I somehow almost always managed to land roles that were relatively chill, well paying, and had a degree of flexibility and work life balance.

After leaving my career in Big 4 consulting, remote work felt like a cheat code to life.

And it wasn’t a one off: I was able to find multiple remote jobs that allowed me room to breathe, live, save.

I began to notice a pattern: what industries were more chill than others, what type of companies paid better, where to find legitimate jobs.

After experiencing burnout, remote work allowed me to fall in love with my life again. I couldn’t believe it. And so, on a whim, I shared a video on TikTok about everything I had learned. I called it “How to Find Low Effort, High Paying Jobs.”

It blew up. The original video got somewhere around 3M views and brought in 50k new followers in under a month. I capitalized on its virality, and began to share my experience, cataloging everything I had learned in a video series. In a lot of ways, that series completely changed my life.

I wasn’t the only creator sharing my experience. We all talked about them in our own way…

“Lazy Girl Jobs.”

“Email Jobs.”

We shared our remote lifestyles - working from cities, beachside cafes, airports and bus stops. I tried to give as much detail as I could: what I wrote when I pitched recruiters, how I’d pivot certain careers to have more work life balance.

Even though in my videos I reiterated that I was not a career coach, and that I was merely sharing my own experience, every week I would receive dozens of DMs & emails.

They were all asking for advice: what to study in school, where to search, how to update their resume, where to find recruiters, what advice I had for pivoting into easier jobs… I tried to answer to the best of my abilities, oftentimes feeling overwhelmed by the vitality, the questions. The pressure was intense. I didn’t want to give people false hope - but I was happy to help, and I evangelized these types of 9 to 5s.

But as time went on, I began to feel… uncomfortable.

There was something I wasn’t acknowledging, didn’t want to admit to myself, even though I knew it was true…

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And I had experienced it firsthand. It started innocuously enough: at one of my jobs, we began to have more oversight, more micromanagement from the higher ups. They wanted more data, more automation. New leadership was brought in and my team had deep dives with management on our role: the ins and outs, who did what and how.

We had a reorg. And then another reorg. As the months went by, it became obvious what was happening. Leadership was kicking up dust so that when it settled, we would need a few beats to realize we had helped orchestrate our own redundancy. I quit before it could happen, but I was shaken.

The landscape was changing: the job that had set me free was becoming an endangered species. My faith in corporate was dwindling.

My mantra had been: get a chill remote job, build your real life on the side. It worked well for me - I had built my dream life. But it was obsolete.

When I ultimately left corporate completely, I knew that phase of my life was over. I had never been cut out for a 9 to 5, and I wanted my content to evolve with me.

Even though I had built my brand on it, I retired my “Lazy Ladder” series and most of my remote work content. My engagement began to sink, and I began to lose followers. But I knew it was the right thing to do.

With hindsight, I now realize that while I was chasing flexibility, I was also chasing safety and predictability. And…

I have a new mantra now: a personal brand is the only thing that will save you from AI.

So here’s how to build a personal brand that will make you money.

Before we dive in, some clarity - everyone talks about AI replacing roles, but what does that actually mean? What does it look like? What skills are going to become worthless? Why are email jobs particularly threatened?

In March 2026, AI became the number one most cited reason for workforce reductions - accounting for 25% of total cuts.

Here are some of the most endangered skills:

Data entry and processing

Customer service & support

Financial analysis & reporting

Data Analysis

Management consulting (entry to mid level)

HR screening & recruitment

Market Research

Email Marketing

Project coordinating

Project management

AKA… the backbone of Lazy Email Jobs. RIP.

All the skills I had spent years developing in corporate are becoming obsolete. My job, specifically, had been in operations, overseeing capacity management & availability. The role also had elements of HR. Everything I loved about it - the low stress, the predictability of it that I found so easy to automate - had become the role’s achilles heel.

Luckily, on the side, I had been busy…

When I started creating online, I was embarrassed. I was a complete novice - I thought people would judge me, that they’d find me cringe for publicly trying. Every post felt like a humiliation ritual. I never told anyone what I was doing - not even my close friends, nor my boyfriend at the time. I started posting into the void (TikTok) and when people I knew IRL would eventually find my account & directly ask me about it, I’d beg them to keep it a secret.

I was embarrassed because no one else in my social circle was doing what I was doing. I felt like a freak.

Five years later, with the clarity of 20/20 hindsight and working as a full time creative, I am shaking my head at my younger self.

I was blocking my blessings, and I didn’t even know it.

Here’s the ugly truth: A lot of people aspire to be content creators, have their lives governed by their infinite scroll. And yet… they look down on content creators. It’s seen as silly, like a version of play - not serious.

Unfortunately, you can no longer afford NOT to have a personal brand.

AI can replace skills, but it can’t replace you. A personal brand is the only thing that is actually AI proof, because it’s built on identity, trust, and specificity. My face, my voice, my specific combination of corporate experience plus American in Paris plus radical financial transparency plus vulnerability… it’s irreplaceable, it builds trust, and it makes me really good money.

AI is trained on what already exists. It can only look backwards. Your creativity, your personal brand is future looking and built on what only you can say next.

I have always hated budgeting. Even though I logically know it’s not true, budgeting always felt like scarcity mindset to me - self denial, frugality, saying no when you want to say yes.

I have a nest egg, and an emergency fund, but the idea of it always terrified me in an abstract way: the idea of it dwindling, surviving off a finite number. When I quit Deloitte, I survived off my savings for close to year, and I hated every second of it.

I realized my salary, my only income source, was a single point of failure. I was entirely dependent on it.

I NEVER EVER WANTED TO SURVIVE AGAIN. I ONLY WANTED TO THRIVE.

When I left corporate a second time and gave up my corporate salary, I freaked out about the money, the loss of stability, but I didn’t spiral like I did in 2018… Because I had an insurance policy. My personal brand.

My personal brand allows me to:

• Travel for free

• Land multiple brand deals a month (my base rate for one video is $3k)

• Build a Substack that now brings in over $2k a month

In month one of working for myself, I made $6,045. In month two I made 8,048.

I no longer needed to panic about job searching, pitching recruiters, or reaching out to old colleagues. I was free.

I had found another cheat code, but this one wasn’t dependent on a company - it was completely my own.

The rest of this guide is reserved for paid subscribers:

• The four questions that helped me identify my actual, monetizable angle.

• Why I’m betting everything on Substack in 2026.

• My personal take on what a lot of advice on personal branding gets completely wrong

For the price of a loaf of bakery bread in the United States, get access to the full vault!

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

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Your stomach contracts and drops as if you’ve just seen a video of your ex. You could be doing this. You should be doing this.

You’re an excellent writer, and have so many stories to tell.

But for whatever reason, your Substack account, which you opened four months ago, is still inactive, with a graveyard of half finished drafts and abandoned ideas.

Your frustration at yourself leads to more inaction, and the cycle becomes vicious, and the still the articles remain unwritten.

I know, because for a long time, I was you.

I would watch other creators live my dreams and be overcome with jealousy & grief.

It felt like I was watching my life play out without me, and the bridge between where I was and where I wanted to be was insurmountable.

For years, I told myself I would start - and nothing ever changed.

Fast forward to today: with over 7k total subscribers & 274 paid subs, Substack covers my rent…

I’m a Substack bestseller…

And over the past 3 months, I’ve published 29 articles, surpassing my goal of two articles per week.

Here’s what changed, why it finally clicked, and my exact Substack strategy.

This guide is for people that want to monetize their Substack, and use it as a viable side income stream.

1. Create urgency.

I didn’t start posting on Substack until my back was against the wall. I had recently left corporate, and with a monetization ban on my Instagram (my second largest source of income), I was very motivated to create another source of income and fast.

It’s not enough to vaguely want something, or to be jealous of someone else.

You need to create external motivation for yourself, and set a concrete goal.

Luckily, your life doesn’t have to go to shit for this to work - there are ways to artificially induce urgency.

When I wanted to leave corporate to work for myself as a creative entrepreneur, I found it impossible. I was comfortable. I had a remote income, my side hustle brought in good money.

I tried to envision what life would look like without my paycheck and force myself to live on just my side income, but it was impossible, because I was still getting paid.

I needed to take drastic measures. I needed to experience what it was like to fully work for myself, before actually quitting. I needed training wheels, and I needed to feel the sting of an income drop before it actually happened.

I began to hide my paycheck from myself.

I opened a separate high yield savings account, and set up an auto transfer the same day my paycheck was set to hit my bank account.

The result? I never saw the money. I began to act like I had lost my job. I worked harder, performed more client outreach.

And four weeks later, I quit my job.

If you really want this, you need to gaslight yourself.

2. Set tangible monetary goals & build in public.

…act like they’re inevitable, and tell everyone you know. I started Substack with the end goal in mind. I wanted it to cover my rent by EOY.

The result? I hit my goal in 3 months instead of 7. After 3 months of consistent posting, Substack covers my rent ($1,600 per month).

It’s not enough to want to “make money on Substack.” You need to set a measurable goal with a timeline, and tell as many people as possible about it.

I started posting weekly updates on Substack & LinkedIn about my goal.

Building in public helped me stay accountable.

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3. Give yourself fake deliverables & be your own boss.

Maybe you can relate: when I had a 9 to 5, I was a good employee. I never missed a deadline. I stayed late if needed. I did what was needed to hit a deadline, no matter what.

Once again, it came down to specificity.

“Write a Substack article” is not enough. I needed clarity, so I created it for myself.

