped posting. It felt like I was trying to share a very small part of my life and something didn’t feel totally right.

I’m not sure if deep inside I was too scared to do it or it was simply that I didn’t know where to start, but looking back I wish I’d started earlier.

5 reasons to start building your personal brand today

If you’re reading this and you’re still in corporate, you’re probably thinking there’s no reason for you to start building an online presence.

But hear me out on this one: a strong personal brand is the one thing I can guarantee will help you find your way out of corporate (or at least help you make money on the side if you don’t want to leave).

Here’s why you need to start thinking about it today:

1. No one buys from someone they don’t know

And now you’re probably thinking that you have experience from corporate, you’re an expert in your field and you’ve done all this networking for years, so you don’t need to show your face because someone will come to you.

Now, let’s be realistic. Regardless of how good you are, do you really think knowing a few people within your industry is enough to build a sustainable business?

The answer is pretty obvious to me.

If you want to start selling something or building a business, you need to make yourself seen.

2. The audience comes before the idea

I know you’re thinking you don’t have an idea and you don’t know what to talk about. So I’m here to tell you that you don’t need any of that.

You can start your personal brand talking about what you’re going through, your hobbies or topics you truly enjoy.

Once you have an audience, the audience itself will start asking for help. And that, my friend, is when you start finding out ways to serve others and get paid for it. The ideas come naturally from interacting with your audience, not necessarily before.

You need to think about it as a platform on which you’ll end up creating a whole ecosystem of different ways of monetizing.

3. It will boost your confidence

I see so many people out there who don’t start because they feel they need more confidence. But the thing is, that confidence is built from showing yourself that you’re capable (meaning, it’s built because you take action, not before).

When you start seeing you’re actually growing your personal brand (and even more if you start earning your first dollars), you’ll gain the confidence you need to eventually leave corporate, if that’s what you want.

4. The right opportunities start coming to you

When you put yourself out there, people can see how you think and what you stand for.

Once you do that, people start connecting to your inner world and the right things start coming to you, instead of you having to chase them.

Clients, collaborations, opportunities you didn’t even ask for start coming your way.

5. It’s the safety net your salary isn’t

I know you’re in corporate and you feel everything is “safe”. But the reality no one likes to admit is that your position can disappear from one day to the next and, with it, the “stability” of your paycheck.

A personal brand is your asset. It’s yours forever, and you can always build more things on top of it. It’s a way of building your own thing, something no one can ever take away from you.

3 steps you can start taking today

Creating a personal brand will generate a lot of friction at the beginning. It’s exposing yourself to being seen, stepping out of the comfort zone. We all know our brains want to keep us safe and safe means familiar, so our brain will do anything to pull us back from doing it.

It’s a tough journey, so we want to make it as easy for ourselves as we can. This means building strong foundations and systems to make it sustainable in the long run.

Here are three decisions you can make today to get your personal brand off the ground:

1. Choose your “why”

Before we jump into posting content or doing anything else, we need to get clear on why we are doing it. Is it to build your way out of corporate? To create income on the side without quitting?

Your “why” is the thing that will keep you posting when motivation dips and things are not working out the way we would want.

2. Choose how you’ll build it

There are many ways to build your personal brand, but these are the main ones you should be considering:

• Authority: it’s build on knowledge you already have. You position yourself as an expert in that field. This works best if you have a service business in mind or you want to monetize your existing experience.

• Documentation: if you’re thinking about moving away from your current career/expertise or you’re simply redesigning your life and you have nothing to sell, start documenting the journey: what you’re learning, trying and figuring out, bringing people along (this is what I did).

• Building in public: you already have an idea or a product you’re building, so you build it out in the open: the process, the wins, the flops, the numbers. It’s similar to the previous one, but here you already have a business idea to pursue.

3. Choose one platform

You can literally build your personal brand in any platform you want, whether it’s LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram or even here on Substack. Each platform serves a purpose, but you can start with any of them.

My recommendation would be to start with the easiest one for you. If you don’t feel comfortable speaking on camera, then don’t choose Youtube to start.

Master one, get comfortable, then expand later. Make it easy on yourself.

Do those three today and you’ve officially started.

Read more

Happy Sunday 😊

If you’ve been around for a while and you’re receiving this email, I bet you’ve noticed some changes (the name of this newsletter itself).

And this is exactly what I’m going to explain in today’s edition.

I started this newsletter as an experiment, with the idea of creating a space to help other high-achievers in their journeys of questioning the traditional career path and finding a way out of it.

And to be completely honest, this was, in a way, a commitment with myself, to sit down and write something every single week. I wanted to make this a habit, which would eventually build up on my own Personal Brand ecosystem.

I’ve always wanted to be super transparent and honest with where I’m at in my journey and only want to speak about things I’ve done myself.