Right now, here’s what my posting cadence looks like:

Tuesday: free article (cultural commentary content pillar)

Thursday: paid article (personal finance or creative entrepreneurship pillar)

I also have a daily notes posting schedule I follow. You can find my notes posting strategy in this guide:

Additionally, I reframed my relationship with myself. I see myself as the best boss I could ever have, and I try not to take that for granted.

With great flexibility comes great responsibility. Honor yourself by honoring your deadlines.

I do not let myself stray from these deadlines. If I have a vacation coming up, I write and schedule drafts for the days I will be out, so that I don’t miss a week.

I also check in and deep dive into my data on a weekly basis, analyzing what titles & formats worked, and what needs to be cut.

My golden rule is that if I would do it at my 9 to 5, I will do it for myself.

What this might look like for you:

Even as I write this, I’m sitting by a pool at an airbnb in the Basque region, one of my favorite areas of the world. Everyone around me is drinking and swimming… and I’m sitting off to the side with my headphones in.

It’s going to take sacrifice. And you might need to gaslight yourself, but it works.

The next part of this guide will focus on my exact strategy, including:

• the tough love mindset shift that helped me start seeing real traction with paid subscribers.

• the #1 thing most people are getting wrong when starting their Substack.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

The house, and the large majority of its contents, had been purchased by Niko and restored and converted into a luxury eco-village that doubled as a guesthouse and event space. He had honored the bones of the chateau - refitted the windows, modernized the appliances, rubbed out the murky green oxidizing the copper pots until they shone above the latticed cupboards, reflecting our baleful faces as we made our morning tea.

He had left intact the marble fireplace that dominated the kitchen, outfitting a working stove in its hearth to warm the space in the winter months. The exposed timber beams latticed overhead formed a protective ribcage over the heart of the home - with winter encroaching, the inhabitants congregated in it, drawn in from the drafty halls.

Though he had done an admirable job preserving its French charm, Niko himself had crept into every corner of the home. From the vintage fingerpost sign pointing toward the Acropolis - placed cheekily between two faded countryside oil paintings - to the eerie, talismanic palmistry chart hanging on the peacock blue walls of the ground floor bathroom - Niko had not resisted entirely the urge to leave his fingerprints all over the place.

His eccentric and sporadic influence, far from incongruous, felt rather cohesive in a peculiar way, giving the overall impression of a couple cohabiting - one alive, one centuries past.

The staff on the property were working valiantly to restore order on the long abandoned property, their efforts rewarding us at last with the meal we had just finished. From the eggs to the dill that garnished them, it had been sourced almost entirely from the sprawling fields that surrounded us.

Faintly visible from the paned windows and bathed in the remaining light of a weak fall sunset was a partially finished greenhouse, a chicken coop, a flower garden, several vegetable plots hedged in by felled logs. The farm dogs streaked past occasionally, barking crazily, spooking themselves in the twilight.

Alongside the vine choked facade snaked a path that led to my favorite feature of the property: a natural pool burbled, complete with frogs, lily pads, and a diving board. Hours earlier, we had flung ourselves nude into the freezing black water. We’d scramble up the algae slicked stone steps to the sanctuary of the sauna or hot tub, both of which were warmed by wood burning furnaces. We’d cycle through the circuit until we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, using our phones as flashlights in the light rain that misted around us, soaking our towels, stumbling in the dark towards the promised relief of the kitchen, the blessed warmth of the stove glowing with the flames that thrashed within its belly.

I was there under loosely defined conditions; I could stay in a bedroom, and not one of the frigid and leaky yurts on the property, if I agreed to make a video about my stay. In truth, I had been invited by the groundskeeper, who helpfully suggested my marketing abilities when I openly balked at the idea of sleeping in a tent. He was my ex lover, a fact that we hid poorly; we were awkward around one another. The passion that had once simmered between us had been long extinguished, and we clumsily navigated our recently reignited friendship.

I was duly compensated for my troubles: the bedroom was well appointed and cozy - a brass bed with a pink tufted duvet, slippers to guard against the chill of the terracotta tiles, and a large bay window. I’d pull the shutters closed every night and gasp each morning with pleasure when I opened them again, marveling at the lushly rolling hills, the riot of color that was the flower garden, the chickens plucking at it’s foundation. French doors led to the bathroom, a further testament to Niko’s taste and dedication to preserving the original character. He had added a shower, restored the clawfoot bathtub into working order. I washed my face every morning in a vanity with a colorful ceramic basin and copper faucet for a sink, the rosy marble countertop shot through with fingers of purple mineral deposits.

The chateau - temperamental and demanding in its needs, its endless to do list - was tended by a staff of eight. The two French caretakers - to their barely concealed displeasure - had at their disposal a team of six volunteers; students from virtually every corner of the globe, some of whom spoke no French and only rudimentary English.

They had found the farm advertised on a website for work exchange, and enticed by a free stay and a backpacker’s dwindling budget, the university students trudged through the front door bewildered and overburdened with freshly christened Ospreys.

They had as much experience in managing a farm as they did making animal balloons - that is to say, none at all - and instead of work, the manager’s time was instead largely focused on training and retraining the revolving door of holiday makers. Frustrated and woefully incompetent, the team formed an uneasy and often volatile crew.

Ravenously bored in the off season, my arrival had caused a titter amongst them. I could feel their searching eyes on my ex and I, trying to suss out our relationship, make sense of the odd way we interacted, the way I resisted them when they insisted on us sitting next to one another, the way I tried to cover our stunned silences in any way possible.

Yue and Magda watched us warily as they cleared away pierogies and moules marinières, remnants of a meal that had been as harmoniously haphazard as the home. Gossip ran rampant in the home - I suspected they lingered in the hope of collecting some scrap of conversation to carry back to their bosses, a little piece of social currency that might curry favor, elevate them in the household pecking order - or at the very least, momentarily loosen the grip of their inexperience, which had placed them squarely at the bottom.

I was grateful for Niko’s presence: he was warm, hospitable, never knew a stranger, and he easily filled the silences that mushroomed uncomfortably between the work spats and personality conflicts that so often came to a head during the forced proximity of meal times.

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“Well Marianna is my second wife,” Niko explained, “as my first wife died. Quite horribly, actually, it was very tragic.”

Maybe it was morbid curiosity, desperation to keep the conversation going, or how emboldened I felt due to the good French wine swilling in my glass that had rendered itself bottomless under his hospitable eye, but I couldn’t stop myself from prying. I asked how.

In his lilting Greek accent, he described the tragedy of her accidental passing with the practiced detachment of someone who had repeated the story countless times over the years until it had been defanged, woven itself into the fabric of his story, no longer defined it entirely. Time had erased the shock but not the pain, I could see he spoke from above, had built a protective bedrock miles deep around the core of grief he carried.

“How horrible,” I began, “how horrible for you and your children, that must have been awful -

I stopped abruptly, for he had suddenly seized my hand. I thought for a moment I had been wrong, that he was indeed overcome with emotion, gripping on to me for support, a human touch, engulfed by a sudden wave of pain. But instead of collapsing into me weeping, he instead deftly flipped my wrist, began to inspect my palms.

He fixed me with eyes so dark they were almost black in the flickering light. “Could I take a photo of your palms?”

I stared at him, uncomprehending, my mouth agape.

“For my homework,” he continued busily, pulling out his phone. “You have lovely thin palms, long slender fingers.”

“Sure,” I said, bewildered but agreeable, hurriedly wiping the perspiration that blurred the surface of my hand, dotted the whorls of my fingerprints. I had hyperhidrosis - a fancy way to say excessive sweating - and sweat nearly always shone from my palms and the soles of my feet.

“I’m in a palmistry class!” He was laughing, catching on finally to my naked confusion, his liquid eyes dancing merrily now, as though it should have been obvious. “We need to take photos of peoples’ hands to analyze. For practice! I need three palms. Well, technically six, but you know what I mean.”

I regained my composure, my curiosity. I suddenly remembered the poster in the bathroom, the title emblazoned in faded ink - YOUR LUCK IS IN YOUR HAND. TELL YOUR OWN FORTUNE. At its center was a large, outstretched palm, hatched with intersecting lines, creases, symbols, tiny annotations. Around it, tiny blocks of text in cribbed faded ink delineated fate, head, heart lines, cramped paragraphs covering every inch of free space, as though it had been inspired by a student running out of time on an exam, scribbling in the margins.

Illustrations of at the bottom offered different hands, different configurations, different destinies - human fate in the style of an anatomical diagram. A no nonsense relic from a world where the occult was not a fantasy, but a discipline; the map to the future only an arms length away.

“Where are you taking palmistry classes in rural France?”

“Online, of course!” He was now taking photos of my palms, gesturing mutely for my left hand as well, smiling slightly as I obliged him.

His grandfather had been a merchant, he explained. He traveled relentlessly, weaving an exhausting web of trade routes with Athens at its center. He regaled young Niko with stories - haggling in the markets of Istanbul, the time he spent a fortnight jailed in Kabul over a squabble turned violent regarding the provenance of silk rugs.

But what had most captured young Niko’s imagination was the story of his grandmother. Somewhere between Beirut and Marseille, his grandfather had become enraptured with the ancient art of palmistry. He was an expansive, flamboyant character. He had a propensity for theatrics but not mysticism - he was shrewd, skeptical, hardened by his trade, tense negotiations, ruthless competitors.

The mystic had ensnared his grandfather easily by virtue of being right. About everything. His past, his tumultuous present. And so the infidel became a believer.

A decade later, when his wife collapsed and slipped into a coma, he was nonplussed. When the doctors told him she was unlikely - no, guaranteed - not to wake up from the stroke that had felled her, he merely shook his head. The physicians grew indignant - he was a fool, she a vegetable. He paid them no heed, for he already knew the outcome of this story - the mystic had told him. She would wake up. It was written, right there in the crease under the meaty base of his ring finger.

He had no need for faith in the face of the certainty of fact.

In his eyes she was sick, but in his palm she was destined to live, and so he never acted like it - not for one moment. He busied himself around her, spoke to her as if she was there. If he could do anything, it was talk - he filled the space between the beeps of the monitors with stories of their life, tirades about work, updates on their children.

Three weeks later, she woke up.

And two generations later, in a chateau restored by a labor of love, Niko snapped photos for his coursework.

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I’m on my way to Dalaman, where I will be island hopping on a yacht for a week in exchange for two short form videos & the contents of my camera roll. I consider myself a retired travel influencer - 2024 was the last year I was truly nomadic, chasing gigs instead of paying rent - but I still dabble, coming out of retirement for the odd former client or when the circumstances necessitate it (after my visa denial, I needed to leave the Schengen zone, adding to the allure of ten days in Turkey).

I head lazily over to Sparro, double clicking my phone to Apple Pay a €3 bottle of water. That’s odd, I note idly, my boarding passes have disappeared. I think nothing of it, impatient to return the cloying effects of my infinite scroll. I only allow myself a deep brain rot session during transit, and like a toddler with a tablet, I happily abuse my privileges. Fifteen minutes later, I finally meander over to my gate.

With my boarding passes mysteriously disappeared, I study the digital board instead, the flights blinking like a 2D Christmas tree. My flight is not listed. And what’s stranger, only flights after my 5:30pm flight are listed - Dalaman is nowhere to be found. A sense of disquiet stirs in my belly, sharpening the chicken tender nausea. I have the sense I’ve forgotten something vital - the dog left home with the stove on - but I can’t quite place my finger on it, I’m still running home with my keys in my hand.

And then it hits me. Like a sledgehammer.

There’s been a time change. And my phone, permanently set to EST (don’t ask), did not register it. I have missed my connecting flight.

I have always struggled with numbers. Not calculating them - I’ve always been good at math - but more so the idea of them, wiggling around - they seem to shift and change before my eyes, confounding me, impossible to pin down. Military time escapes me. I still frequently google things like “21:43 in normal time??” frustrated at my own stupidity, mashing the buttons like a gentle giant navigating an improbable and cruel world.

I quickly locate the next flight to Dalaman: it’s in 45 minutes, and I sprint to the gate. Breathless, I plead my case: I missed my connection - pointedly leaving out why said connection was missed - any room for standby? The worker is shaking his head no before I finish my sentence, he doesn’t pretend to check, or care. I don’t know why his indifference still surprises me - I have long pupated from the cocoon that is customer service culture of the United States. He directs me to a service desk, his brusque English rendering it a coarse command: Left. Desk. They help.

After 45 minutes and another redirection to yet another line, I am given my options: I can wait four more hours for a 10:30 pm flight, or I can pay for business class on an 8:30 pm flight. I weigh my options. A 10:30 pm flight would mean getting in at midnight, and the beach town where I’m headed is yet another hour further still from the airport. Will reception still be open at the hotel? Is there even a reception? Photos reveal nothing, there is no website, their cell is disconnected (of course!). What if I can’t find a taxi or a shuttle? The calculations, the eternal checks and balances, of being a woman solo in a foreign country flit through my head. I hand over my credit card in acceptance, penance for my stupidity, internally furious at my inattentiveness, my folly.

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The attendant repeats the price to me twice, enunciating the numbers. €347. Three hundred and forty seven. Euros. And / or, 400 USD. My brain, ever nimble with addition, reminds me that I have now spent $1,500 on my flight to this “free” trip. Almost a rent payment! It extrapolates further, hissing at me.

Over the years, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars (and unpaid hours) on my side hustle. I’ve somehow managed to recreate a parody (albeit a more tropical one) of the very reason I left consulting: whatever line existed between personal & business travel blurred long ago, my identity irredeemably knotted up along with it.

It sometimes felt like a toxic relationship: love me, love me, chasing the scream, the big break, the moment when it’s all worth it, when I’ve made it. Yet the goalposts keep moving: $300 for a video once had me giddy, like I was getting away with something. Now anything under $3,000 felt like a disappointment, like I was a failure.

And more than sometimes, I was aware I wasn’t doing it just for the money, the free vacation…I was doing it for me, the validation, the way it slips out of my mouth: why, yes, I will be island hopping, staying here, going there, getting paid, comped - padding my ego around the uncomfortable reality: it’s really freaking expensive, there’s a tally my little math brain will never tick off my fingers because it will only leave me in the red, with mud on my face to boot.

Travel influencing is relentlessly competitive. White girls with iPhones, steady hands, & strong passports are a dime a dozen (and yes they do tend to be white: studies have shown the algorithms favor a certain profile, pushing it out more than others, a profile that disproportionately is slim, caucasian, and young. The biases that are baked in to our society have found their digital mirror, life imitates algorithm, or is it the other way around?)

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The majority of hotels, hostels, and resorts have cottoned on - they don’t even pretend to negotiate with us, they know they have the upper hand. If I don’t agree to their terms - a video, 10 professionally edited photos, and your firstborn in exchange for a 3 night stay, and don’t forget checkout is at 10am, thank you very much! - someone in the line behind me, a hundred deep, will surely say yes, they’ll sleep on a deck chair if they have to, goddamnit!

The travel industry is a chicken and egg thing: to start traveling influencing, you must already be traveling, to be traveling, you must have a flexibility, income, able bodied. I have met dozens of travel influencers over the years. Virtually every single one has benefited from a degree of generational wealth.

I’m not saying all of them have their travels bought by daddy‘s money - I think that’s a reductive and trite argument, and is often rooted in misogyny, but that’s a different topic - I mean these people benefit from privilege across the entirety of the spectrum, privilege in the sense that they have a couch to crash on, parents that helped pay for their schooling, even the benefit of a two parent household, a US passport.

There’s something myopic about the industry as a whole. We are expected to observe and report, discover and share… But when I’ve talked about generational privilege and wealth on my page, I was met with mutinous ire, ripples of fury and judgment. There were many commenters that took it as a personal critique, a few that stitched me and mounted direct testimonials. They felt personally offended, mischaracterized.

Eventually, I stopped speaking on it. It was the elephant in the room, I no longer felt like pointing out how it loomed: it was a fact of life.

There was the budget backpacker who pretended to stay in hostels while his actual reservation was in a different zip code entirely, at one of the chic boutique hotels he’d grown accustomed to somewhere around his third consecutive 7 figure year. There were the points travelers, deftly sidestepping the inconvenient truth that they largely owed their 800+ credit scores to the foresight & tutelage of their parents, the financial education that comes hand in hand with privilege.

“Free trips” start becoming a very elaborate trick of accounting - despite the sunk costs, the 4 figure flights - the levels compound, the math ends with us impossibly ahead, always ahead. Travel influencing is an industry where the people who can best afford to lose money are often the people best positioned to make money. The first part of the equation - me, becoming a travel influencer - the math was done long before I ever hit record. It lay dormant, with my American citizenship, my cushy childhood.

Ultimately, I made it to Dalaman. Around midnight, after a €70 taxi ride. The reception was open, the room clean and safe. That night, I was pitched a new deal: $3,000 for a video, a promo for a vibe coding software. Still fuming over the missed flight, I countered: somehow, when it came to money, my numeric dyslexia mercifully disappeared. I thumbed in a new number, hit send: $4,500.

Later, brushing my teeth, I checked my email. They had accepted almost immediately. It barely registered. I was working tomorrow, after all.

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Starting on Substack right now, in 2026, is like dancing on TikTok during the pandemic.

It’s changing people’s lives, and it’s right at that tipping point before it becomes massive. And you want to start. You’re creative. You love writing.

but… you can’t figure out what to write about.

You like true crime, work as a product manager, and spend your weekends gardening, and recently signed up for a quilting class. You care deeply about political activism. You could rant for three hours about the death of the third place, and another three about why everyone is suddenly obsessed with running clubs.

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So… what the 🦆 is your Substack supposed to be about?

A true crime newsletter? A career newsletter? A gardening newsletter? A political newsletter? A lifestyle newsletter?

All of the above? None of the above?

You likely have a lot of creators that you admire, and what’s more, you could see yourself doing EXACTLY what they’re doing. You read one person’s newsletter and think, I could absolutely write about culture. Then you find someone making $20,000 a month talking about YOUR EXACT JOB and think, well maybe I should do that. Then you see someone building a huge audience around cozy hobbies in your 30s and it’s also extremely relevant.

…and the panic keeps rising, and the articles stay unwritten.

I am going to guide you through the process that I tell to everyone in my personal life that asks me about this.

About your host: I'm Liz, & I've been creating content, and getting paid for it, since 2021. I started Substack 10 weeks ago, and I’ve been applying everything I'd learned building an audience on Instagram and TikTok. I’ve become a Substack bestseller and hit $10k ARR:

Since your head is probably spinning, let’s use a simple analogy:

Substack is a plot of land, and we want to build a house for your community to live in.

Your niche is you. Your unique POV, your lived experiences. That is your foundation.

To build the house, we need content pillars - foundational scaffolding that define you, that tell your readers they are home.

Your content pillars hold up the house.

And just like how you can renovate your real life home to reflect changing needs - your content pillars can also morph and grow to accommodate more guests.