At the time I started this newsletter, I had only monetized my own experience in tax advisory, providing freelancing services. And, to be fair, I never looked for clients out there, so I didn’t really feel I could tell someone how to start freelancing and looking for clients.

But I knew I could provide some interesting views which could help others in their journeys from a mindset perspective, because I’d lived through them, both in my own personal development journey and through a deep therapy process I’ve gone through over the last few years.

So that’s where I started.

For a while now, this newsletter has landed in your inbox as Prepared Not Ready. I loved that name and I still do.

But, after talking to so many high-achievers over the last few months, seeing what they really need and considering the evolution of my own personal brand and portfolio career, I feel it’s time for a rebranding.

I want to take this newsletter to the next level and start sharing the real behind-the-scenes of someone building different income streams in real time.

So I’m making it official: from today, you’re going to receive this newsletter as “The Untitled Career”.

Prepared Not Ready was about one moment: getting ready to leave. But leaving corporate isn’t the story, it’s only the first page. The real deal is reinventing, building, trying things, failing, trying again. Building a career that doesn’t fit in a box, that you’re still writing as you go.

That’s what “untitled” means. Your career doesn’t have a title yet and that’s the beauty of it. You have the freedom to decide what it looks like.

Here’s how this is going to work from now on

Every edition, I’ll open up with a topic related to building a non-linear career, designing your own path and essentially reinventing yourself outside of corporate. This may take the form of an honest reflection, a mindset shift or whatever I feel can add value to your process (I’m going to keep this quite open).

That part is, and always will be, free.

But I’m adding something new.

I don’t just want to talk about this in theory. I want this newsletter to become a real space for transformation, where you can take my exact experiences and apply them on your own.

So at the end of each edition, I’ll show you exactly how I’m putting things into practice in my own business: the funnels I’m building, what I’m actually monetizing, the real numbers, what’s working and what’s flopping.

That part, the “here’s exactly how I do it”, will be available for paid subscribers.

What stays exactly the same?

I’ll still be sending out the newsletter weekly, every Sunday at 4PM GMT. The first real edition of The Untitled Career starts next week. This one is just a teaser 😜

Before you head off, I'd love to know where you’re at in your journey at the moment. Feel free to leave your responses in the poll below or just hit reply and let me know! I read every single message, and it shapes what I write next.

Whether you’re stuck in your corporate role but dreaming about leaving some day or you’ve just left and you’re completely lost, everyone has their own journey. So, please please please don’t feel like you’re falling behind.

If you've been around since the Prepared Not Ready days: thank you, truly. You're the reason I get to keep doing this.

And if you just found me: welcome to this new era.

Welcome to The Untitled Career.

See you inside 🤍

PS: If you want to start supporting my journey from today, you can become a paid subscriber in the link below:

Become a paid subscriber

One last thing.

If everything in this email resonated with you, here’s something I want you to know: you don’t have to do this alone.

I’m building a community for high-achievers who are questioning the traditional path and starting to build something of their own. It’s a space to figure it out together, with people who actually get it. Because the hardest part of leaving the “safe” road isn’t the strategy. It’s doing it surrounded by people who don’t understand why you’d ever want to.

It’s not open yet, but you can join the waiting list here:

Sign up for the waitlist

The other day I was telling a friend about something that happened to me earlier this year with a client.

An obstacle that, honestly, was one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with. The kind of moment that would have been a completely reasonable place to quit.

And he asked me something: “What kept you going? Why didn’t you stop?”

I sat with it for a second. And to my own surprise, I never actually considered stopping.

Stopping was never on the menu, because I don’t have a plan B. So the only direction available to me was forward.

That’s when it clicked. Not having a plan B was actually the reason I kept going.

There’s an old military move where an army lands on enemy shore and burns its own boats. No ships, no retreat. Suddenly there’s no “well, if this doesn’t work, we’ll just sail home.” The only option left is to find a way through. And something shifts in people when retreat stops being possible.

I used to think a plan B was just being responsible. Now I think that, for certain things, it’s the quietest way to guarantee you never fully commit.

And it’s not a willpower problem. It’s how your brain is built.

Your brain is wired to keep you safe and “safe” means “familiar.” Neuroscience is pretty clear here: choosing the known option costs your brain less energy than choosing the unknown one. Your amygdala, that ancient alarm system, fires harder at the thought of a loss than at the thought of an equivalent gain. So your mind is constantly, quietly nudging you toward the path you already know.

Here’s why that matters. If you have a plan B sitting in the back of your mind, that’s exactly where your brain will keep running. Because plan B is the known, safe, no-risk option and plan A is the scary, uncertain one. Every time plan A gets hard, your brain will whisper: you know, you could always just go back. And it’s very hard to give everything to something while a part of you is holding the exit door open.