Your guests will still know exactly where they are - because the foundation, the niche, is you, and that is a constant.

Now that we have the visual, let’s start from the bottom up.

We’ve established your niche is you - easy enough.

But what does that actually mean?

It means your voice, your lived experience, and your POV need to inform every single thing you write.

Because of the gentrifying effects of AI on writing, the result is that very often, the soul is stripped out of everything we read / watch. Everyone is regurgitating the same thing. Everything is kind of… beige. Millennial grey.

Your goal is deceptively simple: put the soul back.

I don’t want you to write about product management. I want you to write about your experience as a first gen immigrant in a white tech bro corporate office, and how that influenced the way you handle interpersonal issues in project dynamics. I don’t want you to tell me about your garden. I want to hear how you first picked up a trowel because your ex called you an unfunny, one dimensional, boring loser and you started pursuing hobbies out of pure spite and actually started liking it, and now you have the cherry tomatoes to prove it.

When you start adding in your personality and unique lived experiences, your readers build a relationship with you.

This is why it’s vitally important to resist the siren song that is Claude writing everything for you.

Defining your content pillars

So let’s go back to the beginning, where you were looking at other creators - the marketer, the personal finance guru, the cozy hobbyist. The unifying theme of these specific people you admire is very likely that:

• they are receiving public affirmation of their choice.

You can see that their niche is working. People are subscribing. Their posts are getting shared. They’re being invited onto podcasts. They’re making money. They seem to have found the thing.

And this is where I want you to be careful. Because the evidence of public affirmation is influencing what you think you should be doing.

When defining our content pillars, we need to completely ignore this fact. You will need to write your way through dry spells, through posts with 4 likes. Months without seeing the subscriber count change.

If you remove this variable, and then re-do the exercise of “what am I interested in?” very likely, the topics shrink.

You realize that wait, you actually don’t want to write about your Greek yogurt obsession for the next 4 months. You just thought you should because someone else did, and they blew up on TikTok for making one good recipe video and quit their 9 to 5 and here you still are, clocking in.

The shrinking is good - the shrinking is clarity.

• What’s a subject I could talk about forever and never get bored?

This helps test for durability - you need to pick something that is a real interest, not a “strategic” pick. Think beyond what you doomscroll on. What do you find yourself researching for fun? What conversations could you have for hours? What do you naturally notice, obsess over, or think about?

• What’s something people come to me for advice on?

This tests for authority - while building and growing alongside your audience can be interesting, having topics you can write from lived experience gives your content a level of specificity that generic advice can't replicate.

• What irritates me? What do I keep ranting about?

This tests for point of view. Your strongest content often lives somewhere inside your contrarian viewpoints. Where do you go against the grain? What common knowledge do you find yourself thinking the opposite on? What do you wish more people were honest about?

how to put it all together

1. Go for a walk, and using the notes app in your phone, brain dump on these topics, aiming for a minimum of 5 answers for each. For this purpose, let’s imagine your answers look like this.

2. Look for commonalities between your answers, and try and find common unifying themes. for the answers linked above, those clusters would be something like money, reinvention, lifestyle, taste, career, relationships, culture, freedom.

3. Now start grouping those clusters together. You don’t need eight content pillars just because you identified eight interests. Some of these things naturally belong together.

   Maybe money + career + freedom is more so about designing a life on your own terms, and your pillar would be Work & Money

   Maybe lifestyle + taste + culture is actually about your desire to build a beautiful, interesting life, and your pillar would be Lifestyle

   Maybe relationships + reinvention become becoming a different version of yourself, and your gardening content would fit here, under the pillar of Personal Growth

4. Now that you have your pillars loosely defined, we need to go back to our niche, which is you. Using your brain dump / pillars as your starting point for your articles, your goal is to transform your topics by looking at them with your unique POV.

   since it’s easier to explain this with examples:

   Corporate America → How growing up in Italy shaped the way I communicate, disagree, and navigate corporate America

   Substack growth → What happened when I started treating my Substack like a real business instead of a creative hobby

   Personal finance → I love spending money. Can I still build financial freedom without a budget?

   Gardening → I started gardening because my ex made me insecure. Here’s what happened.

   Dating in your 30s → I stopped trying to be “low-maintenance” in dating, and it completely changed who I was willing to date.

   From my experience, the key is specificity, and to imagine you are writing to one person, not the masses.

5. And finally, as always, the MOST important thing - just start. Put your phone on airplane mode, log out of your social media accounts, hide the TV remote - whatever is keeping you from starting - remove that barrier and begin.

Need help? Leave a comment and I’ll brainstorm with you!

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Your pillars will grow and change with you, but they cannot evolve until they exist.

Liked this post? Check out my other guides documenting my start on Substack & life as an American creative in Paris:

I have zero interest in being on a budget. I love spending money. And I recently lost 90% of my income.

After numerous failed attempts at budgeting, I’ve conceded that I simply have zero desire to compromise on my lifestyle. I don’t want to say no to things. While I don’t necessarily need a materialistic lifestyle - things aren’t super interesting to me - I love quality. I love travel, spas, nice hotels. I’m a foodie. My soul exhales in luxury.

I’ve finally accepted budgeting is fundamentally incompatible with my lifestyle, and I’ve accepted there’s only one real solution: increase my income instead of decreasing my spending.

I want to build from a place of abundance, not one of lack.

The most terrifying part of leaving corporate is money.

I am governed by the essential paradox of modern life: I love money & the pleasures money brings me, but I don’t particularly love working.

I absolutely hate the concept of a 9 to 5 and sinking the best decades of my life into a corporation where I am nothing more than a line on a spreadsheet, one that can be deleted on a whim in a flurry of layoffs… but I also think the path out of corporate is opaque, and impossible to envision if you are still in the thick of it.

We only ever hear from people who have already made it, or the one’s with overnight success. My feed is an endless scroll of influencers making 50k+ a month ON TOP OF their 9 to 5… and that hasn’t been my reality. Like most freelancers, my income has been unstable, and at times, inconsistent.

A month ago, I started working for myself as a full time creative entrepreneur.

While I had been planning for this, leaving my career could not have come at a worst time: my Instagram (a large source of income for me) had received 3 month monetization restriction earlier in the year.

After receiving the ban, I have pivoted my attention to building off platform, away from an algorithm. In many ways, I feel like I’m building from scratch.

Here is my plan for how I will replace my corporate salary:

I love financial transparency. The whole ‘don’t ask what someone makes, it’s rude’ rule isn’t etiquette, it’s a corporate talking point that happens to keep everyone from comparing notes. If you don’t know what the person next to you is making, you have no leverage to ask for more. That’s not politeness. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

I want to document this process as much as possible: the candid financial diary of a woman trying to build without sacrificing a lifestyle of abundance, exploration, and self care.

In today’s deep dive, I’m sharing:

• exactly how much I spent this month living in Paris

• every income stream I currently have (with real numbers) for the month of July

• the financial mentality that completely replaced traditional budgeting

• the spreadsheet I use to track every dollar I spend

The rest of this essay - including all of the numbers, screenshots, and templates - is for paid subscribers. For the price of 3 oysters, continue reading and access the full vault.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• I started my Substack seven weeks ago. I already make enough to cover one month’s rent.

• I pivoted from corporate to creative consulting. Here’s how I did it + my actual income projections.

• Every remote job I’ve had, how I found it, and how much it paid.

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

Substack has become both my creative outlet and my most viable income stream, and I've leveraged everything I’ve learned from 5+ years as a content creator into building on Substack.

I started posting consistently on May 31, and here is my current dashboard:

This guide is for you if:

• You’re watching other creators blow up on Substack and want to get started.

• You want real advice from a human that’s learning, not AI generated slop.

• You’re a multi-hyphenate person with many interests and are daunted by the idea of picking just one thing to write about.

• You want to make money creating on Substack, and plan to treat it like a side hustle, not purely a hobby.

I will cover:

• Exactly how I convert free subscribers into paid ones.

• How I plan to monetize Substack beyond the monthly subscription.

• My actual posting schedule, day by day.

• Common mistakes.

• How I plan to double my Substack revenue, real income projections.

• Free download: 10 ways to monetize beyond paid subs

1. Before you write anything: defining your content pillars

People often reach out to me saying they want to get started creating, but they have so many ideas that they don’t even know where to begin. They are multi-hyphenate, multi-passionate individuals, and picking just one thing feels terrifying.

The good news is this: you don’t need a niche. What you need are content pillars.

You don’t need to overthink this - odds are, you already have an idea what these topics are, and need guidance on defining them.

Your content pillars will likely lie at the intersection of these questions:

1. What’s a subject I could talk about forever and never get bored?

2. What’s something people come to me for advice on?

3. What irritates me / triggers me? What’s a subject I keep ranting on?

4. What’s a subject I have expertise on?

5. What do I already get paid to do?

Your content pillars will help give you structure, and avoid the analysis paralysis of “what do I post??”

It’s also worth noting that content pillars are not set in stone - they will change and grow with you.

As an example, here is how I define my content pillars:

Creative entrepreneurship: I recently took the plunge to work full-time a creative, and I document everything related to this process, such as how I pivoted my corporate career, how I actually make money, and my process as someone learning the Substack platform.

Cultural commentary: I have lived a LOT of lives - full time traveler, travel influencer, Deloitte consultant, American in Paris, etc - and I have a LOT to say. I’ve noticed a lot of people aren’t actually honest about what these worlds are really like - they only share the highlight reels - so I share my unfiltered, authentic POV.

Bougie Budget / Personal Finance: the real numbers. How I make money, what I charge brands, how much I spend. I love talking about money and I don’t think enough people are transparent, so I share as freely as possible.

I am not writing to everyone - I am writing to one specific person:

My younger self. 25, fresh out of consulting, burnt out, scared, desperate for work life balance. Everything I write is with her in mind, and I’m solving her problems - 8 years in the future.

She is my why.

2. The free vs. paid essay split

I aim to write and post two articles every week. Free essays drive discovery. These are my most “shareable” posts, and fall under my cultural commentary content pillar. They bring in free subscribers, and get eyeballs on my page.

Paid essays retain and convert. These are my creative entrepreneurship and personal finance content pillars.

Tuesday: free article (cultural commentary content pillar)

Thursday: paid article (personal finance or creative entrepreneurship pillar)

Using my notes app in my phone, I keep a running list of observations, potential topics, and inspiration to help guide me.

3. The weekly Notes cadence system

Notes are the single most important part of your strategy. Substack is not a writing platform. It’s a social media platform. When you click on someone’s profile, you don’t see their published articles first - you see their notes activity.

Using myself as an example, the first thing you see when you click my page is my notes section, NOT my articles:

Substack is pushing the social media aspect of its platform. Notes are what people scroll in the app, and one of the best ways to get people to see your articles is through self-promoting them.

Monday: mirror content. You open the week with your most representative content, moment, or a high or low anecdote. It's the note that says "this is exactly what my page is about," setting the tone before everything else that week, and allows your followers to see themselves in you.

Tuesday: tease free essay. Typically, I will restack the most controversial / interesting part of my free essay with a note.

Wednesday: built in public. Share what you’re working on, creating, or building. For me, these have been updates on my Substack growth and goal of having Substack cover my rent by EOY.

Thursday: prompt / poll. A question to generate audience engagement.

Friday: tease paid essay. Similar to Tuesday, I will restack a part of my paid essay with a note.

Saturday: relatable observation. Something that a lot of people would resonate with / restack.

Sunday: tease next week or share something candid from my week.

I’ve also noticed that notes with photos, bolded, or italic text get more engagement. Your goal is always to stop the scroll.

4. What performs and what doesn’t (the receipts)

I try to analyze my data on a weekly basis. I focus on views, conversions, and my open rates.

Views - how many times a post was actually opened and read, whether from email, the app, or someone finding it online.

Conversions - when a reader takes the action you want, on Substack this usually means a free subscriber upgrading to paid, though it can also mean a visitor becoming a free subscriber in the first place.

Open rate - the percentage of your subscribers who opened the email when you sent it. If you have 3,000 subscribers and 900 opened, that’s a 30% open rate.

• Poor: Under 20%

• Average: 30% to 50%

• Good/High: Above 50%

Since we’ve established that Substack is a social media app, the most important part of your article is your title, which is functioning as your hook. I’ve found that for me, the following formulas work best for my titles:

real number + unexpected complicating detail.

blunt observation.

Here are some examples using these formulas. All of these have a 40%+ open rate:

5. Monetization: what actually converts free readers to paid & how to monetize your Substack

Here's exactly what moves people from free to paid, the other ways I'm building Substack into an income stream beyond monthly subscriptions, and the actual math behind how adding those could nearly double my revenue and get me to my rent goal three months early.

My deep dive strategy, the numbers, and the income model are reserved for paid subscribers. For the price of 3 oysters, keep reading and get the full breakdown.

Paid subscribers also get this week's free download: 10 Ways to Monetize Your Substack Beyond Paid Subscriptions.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• I started my Substack seven weeks ago. I already make enough to cover one month’s rent.

• I pivoted from corporate to creative consulting. Here’s how I did it + my actual income projections.

• Every remote job I’ve had, how I found it, and how much it paid.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

After he followed me on Twitter, I took a cursory look at his page - it was full of tweets about how women were only “worth it” as partners if they were 21 or younger - any older “couldn’t be trained.” He had a serious complex about his height (5’6”) and compensated for it by constantly bringing up how “young” people told him he looked.

Mika was staying in a hostel with us. The temperatures would climb to the high 90s during the day, barely dropping below 85 at night. His bed was situated directly under the sole air conditioner in the space, giving him total control. Though it made the rest of us - five other people sharing the space with him - uncomfortable, he refused to allow us to use it, insisting it made him sick.

Jasmina preached love and followed a vegan lifestyle, judging anyone that didn’t follow suit. In her free time, she loved cocaine and ketamine, and sourced much of her wardrobe from Shein. She did not see any irony in the application of her rigid ethical code.

Anna announced she was going to the beach, and asked if any of us would like to come along. After we returned, she calculated the exact amount of gas used for the 4 mile round trip, and sent us Revolut requests for several dimes’ worth of money. We were flabbergasted - she had been going anyway - it felt absurd, petty.

I chalked it up to cultural differences, like I always did.

But what if it was something else?

I have a complicated relationship with travel. It absolutely changed my life. It allowed me to build a business, learn two languages, enabled me to push my comfort zone to its limit.

But there was a casualty, and that casualty was ultimately why I stopped traveling: I didn’t have a community. My relationships were superficial, transactional, temporary - and I didn’t see it until I settled down.

Travel is a myopic, hyper accelerated version of the “real” world. It’s defined by intensity. Timelines are shortened. If you’ve ever experienced the whirlwind that is a travel romance, you know what I’m talking about.

Stripped of convention, judgement, the familiar markers of home, travel allows you to step wholly into a new identity. For a time, I relished it. I was able to explore facets of my identity, exaggerating and minimizing aspects of myself, dialing up and down my extraversion in relation to the city I was in, the people that surrounded me.

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Online, as a travel influencer, I evangelized full time travel, and I wholly believed what I was preaching. My life was a kaleidoscope of intensity - every 4 to 5 weeks I was entering a new world, building a community from scratch, dismantling it like a traveling circus.

The friendships I fell into felt real - we would laugh, cry, commiserate, (and of course) travel together, bonding over troubleshooting and bartering in a foreign land. We would feel like our own unit, united against an alien world, fumbling coins in a strange currency, mumbling through a language that was not our own. We tagged one another in photos, blew up each other’s phones with voice notes and stickers.

And then… someone would move on. A visa run, a new destination. We’d exchange tearful goodbyes, promising to meet up in summer, fall, the next country.

And we would mean it. But then reality would settle in. We’d find new families, new besties, take new photos. And the intense love affair would subside: object permanence of the heart.

Of the people I met, I would stay in contact with a fraction of them. Time would cull the herd further - the women with whom I once exchanged 10-minute voice notes were reduced to someone whose story I would occasionally 'like'.

Why was this happening? How could these brilliant, whirlwind, larger than life friendships fade to black so quickly?

It wasn’t until I settled down again that I understood.

The essential lack in my life was not permanence, but conflict.

Shawn, Mika, Jasmina, Anna - the revolving cast of characters, the endless and exhausting blur of humanity and all of their quirks, from the petty to the predatory - none of them were ever confronted. Not because no one cared, but because in a transient community, none of us were incentivized to do the emotional labor required to shame someone we were unlikely to ever see again.

And this stunted my emotional growth.

When drama would happen, I would simply get up and leave. Failed situationship? Book a flight. Someone didn’t pay you back? Hop on a bus! Not vibing with the community, feel left out? There’s a bed free one city over.

Away from my friends and family, I obsessed over the opinions of strangers, putting an outsized weight in their acceptance of me. I wanted to avoid drama at all costs, becoming more emotionally fragile as a result.

In 2024, burnt out from travel, I decided to settle down, find a real community - one I didn’t need to pay for - and in 2025, I moved to Paris.

To say the road has been rocky is an understatement - this has been one of the most challenging years of my life on many levels.

On a personal level, I was forced to confront how travel had warped my ability to relate to people: I realized that I had become avoidant, afraid of conflict. I had spent years blissfully free from it - all of the most important people in my life were virtual - long distance rendering them frictionless avatars in my phone; I could simply hang up if things got rough.

It took months to get my bearings again, to learn how to show up for people, the mundane reality of finding and maintaining friendships in your 30s. I had to relearn how to sit with discomfort, uncomfortable silences, confrontation, personality and cultural clashes.

My emotional world had been in 2D, as garish and colorful as a travel brochure and just as empty of substance. It slowly it began to take on dimension again, room to breathe and grow, and it was painful, awkward at first. Yes, there were shadows, but I learned to be less afraid.

I saw this phenomenon repeated with other full time travelers. They bounced from community to community, making appearances like celebrity guests, shaking hands and taking selfies, leaving before the shine wore off.

And I have relationships with them. We like each others’ stories, catch up occasionally. But it will never go deeper than that, and now I know why.

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What was causing this spiral of existential dread…? …A generic, slightly canned 500 word bio on a woman’s “about me” section on her website.

I clicked over to her Instagram. I inhaled sharply, as though I’d just been airdropped photos of my ex proposing to his new girlfriend. Lisbon, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Bali, Australia… square after square of her, tanned, glowing. Living a dream life.

My dream life.

And my reality could not look more different.

The other day, I had sobbed the entirety of my 47 minute bumper-to-bumper commute from the city to the suburbs, where I was expected to be onsite for a consulting client. In the parking lot, I wiped the snot remnants off my face, flashed a few smiles to “convince my brain it was happy” (a psychology trick I had recently learned), grabbed my keys, and went inside to spend the next 9 hours hunched over my computer, doing work I found to be soul sucking, obnoxious, and utterly pointless.