There’s even research on this. Two researchers, Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman, ran experiments where people simply thought through a backup plan before working toward a goal. And those people consistently performed worse on the actual goal. Not because they were less capable, but because merely having the backup lowered their desire to make plan A work. Just thinking about the safety net reduced how badly they wanted the main thing.

Now, I’m not telling you to be reckless. A plan B makes complete sense when the outcome is mostly out of your hands. But for the things that are actually within your control (building something of your own, betting on yourself, leaving the safe job to do the thing you actually want) the safety net isn’t protecting you. It’s actually diluting you.

This is why, when you leave corporate, the cleanest thing you can do is stop treating “going back” as an option. Because the moment going back is on the table, your brain will keep reaching for it every single time things get hard. And they will get hard.

So burn the boats. Take retreat off the menu, and watch how fast you become the kind of person who finds a way.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

Look around the room you’re in right now.

The chair you’re sitting on. The phone in your hand. The building around you. Every single thing you can see was, at one point, nothing but a thought in someone’s head. Before it was real, it was imagined. Someone had to conceive it before anyone could build it.

Nothing gets created in the world before it’s created in a mind first.

We forget this constantly. We look at the life we want and we treat it like a logistics problem. What are the steps? What’s the strategy? What do I do first? Those questions matter. But they’re not the beginning.

The beginning is believing the thing is possible for you, and being able to hold it clearly in your mind.

Napoleon Hill spent more than twenty years studying the most successful people of his time, and he built his entire philosophy around one line: “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Everything begins as an idea, and nothing becomes real out there until it first becomes real in here.

Notice the order in that sentence. Conceive. Believe. Achieve. Achieve is the last part and it’s not a coincidence. It can’t come first, no matter how hard you work, because you cannot build something you can’t first picture, and you won’t chase something you don’t actually believe you can have. The idea and the belief come before the action. Always.

That’s why two people with the same skills can end up in completely different places. One of them can see the thing clearly and believes it’s theirs to build. The other can’t, so they never really start (or they start with one foot out the door, waiting for proof). Same ability. Different starting point. And the starting point was in their head.

Now, let me be clear about what Hill did not mean, because this gets twisted all the time.

He did not mean you can think your way to a result from the couch. Belief is not a replacement for work. In Hill’s own system, that belief only does anything when it’s tied to a definite aim, a real plan, and relentless persistence. The thought is the seed. It is not the whole tree.

But it is the seed. And nothing grows without it.

So before you obsess over the strategy, the steps, the perfect plan, go back to the part everyone skips. Can you actually picture the thing you want clearly, in detail? And do you truly believe it’s available to you?

Because if the answer is no, no plan will save you. And if the answer is yes, you’ve already done the hardest part. You’ve conceived it. You believe it. Now go achieve it.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

Many people don’t change their lives because they are not clear on “what they want to do”. Maybe they have many interests, or they simply haven’t found something they really enjoy.

They’ve been told to have a 5-year vision and follow it.

But what if you genuinely have no idea about what you’d like to do?

For years, that was me. I’ve always been this kind of person who loves learning about many things and never runs out of curiosity. Choosing something I would dedicate my life to was simply too hard for me.

People would ask me what I liked, what lit me up, and where I saw myself in 10 years. And, to be honest, I had literally no idea. I could picture myself doing so many things.

I used to compare myself to others and feel broken. As if everyone else had been handed a map and I’d missed the day they gave them out.

At some point, I understood I could work it out differently.

Maybe I didn’t know where I wanted to be in the next 5 years. Maybe I hadn’t found something that lit me up so much that I could picture myself doing it long term.

But I could definitely tell you where I didn’t want to be.

I didn’t want to see myself sitting in the same chair in the same office at 40.

I didn’t want to wake up at 80 feeling like I had never tried.

I didn’t want to become someone who just kept saying “not yet”.

I knew that if I kept doing what I was doing, I would end up exactly in the same place I didn’t want to be in.

So that immediately became my starting point. Knowing what I didn’t want was exactly what I needed to start redesigning my life.

There’s something about the way sculptors work that relates so much to this, and that I genuinely love.

When you carve a statue out of marble, you don’t add anything. You only remove. The figure doesn’t appear because you bring it in from outside, it appears because you take away everything that isn’t it. Michelangelo carved the David out of a single block of marble by doing exactly that: removing, piece by piece, all the stone that wasn’t him. The form was found by subtraction.

Your life can work the same way.

You don’t always sculpt the life you want by laying a perfect vision on top. Sometimes you sculpt it by removing. Saying no, chipping away the jobs that aren’t it, the rooms that aren’t it, the version of you that isn’t it, until what’s left starts to look like something true.

And here’s the part I believe most: your no is the most honest thing you have.

Because a vision can be borrowed. Half the “dreams” we chase were handed to us… the house, the title, the milestone, the life that’s supposed to make you happy. You can want something for years and never notice it was never really yours.