I tried to stay focused on the good things - the salary, how good the company looked on my resumé, the experience. But my soul was not getting the message, and it felt like it was withering.

I couldn’t take it anymore. On a random Wednesday, I drafted the following email, and shut my laptop. For good.

After I quit Deloitte, to say I floundered is an understatement. I would trawl Linkedin and Fiverr, hoping my dream career would fall out of the sky and into my lap. I started a blog, found a few copywriter clients, tried my hand at photography… quit everything.

I was convinced I had no skills, that I was an idiot destined to fail, and that I was doomed to hate my job for the rest of my life.

I genuinely, to my core, believed that.

I was so, so lost. All I wanted was someone to come and tell me exactly what to do.

Luckily, I am writing this from eight years in the future… and… I hate to say it, but everyone that said it would work out was right.

I’m not saying I have it all figured out, but my younger self would be gagged to know that:

• In six months time, if everything goes according to my plan, I very well could be making over six figures while working 20 hours a week, as a creative, completely remotely.

• I’ve grown an internet community to 260k+ and it’s changed my life in every measurable way.

• I’m now trilingual, and even occasionally working and negotiating in French, my third language!!

• I’ve worked remotely and traveled all over the world, working with small businesses and Fortune 500 clients alike, making good money along the way.

We see stories all the time of women quitting their jobs, traveling, and making freelancing work while on the road… I was not one of those women.

I pivoted my career while I was still in corporate, still working a 9 to 5.

I fit creative work into the margins of my life - before and after my 9 to 5, during my lunch break, on the weekends. And ultimately, it took me three years after my burnout before I finally had the courage to start pivoting my career. I wish I had started sooner, and my hope is that this guide will help anyone that’s currently stuck, or wondering how to get started.

At 25, I would have done anything to have a conversation with my older self, and to learn how I made it happen.

So here is that conversation. Everything I learned, the only things that actually mattered. Everything else was just noise.

Included in this guide:

• the advice I would have killed for at 25.

• the actual numbers - my forward looking freelance earnings projection against what the Deloitte path would have paid me by now.

• this week's free download: the exercise that changed everything for me. In 2018 I went on a retreat in Bali. This is the one thing I remember most vividly from it…because it actually worked.

This post is reserved for paid subscribers. For the price of 4 baguettes at an overpriced boulangerie, you can continue reader + have access to the full vault including all weekly downloads.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• I started my Substack seven weeks ago. I already make enough to cover one month’s rent.

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

Every week comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

I recently lost 90% of my income, and pivoting to Substack has not only been a great stress outlet for me, but it’s given me a glimmer of hope - in just 8 weeks of posting, it’s now covering the equivalent of three month’s rent for me:

My goal is to have my Substack cover my rent completely by EOY, and I’ve been documenting my progress:

I believe this platform is going to be life changing for so many people:

• you can join the creator economy without showing your face

• you can monetize your creativity / business expertise from day one

• the learning curve is much lower than other platforms (such as Instagram & TikTok)

I am determined to have Substack cover my rent by EOY, and I’m documenting everything.

1. you know how when you click on some creator’s pages, they have a magazine / website look?

to do this on your on page, go to your dashboard (found on your homepage):

once in your dashboard, scroll down on the sidebar and select “website editor:”

on the right hand side, change the dropdown for your theme from “profile” to “custom.”

You will now be able to edit your page! This is also where you can change your font / color theme / etc. This is why it’s important to include at least one photo in each post.

2. Write your content to be skimmed.

visual breaks & variety are crucial.

Think about it like this: you are writing to people that are used to hyper visual / short form content. PEOPLE WITH BRAIN ROT. Everyone’s attention spans are fried. You cannot expect people to read massive blocks of text - not only is it visually unappealing, but it doesn’t give the eye anywhere to go.

after writing your piece, add in visual emphasis everywhere you would naturally pause.

play around with the quote feature

and consider adding line breaks. You can add line breaks within the Substack app, or you can download them from google as PNGs and add them in as images, like this one below:

3. For aesthetic links to your other articles, simply paste the link into the article.

This took me way too long to figure out, but it’s how you get links in your piece that look like this one:

4. Create templates to save time. For example, below you will see my paywall break which separates my free content from my paywell.

Before, I would copy & paste it from each article. Now, I can easily add this in by saving it as a template:

Now it’s time for the most important part:

how to create content that ACTUALLY converts to paid subscribers.

In this next section, we’re going to cover the following:

• the exact formula I use on each piece to convert readers to paid subscribers.

• the hidden Substack feature that lets you test each article you post for virality.

• the real reason using Claude destroys your ability to monetize.

This post is for paid subscribers. For the price of a dozen eggs in Manhattan, you can get access to this article + the full archive.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• I started my Substack seven weeks ago. I already make enough to cover one month’s rent.

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

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“If I were you, I’d update my resumé and start job searching now.”

“You had a good run - do you think you’ll look for the same role somewhere else?”

“How much savings do you have? Will you be able to survive for a few months?”

“I’ve been job searching for two years now… good luck…”

I was devastated when I lost my job. It was fully remote. Paid well. Very chill. It was so easy, it sometimes felt like passive income. But it was safe… too safe, too familiar. I loved my golden handcuffs. I polished them daily, reveled in my tiny but well appointed cage. And everyone close to me knew it.

When I let my broader network know what happened, they were sympathetic. From the supportive to vaguely ominous, I was flooded with the canned advice one can predictably expect to receive after such an announcement.

I thanked everyone, took their advice in stride. And I got to work.

But not on my resumé. Because that was my last corporate job.

I have a delusional belief in my own abilities. I have been blessed with the cocky, grating confidence of a white frat boy. Maybe it was my upbringing, but as insecure as I can sometimes be in my looks and interpersonal relationships, I’ve never had much doubt in my ability to roll up my sleeves and get things done.

And I am certain I am going to make it work, just like I am certain this Substack will be paying for my rent by EOY.

“You’ll never make that much money living in France.”

“You’ll need to adjust your lifestyle to your new reality.”

“This is how things are. You need to be realistic.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to live in their reality. I want to live in my reality, where I managed to make 240k last year while going to school, traveling, exploring, and establishing a new community in a new country - all without work consuming me.

I want to live in my world, where I can drop 2k in a weekend without batting an eye. In my world, where the word no doesn’t exist, where my children will have all the options and opportunities that money brings.

While it’s good to manifest, honest conversations are not without their merits. I need to be realistic, so that I can build a foundation upon reality, not fantasy.

Maybe you can relate: my creative work filled the margins of my days. I squeezed it in when I had time, mental energy. It was the first thing to go when my plate was too full. My corporate job paid the bills (and my healthcare) so it of course always took priority.

But now, my back is against the wall. I need to make this work - not only will I have to go back to corporate America if I don’t, but I will need to leave the country I’m living in (my visa is dependent on a certain income threshold as a freelancer).

My 110k salary equals roughly $9,200 per month before tax & deductions.

I currently live in Paris, where cost of living is considerably lower. This salary put me in the top 10% of earners in the city, and it has allowed me to live a very high quality life here - restaurants, frequent travel.

With freelancing, you need to look at it like a puzzle. Instead of one paycheck, you will need to layer multiple sources of income until you have your desired monthly amount.

I’m envisioning it like this:

Stage 1: Survival - $2,550

• basic expenses

Stage 2: Stability - $3,000

• comfort level

Stage 3: Expansion - $6,200

• bougie lifestyle (yay!)

“I traded my 9 to 5 to work for myself, and now I work 24/7”

I DO NOT DREAM OF LABOR. I DO NOT WANT TO BE WORKING 70 HOURS A WEEK AND PRETENDING IT’S NORMAL. FUCKKKKKKK THATTTTTT.

It’s not enough to replace my salary. I want to maintain the work / life balance I enjoyed as well. A lot of guides talk about the numbers, but very few dive into the TIME needed.

I don’t want to make good money if it means I’m working 12 hours a day. I’m not immune to work, but I’m not immune to burnout either - I want a sustainable, healthy life.

I have crunched the numbers and created a realistic plan that will allow me to make $11,050 within 6 months, while working 20 hours a week. That’s 120% of my salary, while maintaining the quality of life I’m used to.

here’s how I’m personally going to make this happen as a creator with 5+ years creative experience and a Big 4 consulting background, with my actual numbers, projections, and earnings estimates.

This post is for paid subscribers. For the price of 1/8 of an entrée of at a mid priced restaurant, you can get access to this article + the full archive.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• I started my Substack seven weeks ago. I already make enough to cover one month’s rent.

• I pivoted from corporate to creative consulting. Here’s how I did it + my actual income projections.

• Every remote job I’ve had, how I found it, and how much it paid.

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie or an exclusive discount.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

And I will use the entirety of my throbbing, bitchy, petulant, pretentious little chest to say this:

Using WisprFlow to brain dump into your notes app and having Claude make an article out of it does not make you a writer.

It makes you boring, your writing soulless, it’s why you’re stuck at 500 subs after 2 years, and yes we can all tell. We don’t even need Pangram! It’s that obvious!

Do I think I’m better than you for not using AI to write? Yes, unequivocally. And I’m sick of hedging, minimizing, downplaying. Pretending AI has feelings, that it’s valid or admirable to outsource your brain to a machine and subsequently whine about not having an audience.

You don’t “need AI to save time.” Your time is only precious to you when you’re making excuses on your absence of it. Otherwise, your time is in abundance. You doomscrolled for four hours yesterday.

Let’s be candid, for once. And above all, honest with ourselves. I’m so sick of packaging up everything neatly, trying not to offend, bean souping the fuck out of everything I touch on the internet. Maybe we don’t need our hands held every second of every day. Maybe we don’t need someone being “nice” to us. Maybe, just maybe, what we actually need is someone demanding we do better. Maybe we need someone prying our mouths open and force feeding the truth down it while we sob because it is that serious. Do you not realize wh

at’s at stake here? An entire generation of writers, lost. Opinions, neutered and skewered for public consumption, tentatively served cold with the tepid hope that palatability will equal virality.

You “need AI” because it’s a crutch that you’ve used so much and so often that it fuzed into your underarm and you can no longer walk erect.

You have feelings, and I’m not afraid of hurting them.

Because you’re better than this.

I’ve had a conversation with you. Your eyes were manic with excitement as we jumped from US military propaganda thirst traps on TikTok to theorizing about how baby hedgehogs are born without tearing their mothers apart on the way out.

You threw back your head with riotous laughter one moment, were near tears talking about your family dog turning ten the next.

You were unequivocally, flesh and bone, human. Bizarre, introspective, indignant - unmistakably human. Our conversation was meandering, galloping, made perfect sense and none at all. And I ate you up, consumed you whole - thrilling in and intoxicating in your quirks and contradictions, the endearing way you pronounced words that ended in “ed”, a holdover from the Brazilian accent you never quite managed to shake.

And then I opened your Substack.

Where you had been, a 2D puppet, wearing your face, had replaced you. Someone had come along and melon balled the soul out of you, splattered the carcass onto the canvas, stitched it back into a you shaped avatar and frogged marched it across the screen, making it smile and wave and calling it you.

This thing, wearing your face, carried me through a beautifully designed, logically structured, perfectly formed argument about how I, too, could start a business from my phone.

In the next essay the other you wrote, you suggest, half heartedly, in measured, friendly, HR appropriate tones, a listicle about... ambition. Or girl bossing. Or… something. I honestly don’t remember. The most enigmatic woman I’ve met in months, publishing forgettable trite.

I dig. I read. I find. Your creative method: a brain dump. Claude. It all makes sense. Of course he’s behind this. He is the architect of every gentrification of the soul.

I imagine you, meandering the streets of Paris, your beautiful, unhinged babble, murmured into your notes app. The haussmann buildings, conduits from the universe to you, tapping away on the metro, whispering covertly into your palm in the boulangerie when both inspiration and hunger seize you.

You once told me that you and a bitter rival were competing for the same internship. You once cornered her and bullied her into giving you the phone number of her contact for recruiting at McKinsey. When you rang the number and it blared out an error tone, you didn’t give up… you had a hunch. The Rival. Sabotage!

Put on the spot, she didn’t have time to lie, but what if she had the wherewithal to jumble the numbers? You followed your hunch. Inverting variations of the last four digits, like a campagin intern trying to make numbers, you dialed and dialed, hanging up on grandma’s and florists until finally… she answered. The recruiter. You lied, immediately - why, you already had an interview scheduled - could she please confirm the time? The recruiter, caught off guard, flustered, quickly gave you a timeslot. Two weeks later you got the job. The rival went to Accenture - ew!!

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You were giddy telling me this story, a bit ashamed, apologetic, but mostly proud - she was so ambitious, younger you, so utterly cut throat!

Do you know how you recounted this story on your page? You said “ON AMBITION: Looking back, I probably wouldn't recommend this as a recruiting strategy. But it taught me something I've carried throughout my career: persistence often looks irrational from the outside. Most people stop after the first dead end. Sometimes the people who get ahead are simply the ones who keep testing assumptions everyone else accepts.”

My blood thirsty, ruthlessly ambitious queen - reducing herself to a brown nosing little squire so as not to bunch a single panty, courtesy of Claude.

I want your typos. I want your vicious, ruthless, mean girl. I want your soft white underbelly, the woman that sobbed her eyes out when her rat trap accidentally snapped the foot of a sparrow and it died from the shock; she called me gasping, barely able to speak - donating $500 from her unemployment check to a bird shelter in remorse.

I want to know I’m not alone in these thoughts, I want you to reach out and grab me. At the very least, I want to know I’m not the only person that will never, ever, for the life of her be able to spell beauroacracy.

Claude is the equivalent of an airport Hilton. It’s designed to be palatable to the masses. It’s airpace. You don’t know if you’re in Tokyo or Boise, reading the work of an American or a Greek. It pushes back against controversy, blunts feeling, and is highly sensitive to political correctness and appeasing as many people as possible.

In short, it is the exact opposite of what your content should do. And it’s why no one wants to follow you. Why would they? You’re a robot, dressed up as a girl. Uncanny valley, you give us the creeps.

I quit my comfortable, fully remote, highly paid job.

I’m building a business and negotiating contracts in a language I don’t speak fluently.

I don’t currently make enough money to cover my (admittedly very bougie) lifestyle.

I’m navigating a visa denial while apartment searching in one of the most brutal housing markets in Europe.

I’m going to school part time.

My instagram was stripped of its ability to monetize for 3 months, causing a serious hit to my income.

And if I don’t figure all of this out, I have to leave the country.

To stay the stakes (and my stress levels) are high is an understatement.

When I was stripped of my ability to monetize my Instagram, I needed a pivot.

Not only did Substack feel like a natural next step, but it feels like it’s still in the early-ish adoption phase - I’m reminded of how it felt to be on TikTok in 2021 - no one I knew IRL was posting, but everyone was scrolling.

Substack is going to be the next big thing:

Here is why I feel Substack is superior to other platforms:

• it’s still in its growth phase, meaning competition is far lower.

• the barrier to entry and learning curve is MUCH smaller. you don’t need to learn how to script, pitch, edit, talk on camera, etc.

• they recently announced an - albeit very controversial - partnership with Pangram, which will hopefully curb the AI slop we are seeing on other platforms.

• you can monetize your platform from day one.

After eight weeks and 18 articles, my substack now covers one month’s rent. I started from scratch, and due to my ban, I did not cross-promote my page on my Instagram until this week. The majority of my growth has come from inside the Substack app itself.

Here are my stats:

I have learned a lot in the past two months.

I also paid for a one hour consulting call with a full time Substack writer / coach, and I’ll touch on what she taught me. We focused on my content pillars, growth strategy, and monetization plan.

My goal is to for Substack to completely cover my rent by EOY.

That would be roughly 200 to 250 paid subscribers. Maybe it’s delusional optimism, but I truly believe this is possible with the strategy I have formulated, and my current growth rate.

I started with zero knowledge, and I want you to begin your Substack journey with a head start.

This deep dive strategy & best practices guide is reserved for paid subscribers.

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• all the remote jobs I’ve worked and how I got them,

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie + discounted consulting calls.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers.

Read more

Unlike its namesake, the beach is not entirely comfortable, nor a place one wants to lounge for an extended period of time. The beach means a degree of undesirability (no benevolent partner saw your shining star and snapped you up before your previous project ended, calling dibs), and uncertainty - you have no idea where you’ll end up.

The uncertainty was what killed me.

My life - and the quality of it - were governed by capricious and unknowable corporate gods, who would decide - by staffing me on a project - my fate for the foreseeable future. It was like having someone conduct a job search on your behalf - would you be with an automotive client in Detroit? A liquor distillery in bum fuck Indiana? Perhaps tech, with the requisite cross country flight to Silicon Valley every week…?

My previous client had been in financial services. I was required to be onsite by 9am Monday morning through Thursday, requiring a grueling schedule: to accomodate for the one hour time change between NYC and Chicago, I had to wake up at 3:40am for the 6am flight to Newark, returning around midnight on Thursdays after the inevitable delays and city traffic.

A month into the project, the client decided that wasn’t enough: They wanted us 5 days a week, and earlier on Mondays. My flight schedule thus became Sunday evening to Friday evening.

I was effectively paying rent for an apartment I spent four days a month in - four days a month for doctors’ appointments, friends. Four days to cobble together the semblance of a life. The company owned the rest of my time.

I was categorically miserable.

And yet… everyone told me it was a dream job, and that I’d be a fool to quit:

You should stay for at least 5 years.

It looks so good on a resumé.

The job market is terrible.. what if you don’t find something better?

Their warnings compounded my feelings of fear, guilt, and shame. I was conflicted. It had been my dream, until the hours, the travel, the loss of control all eroded my identity, my sense of self.

With trepidation, I stopped cleaning my bathroom and walked into my living room to check my laptop.

It was Bryce. My team had been adjacent to his the past three months. He was a New Jersey native - loud mouthed, obsessed with work, and viciously funny as long as it wasn’t you that he was mocking. The guy you’d love to get drinks with but would be a nightmare to work under.

Four words, that made my blood run cold:

Hey. Got a sec?

15 minutes later, I was officially off the beach, reporting to a new manager. Bryce.

My head was reeling. I had never imagined I’d go back to the same client - let alone under worse management. I began to hyperventilate. It felt like everything was coming crashing down at once - the sleepless nights, the dirty laundry piled in the corner, the 3:40am alarms, sitting in traffic, pretending to care about spreadsheets - and I suddenly couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t pretend.

I called the company’s 1-800 number, and asked how to quit. They pointed me to a subheader on the company portal. I was required to upload a reason, a resignation letter.

I typed something barely coherent, something like (hand to god):

I hate it here. I need to quit.

Immediately after, I burst into crazed laughter. The absurdity, the relief - it hit me all at once.