But you can’t fake a no. It’s the realest signal you have about who you actually are.

So if you’re stuck because you can’t see your vision, stop staring at the blank and start building your “anti-vision”.

Make the list of what you don’t want. Look honestly at where you’ll end up if nothing changes, and let that be uncomfortable enough to move you. Then ask the only question that matters: what would I have to start doing, today, to make sure that life never becomes mine?

That answer isn’t your whole vision. But it’s a direction. And a direction is enough to start.

You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going. You just need to know what you’re walking away from.

Start with the no.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

Why nothing becomes real until you believe it first.

“No one is ever ready for anything they don’t believe they can acquire.”

I read this quote recently and it hit hard.

Before the business, before the move, before the content, before the version of your life you actually want, there’s a belief that it’s possible for you.

Not for someone smarter, or luckier, or further ahead, but for YOU.

Now, I know you’re thinking “how can I actually do that?”.

So, I have an answer for you:

You start acting as if you already are the person you’re trying to become before it’s actually a reality.

Let me make this concrete.

Say you want to create content.

Most people would approach it like this: “Once I get good, once I have an audience, once it’s actually working, then I’ll call myself a content creator.” They wait for the result to grant them the identity.

But it works backwards. You have to believe you’re a content creator first. You decide that’s who you are and then you act from that belief.

So you ask yourself: what does a content creator do? They create content. That’s it. So the moment you start creating (even if it’s shit at the beginning) you’re already being the thing.

Every time you feel and act as a content creator, you’re tricking your brain into believing you really are, until it becomes a reality. Because reality responds to how you move.

I know this is counterintuitive, because it works the opposite way from how we’re taught. We’ve been told to get it and only believe it afterwards.

But it’s actually the reverse: first you believe it, then you become the person who can have it, then you get it.

The universe doesn’t hand you a life you don’t believe is yours.

So whatever your version of this is (the founder, the writer, the person who left and started over) stop waiting for permission to believe it. Start being it in the smallest possible way, today. Do the one thing that person would do.

Because you are never going to feel ready for a life you don’t believe you can have. You have to believe it first. And you start believing it by becoming it.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

We love an overnight success story.

The founder who “came out of nowhere.” The creator who “blew up overnight.” The person who seemed to go from invisible to everywhere in what felt like a week. We see the moment it happened and we think: wow, that was fast.

But we’re only ever seeing the moment. We’re not seeing everything that came before it.

Because here’s the truth about almost every overnight success: it wasn’t sudden, and it definitely wasn’t smooth. The “overnight” you’re looking at is the tip of years of trying things that didn’t work, failing, adjusting, and trying again. The moment it finally clicked is just the only part you were around to witness.

When someone is doing well now, it’s almost always because at some point they did badly. They launched the thing that flopped. They put out work nobody cared about. They had the idea that went nowhere and instead of stopping, they learned from it and evolved. And they did that over and over until one day, “out of nowhere,” it worked.

The success isn’t the opposite of those failures. It’s built directly on top of them.

There’s a tree that explains this better than anything.

The Chinese bamboo. You plant the seed, you water it and for the first year, nothing happens. Second year, still nothing. Third year, fourth year, the same. Nothing above the surface. To anyone watching, it looks like a failure. Like you’re pouring effort into dead ground.

And then, somewhere in the fifth year, it shoots up. Around 25 meters in a matter of weeks.

So did the bamboo grow in five weeks, or in five years?

Five years, obviously. All that time when nothing seemed to be happening, it was building a root system underground, deep enough to hold the explosion of growth that came later. Skip the underground years and the tree shoots up and collapses under its own weight.

People work the same way. But with one detail the bamboo leaves out: our underground years aren’t quiet and tidy. They’re messy. They’re full of failed attempts. The drafts nobody read. The launch that sold nothing. The version of the idea that was just wrong. Those failures aren’t time wasted before the success…they are the roots. Each one taught something, corrected something, made the next attempt a little better.

And then one day it broke the surface and that’s the only day everyone else saw.

So here’s the shift I want you to make.

Stop seeing other people’s success as a single lucky moment. When you watch someone “blow up,” you’re not watching magic. You’re watching the surface moment of years of failing, adjusting, and evolving that nobody posted. Comparing your messy middle to their highlight will wreck you every time.

And stop reading your own failures as proof that it’s not working. They might be the exact opposite. They might be the roots.

Most people quit in year three, right in the messy, no-results, lots-of-failure part. Right before the breakthrough. Not because they ran out of ability, but because they couldn’t see that the failing was the building.

So if you’re there right now, trying, failing, adjusting, wondering if any of this is going anywhere, consider that you might just be early. Not failing, but building.

The growth you can’t see yet is the growth that will eventually hold everything up.

Keep going. Keep evolving. Keep watering the ground.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

The other day I heard a quote that moved something inside of me: “If you want to achieve the unimaginable, you have to believe in the unimaginable.”

Read it again. Because there’s something in it that goes against almost everything we were taught.

Most of us live by the opposite rule. We say: show me it’s possible, and then I’ll believe it. Give me the proof, the evidence, the guarantee, and then I’ll commit. We treat belief as the reward at the end…something we’ll finally let ourselves feel once reality has confirmed it’s safe.

But that order is backwards. And it’s the reason most people never build anything that didn’t already exist.

Think about Roger Bannister.

For decades, running a mile in under four minutes was considered humanly impossible. Doctors said the body couldn’t take it. Experts said the heart would give out. It wasn’t a goal anyone was chasing. It was a wall.

Until 1954, when Bannister did it.

And here’s the part that matters: within a year, other runners broke four minutes too. Within a few years, dozens had. Nothing about the human body had changed. The only thing that changed was that one person proved it could be done — which means the only thing that had ever stopped the rest was the belief that it couldn’t.

The wall was never in their legs. It was in their heads.

That’s what the sentence is really saying. The unimaginable stays unimaginable for exactly as long as nobody is willing to believe in it first. Belief isn’t the proof that something is possible. Belief is the precondition for making it possible.

And I’ll go further, because this is the part nobody likes to say out loud: you have to be a little delusional.

You have to be willing to believe in something other people can’t see yet. Something you have no evidence for. Something that, if you said it at dinner, would make people quietly raise an eyebrow.

Because here’s the logic most people miss: if you want a different outcome, you have to believe you’re capable of something different. You can’t follow the exact path everyone else followed, settle for the exact things everyone else settled for, and somehow expect a result nobody around you has. A different result requires a different belief first.

Now, let me be clear about what this is not.

This is not “believe it and it will magically appear.” Belief doesn’t do the work for you. You still have to build the thing, brick by brick, with no guarantee it will stand.

What belief actually does is quieter, and more important: it’s the only thing that keeps you in the game long enough for the work to pay off. The unimaginable takes time. It takes failed attempts, and doubt, and long stretches where there’s no proof at all that you’re on the right track. And in those stretches, the only people who keep going are the ones who believe in something they can’t yet see.

Belief doesn’t make it real. It makes you stay long enough to make it real.

So whatever the “unimaginable” is for you (the life, the work, the version of yourself that feels too big to even say out loud) notice the order you’ve been waiting in.

You’ve probably been waiting for proof before you let yourself believe.

Try flipping it. Believe first. Be a little delusional. And then go build the proof yourself.

Because nobody has ever seen the unimaginable before it was made. That’s exactly what makes it worth making.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

Rochi

He called it “Profiting by Failure.” And the core idea is a distinction that changed how I see almost everything: there is a difference between failure and temporary defeat.

Hill said that what most people call failure is almost never that. It’s a temporary defeat. A setback. A redirection.

And the difference between the two depends entirely on how you respond. A failure is only a failure when you accept it as permanent and stop moving. As long as you’re still in motion, what you have is not a failure. It’s life telling you to take a different route.

He lived it himself. Seven times in his life, Hill thought he had failed completely. Lost businesses, lost money, people who betrayed him, moments where everything seemed to collapse. But looking back, every single one of those defeats had pulled him out of a path that wasn’t right for him and pushed him toward something better. He said the most valuable knowledge he ever gained didn’t come from his successes. It came from those seven moments of defeat.

I think about this a lot. Because I’ve lived my own version of it.

When I moved to Dubai, I came with a job offer and within two months, I was let go. Just like that. No warning.

At the time, I didn’t see it as a redirection. I saw it as a personal failure. What did I do wrong? Why wasn’t I good enough? What does this say about me?

I found another job. And the same thing happened. It didn’t work out, and I was let go again. Two jobs, two endings I didn’t choose. And by then, the story in my head was getting louder: maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I’m not built for this. Maybe coming to Dubai was the wrong decision.

And then it happened a third time. A third job that ended with a termination.

Three jobs. Three times the door closed in my face.

And it was only after the third time that something clicked. Because here’s the thing: I had always had this idea in my head that I wanted to build something of my own. Entrepreneurship had been sitting in the back of my mind for years. But I kept pushing it aside because the “safe” path felt like the responsible thing to do.

And life kept closing that safe path. Again, and again, and again.

It wasn’t bad luck. It wasn’t that I was unemployable. It was a redirection. Life was practically screaming at me: this is not your path. Stop trying to force it.

But I almost missed it and that’s the part nobody talks about.

Redirections don’t arrive with a label that says “this is good for you.” They arrive disguised as pain, as rejection, as the worst thing that could happen to you right now. And in the middle of it, when you’re scared and confused and your confidence is on the floor, the last thing you’re thinking is “maybe this is exactly what I needed.”

That’s why Hill’s distinction matters so much. Because in the moment, temporary defeat feels identical to failure. The emotions are the same. The fear is the same. The voice in your head telling you to quit is the same. The only difference is what you do next.

And here’s what I’ve learned: the redirection is always there. Life puts signals in your path constantly. But you have to be paying attention. You have to be willing to look at what just fell apart and ask yourself, honestly: is this the end, or is this life pushing me somewhere I wasn’t brave enough to go on my own?

It’s not easy and I’m not going to pretend it is.

Accepting a redirection means letting go of the version of your life you had planned. It means trusting that the path you can’t see yet might be better than the one you were holding onto. And that takes a kind of courage that nobody prepares you for.

But if you’re in the middle of something right now that feels like a failure, I want you to consider the possibility that it’s not. That what you’re living is a temporary defeat, not a final one. And that maybe, just maybe, it’s not taking something away from you. It’s trying to show you where to go next.

You just have to be paying attention.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi

Books, podcasts, Instagram posts, even people I admired. They all said the same thing: figure out what you’re meant to do. Find that one thing that lights you up so much that it becomes your whole career, your whole identity. Find it, and everything else will fall into place.

So I looked for it for years.

And every time I thought I was getting close, something else would pull my attention. A new interest. A new curiosity. A new thing I wanted to explore.

And I felt broken. Like everyone else had found their thing and I was the only one still looking.

There’s a word for what I felt. It’s called “the purpose trap.” This idea that somewhere out there, there’s one single answer to the question “what should I do with my life?” and that your job is to find it. And until you find it, something is wrong with you.

But here’s what nobody told me: some people don’t have one purpose. They’re interested in too many things. They’re good at things that have nothing to do with each other. And that’s not a problem. That’s actually a superpower.

Think about it like a playlist.

Some people are a single song on repeat. One genre, one sound, one vibe. And that works for them. They found their song early and they play it loud. Those are the people who knew at 12 they wanted to be a doctor, and now they’re a doctor, and they love it.

But other people are a whole playlist. Different genres, different moods, different energies depending on the day. And for years, I thought that made me scattered. Unfocused. Not serious enough.

Until I realised that the problem was never me. The problem was the question.

“What is your purpose?” is the wrong question. It assumes there’s one answer. One fixed point. One thing that defines you forever.

The better question is: “Am I building a life that feels purposeful?”

Because purpose is not a thing you find. It’s a quality you create. You create it by paying attention to what genuinely pulls you in, even when it doesn’t make a clear career path. By letting yourself be good at things that don’t seem to go together. By trusting that all those different pieces are building something, even when it doesn’t look like it from the outside.

A purposeful life doesn’t look like one straight line. It looks like a web. Different threads, different directions, all connected by you.

And the beautiful thing is, the people who build the most interesting lives are usually the ones who couldn’t pick just one thing. The ones who followed their curiosity instead of forcing themselves into a box.

I stopped looking for my purpose a while ago. And honestly, it was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done. I stopped asking “is this the thing?” every time I started something new. I stopped putting that pressure on every project, every idea, every interest. I just started building. Following what excited me. Letting things evolve.

And what I’m building now doesn’t have one name. It’s not one thing. It’s a combination of everything I’ve ever been curious about, everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve lived. And it feels more “me” than any single purpose ever could.

So if you’ve been feeling frustrated because you can’t find your one thing, maybe it’s because you were never meant to have just one.

Maybe you’re a playlist, not a single song.

And maybe that’s exactly what makes you interesting.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi

There are two ways to relate to a garden. You can walk through it, look at the flowers, take a photo, and leave. Or you can get on your knees, put your hands in the dirt, and plant something.

Both people experienced the garden, but only one of them changed it.

I think most of us spend our lives walking through other people’s gardens. Admiring what they built. Wondering how they did it. Scrolling through their results without ever getting our hands dirty.

And I get it. We were trained for that. School taught us to absorb. Corporate taught us to execute someone else’s plan. Nobody ever said: “Now go create something that doesn’t exist yet. Something that’s yours.”

So we stay in consumer mode. Consuming content. Consuming other people’s opinions and paths. Consuming advice about what we should do next without ever stopping to ask what we actually want to build.

And consumer mode feels safe. Because when you consume, you don’t have to put anything on the line. You don’t have to be wrong. You don’t have to show something unfinished to the world.

But consumer mode has a cost. And the cost is this: you watch your life happen instead of making it happen.

Now, there’s another mode which changes the game completely. And it’s not necessarily about becoming a content creator or even starting a business. It’s just a shift in how you approach things overall.

In consumer mode, you ask yourself: “what can I watch?”. In creator mode, you ask “what can I build?”.

In consumer mode you wait for the path to appear. In creator mode, you build the path by walking it.

In consumer mode, you look at other people’s lives and think you are behind. In creator mode, you ask yourself: what can I try today which will help me build the life I dream about?

I notice this in myself all the time. On the days I’m consuming (scrolling, comparing, absorbing), I feel stuck. Like life is happening somewhere else and I’m just watching.

On the days I’m creating (writing, building, trying something new even if it’s small), everything shifts. I feel like I’m moving, because the act of creating puts you in a completely different relationship with your own life.

You stop being the audience to become the author.

And you don’t need to know the full story before you start writing. You just need to pick up the pen.

So if you’ve been feeling stuck lately, ask yourself honestly: have I been consuming or creating?

Because sometimes the answer isn’t that you need more information, more inspiration, more clarity. Sometimes the answer is that you need to make something. Anything. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s small. Even if nobody sees it.

Plant something. Get your hands dirty. Stop walking through other people’s gardens and start building your own.

That’s where everything begins.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi

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When a bowl or a vase breaks, instead of throwing it away or trying to hide the cracks, the artist repairs it with gold. The broken pieces are put back together, but the cracks are made visible (highlighted, even). The philosophy behind it is that the break is not something to be ashamed of. It’s part of the object’s history. And by repairing it with gold, the object becomes more beautiful, more valuable, more interesting than it was before it broke.

I think about this a lot when I think about the stories we tell ourselves.

Because we all have cracks. Moments where something broke. A career that didn’t go the way we planned. A decision that felt like a mistake. A chapter that ended before we were ready.

And what we do with those cracks defines everything.

Some people hide them. They glue the pieces back together as quietly as possible and pretend it never happened. Their story becomes: “I used to have something good, and then I lost it.”

Other people fill them with gold. They look at the break and say: “This is where I changed. This is where I grew. This is where my real story started.”

Same break. Two completely different stories.

Steven Bartlett talks about this in his book The Diary of a CEO. He calls it your self-story, the narrative you carry about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what your life means. And he says one thing that has stuck with me since I read it:

Never compromise your self-story.

Because the story you tell yourself about your life is not just a story. It’s a blueprint. It determines what you believe is possible. It determines what you attempt. It determines how you interpret failure, success, change, and uncertainty.

If your story is “I left a safe career and I’m struggling,” every hard day becomes evidence that you made the wrong choice.

If your story is “I chose freedom and I’m building something from zero,” every hard day becomes part of the process.

Same reality. Same facts. Completely different experience of living it.

So here’s what I want you to think about.

What’s the story you’re telling yourself right now about where you are?

Is it a Kintsugi story? one where the cracks are filled with gold, where the break is part of what makes you interesting, where the hard chapter is leading somewhere?

Or is it a story where the cracks are something to hide? Where leaving the safe path was a mistake? Where you’re one bad month away from proving everyone right?

Because you get to choose. The facts don’t change. But the story does. And the story is what drives everything.

Protect it. Write it with intention. Don’t let other people’s narratives about your life become yours.

Your self-story is the most important thing you own. Treat it that way.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi

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So here it is.

In 1937, Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich. It became one of the most influential books ever written about success, mindset, and building wealth. He spent over twenty years studying the habits and thinking patterns of some of the most successful people of his time (Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison) and tried to distill what they all had in common.

And of all the principles he wrote about, there was one he kept coming back to as the foundation of everything else.

He called it the Definite Chief Aim.

The idea is deceptively simple: you need to know, with absolute clarity, what you want. Not a vague sense of direction or a list of nice-to-haves. A specific, written, unmovable statement of the one thing you are working toward.

Hill believed that most people go through life without ever defining this. They have goals, sure. Ambitions, dreams, ideas. But they don’t have a chief aim. They don’t have the one thing that sits above everything else and gives shape to every decision they make.

And without it, you drift.

You chase opportunities that look good but don’t serve you. You say yes to things that don’t align with where you’re going because you haven’t defined where that is. You work hard but in too many directions at once, and at the end of the year you look back and think: I was busy, but did I actually move forward?

I know this because I lived it.

When I was in corporate, I had goals. Plenty of them. And I was good at achieving them.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about corporate goals: they are not yours.

They are the company’s goals. They exist inside a system that someone else designed, and they move you in a direction that someone else decided. You feel like you’re progressing because the titles change and the numbers grow. But progress toward what? Toward whose version of success?

I never stopped to ask that question. Not once in eight years. Because the system doesn’t want you to ask it. The system wants you to keep hitting targets. Your targets. Their targets. Same thing, right?Wrong.

When I left corporate, I suddenly had no targets. No quarterly reviews. No KPIs. No partner telling me what success looked like this month. And for the first time in my adult life, I had to answer the question for myself: what do I actually want?

And I didn’t have an answer.

That’s the moment I understood what Napoleon Hill was talking about.

Having goals is not the same as having direction. Goals are tasks. Direction is identity. Goals tell you what to do next. Direction tells you why you’re doing it.

A Definite Chief Aim is not a to-do list. It’s not even a five-year plan. It’s the answer to a deeper question: if everything goes the way I want it to, what does my life look like? What am I building? And why does it matter to me?

Hill was almost obsessive about the “definite” part. He didn’t want vague aspirations. He wanted specificity. Write it down. Read it every morning. Read it every night. Make it so clear that your mind starts organising itself around it. That every decision you make, consciously or not, starts moving you in that direction.

And there’s something about writing it down that changes everything.

Because when it’s in your head, it’s just a feeling. A vague pull. A “someday I’d like to…” that never gets tested against reality.

But when you write it down, you have to be honest. You have to choose. You can’t keep five contradictory dreams alive at the same time when you’re forced to put one sentence on paper.

Here’s what I’ve learned since I started defining mine:

Clarity is not something you find. It’s something you build. And you build it by making a decision before you have all the information. By writing it down even when it feels premature. By committing to a direction even when you can’t see the destination clearly yet.

Your Definite Chief Aim doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be forever. But it has to be specific enough that tomorrow, when someone offers you an opportunity, you can look at your aim and ask: does this move me closer or further away?

That’s it. That’s the whole framework. One clear statement that becomes the filter for everything.

I spent years being busy without being directed. Achieving goals that weren’t mine. Moving fast in someone else’s direction. And the hardest part of leaving that behind wasn’t the financial risk or the uncertainty. It was sitting down with a blank page and realising I had no idea what to write.

If that’s where you are right now, if you have goals but not direction, if you’re moving but not sure where, this is the most important exercise you can do:

Write it down. One sentence. Your Definite Chief Aim. Not what you think you should want. What you actually want.

And then let that sentence guide every decision you make from here.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi

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One of his executives had just made a series of bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. The executive was called into Watson’s office, fully expecting to be fired on the spot. He walked in and said: “I assume you want my resignation.”

Watson looked at him and said: “Not at all, young man. We have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.”

Most of us don’t think about failure the same way the executive in the story did. We don’t think: “Interesting. What did I just learn?” We think: “I knew it. I’m not good enough. This isn’t going to work. I should stop.”

We treat failure as a verdict. As proof that we shouldn’t be doing this. As a reason to quit.

But what if failure wasn’t any of those things?

What if failure was just data?

Here’s what I mean by that.

Every time something doesn’t work out, it’s giving you information.

That client who said no? That’s data. Maybe the offer wasn’t clear enough. Maybe the timing was wrong. Maybe they weren’t the right fit. The no itself isn’t the story. The information behind the no is.

That project that didn’t take off? That’s data too. It doesn’t mean the idea was bad. Maybe the execution needed adjustment, or the strategy was wrong. The failure isn’t the ending. It’s a redirect. It’s telling you: not this way, try another.

When you start looking at it this way, everything changes. Because failure stops being something that happens to you and starts being something that works for you.

There’s a concept I came across in Ali Abdaal’s book “Feel Good Productivity” that puts this into a framework.

It’s called the experimental mindset.

The idea is the following: instead of approaching things as pass-or-fail situations, you approach them as experiments. Every experiment has an outcome. Some outcomes are better than others. But no outcome is wasted, because every single one gives you information that shapes what you do next.

Edison tested over a thousand different designs before he found the one that became the lightbulb. When asked about all those failed attempts, he said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.”

He wasn’t being delusional. He was being scientific. Every failed attempt removed a wrong option and brought him closer to the right one. The failures weren’t setbacks. They were the process.

I think about this a lot in my own life.

When I started offering services on my own, some of my early ideas didn’t work. The way I structured my offer, the pricing, the positioning…a lot of it was wrong. And for a while, that felt like proof that I wasn’t cut out for working on my own.

But looking back, every one of those “failures” told me something I needed to know. The offer that nobody wanted showed me that I was solving the wrong problem. The pricing that didn’t convert taught me what people actually valued. The positioning that didn’t land pushed me to rethink who I was really talking to.

None of those failures were the end. They were all course corrections.

The problem is that we’re never taught to see it this way. We’re taught that mistakes are bad. That getting it wrong means something is broken. That failure is the opposite of success.

But failure isn’t the opposite of success. Quitting is.

So here’s my invitation to you.

Think about something that hasn’t worked out recently. A project, a pitch, a conversation, a decision.

Instead of telling yourself the story of what it means about you, ask yourself: what is this telling me? What information is here? What did I learn that I didn’t know before? And how can I use that to make the next attempt better?

Because if you can make that shift (from “I failed” to “I learned something”) failure stops being scary. It becomes part of the process. It becomes data.

And data doesn’t stop you. Data moves you forward.

Take good notes. You’re one step closer to being prepared.

See you next Sunday.

— Rochi