I had no backup plan. No job lined up. I had turned my back on a job thousands of people would kill for.

Here’s what happened next, the resources I found most helpful, and what I wish I had known.

this piece is available for paid subscribers only

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This piece is for paid subscribers. For the price of an iced latte:

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Previous guides:

• all the remote jobs I’ve worked and how I got them,

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

• how to become a paid content creator

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We were packed into a mezcal bar, the kind that feel carved out and grotty, everything under a diffuse layer of grime - as though the earth was trying to reclaim it, barstool by grubby barstool. I was surrounded by my roommates of the month, an international group of 20 and 30 somethings (read: primarily white and able to afford rent at 2 to 3x the national average), and we were staying in a gothic 1920s mansion perched in the foothills of the sprawling city.

I was “on assignment” in Barcelona*, working as a travel influencer, primarily covering a (now defunct) coliving. At this point, I had been a digital nomad for several years, traveling from client to client, staying for anywhere for one week to several months in a city, almost exclusively staying in colivings.

Coliving is a concept that has been around for as long as humans have cohabited, but coliving in the digital nomad sense was a concept that saw a sharp revival (and subsequent gentrification) post Covid. Armed with newly remote jobs and a crippling sense of isolation and lost time, droves of young adults had taken to digital nomadism like existential ducks to overpriced water, and establishments to support and welcome them had popped up all over the world, particularly in Europe.

I was flanked by Katiya and Shelby*, two other travel influencers that had also been invited to come create content for the opening. With fair skin, luminous blue eyes, sandy hair, and matching Irish accents, the women could have been sisters - they even dressed a bit the same, though that may have been more through virtue of the limits of living out of suitcases then a similar sense of style.

I watched as Pierre*, the host and founder, walked up behind the girls and encircled his arm around Shelby’s waist, pulling her closer and planting a kiss upon her cheek before resting his arm around her shoulders.

“Ça va Liz,” he asked me, “did you meet my cofounder Guy* yet?” I ça va’d and did the bise with the bald man to his left, straining with every molecule of my being to understand his rapid fire French under the Spanish rap that threatened to drown out our shouted conversations entirely.

At one point during our conversation, Pierre suddenly stiffened. With a forced casualness, he removed his arm from Shelby, pulled out his phone. It was subtle, but not enough that she didn’t clock it immediately, her eyes following his. Another woman had entered the bar. Shelby’s eyes widened in excitement. “Annette*!” She squealed, “how are you!!” The girls devolved into whisper shrieks and giggles, clearly reuniting, as Shelby had arrived two nights prior.

Suddenly professional, Pierre made introductions, shaking hands instead of air kissing, no longer offering to buy rounds or take photos. He erected a physical distance between us so forceful that it was palpable.

Over the course of the evening (and half a dozen drinks) the origin of his discomfort revealed itself. He had slept with Shelby the night before, and, not realizing she and Annette were friends, had slept with the other woman the week prior. He had also, I revealed to their mounting glee, hit on me the night I arrived - sending drunk texts inviting himself back to my (his?) room at the mansion. At first, we found it hilarious - kind of gross, kind of typical, something you’d roll your eyes at, a misbehaving puppy weeing on the carpet. What more could we expect?

But as we compared notes, a more nefarious thread emerged. Five women had been invited to stay, handpicked by him, to come stay at the home he was renovating and renting out. We all even looked eerily similar - slim, light eyes, blonde hair. He had copies of our passports, keys to our bedrooms.

And he had hit on every one of us.

A charitable read of the situation: he was flirty, single, and opportunistic. An uncharitable read: he had a type, and he intentionally built an environment around that type, casting us as unwitting characters in a play that had his sexual fantasies firmly at the center. The implications seeped into me over the course of the evening, the subsequent days. I believed in what he was building, I loved the space and the team that managed it alongside it. However it wouldn’t be the first - nor the last - time I would sense the boundaries muddied.

There were the hosts that offered massages to the female guests, invited them back to their homes; the ones that would go out drinking with us, stumbling home in the morning to blearily check in a new arrival. Once, a host I was friendly with flipped through the profiles of arriving guests, noting whether or not which ones he found attractive.

I never felt unsafe, per se, but I felt on guard, as though I couldn’t fully relax, lest I give the wrong idea - but isn’t that what it means to be a women navigating this world? Always cautious? But then, I argued back to myself, why did I have to be, when staying in a place marketed to me as my “home away from home?” It wasn’t a hotel, nor an apartment - it was less than a commitment, but more than temporary.

It meant I was often operating in a confusing grey area. These men would straddle the lines between landlord, employer, host, & social organizer - while simultaneously making it clear “romantic prospect” was not entirely off the table. While researching colivings, I would joke to my best friend that I was prioritizing spaces that had hosts that were “fixed” - i.e., over the age of 40 or in a committed relationship (and even that wasn’t a guarantee…).

I would wonder if my expectations - and standards - were too high. These spaces were typically hippie or hippie adjacent, populated by travelers on gap years or embarking on a new lifestyle, emboldened by change, alcohol, a new city. While I witnessed behaviour that blurred the line between “flirty” and “creepy” - if hosts and guests did hook up, it was consensual. But the power imbalance gave me pause nonetheless. The access they had to us was a one way street - our personal information, our rooms, the roof over our head. The wifi that powered our jobs. There were no HR, no rules that dictated what professional behaviour should or could look like, what lines shouldn’t be crossed, and I didn’t know how to navigate that.

I sometimes felt helpless, navigating a tightly knit world where everyone knew one another, our laptops papered with stickers collected from the communities we toured. What did it mean when I was staying in these people’s homes, reviewing the communities they had built, when a fully honest review would mean I could be blacklisted? When my next project depended on their goodwill, their review, their recommendation? What was me being an uptight American, not European enough, not carefree enough, and what was actually predatory, or inappropriate? I didn’t want to be perceived as shrill, uppity, frigid, one of those many female adjectives with negative connotations they assign us when we talk too much, too loudly.

I focused on the positives, highlighted what I loved about what I was doing. I kept out the question marks that plagued me, danced around any discomfort that churned in my stomach. It felt ridiculous, anyway - watch out, he might hit on you and your friends - & unprofessional to comment on consenting relationships that weren’t my own.

Eventually, I am loathe to admit: it worked. I fell in love with one of the hosts. When I met him, it was a rare moment of chemistry: he was the general manager, with deep green eyes and jet black hair. He was morose, intellectual. I loved to tease him, delighting in his childlike laugh. We were as opposite as opposites could be: I often described us as one of those videos you see of cross species animal friendships, a dolphin and a cat, an unlikely duo. He flirted indiscriminately, it was part of his charm. I resisted at first, but finally succumbed. He was magnetic, I was putty in his competent hands. It was one of the most maddening, intoxicatingly toxic, spellbindingly devastating romantic experiences I’ve ever had.

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Before we hooked up, the air between us was so thick with tension you could cut it with a knife. He was constantly surrounded by people, I was desperate to get him alone. One day, mid August heatwave, we were sitting on a blanket in the garden when he proposed a beach trip. Knowing the whole house would want to join, I recognized my moment: I offered to run inside to invite everyone. Once inside, I climbed the stairs to my room, and shut the door. After a beat, and after having spoken to no one, I went back down, declaring everyone was too busy - we’d have to go solo.

I luxuriated in our afternoon together, simmering with excitement. I was either uncharacteristically mute in his presence or chattering nonstop - that day, I was quiet, contemplative. At the beach, I silently offered him a stone I had found - perfectly round, a circle missing from its middle. He pressed it against his forehead, massaging his inner eye, he explained, fixing me with his liquid green stare. Afterwards, he slipped it into his pocket, promising to keep it. Seven hours later he kissed me.

A year later, in his bedroom, I was bored, listless, idly rifling through his things. He was like a crow - a collector, his home a strange altar to past fixations, things fermenting in jars, feathers and tarot decks. At one point, I found a shoebox.

“What’s this?” I asked him, shaking it. “Open it,” he said, smiling shyly. Inside, there were hundreds of rocks and shells. Nestled between them was a rock - my rock. I was touched at the sentimentality.

But there was a lot of rocks.

“Do you collect these?” I asked. “No - those are all rocks people have given me,” he explained. “Girls?” I asked, my brow wrinkling in confusion. “Yea, mostly women,” he said, shrugging. My stomach dropped in recognition.

What we had - no labels of course - I wasn’t sure of anything about it. I wasn’t sure what we were, when I’d see him next, what I meant to him. But the one thing I was sure about was that it was unique, special. And here I was: realizing I was just another shell in a box, part of a collection.

I felt humiliated, admonished. This had been important to me, significant. With a sinking realization, I saw that for him, it had barely registered. But I had no claim to him, we had established nothing, he wasn’t breaking any rules.

No, none of them were ever breaking any rules. They were living their lives. If we were collateral damage? Well, that was our own fault.

Ultimately, I found a shaky kind of peace: it didn’t need to hold the same weight for him for it to be significant for me, to shape me. I could assign my own significance, collect my own shells.

I eventually fell out of love with coliving, and digital nomadism. A lifestyle that once felt to embody freedom to me slowly became restrictive, isolating. And the communities we paid to be a part of?

One of my dear friends put it perfectly: if you have to pay for it, it’s not a real community.

And that tracked. I’ve lived with hundreds of people over the years. I’ve stayed in regular contact with maybe a handful of them. It’s impossible to stay in touch with everyone, especially when they’re strewn across the globe, across timezones.

Community, real community, is borne of shared interests, common values, routine, predictability. A bundle of ties, reinforced with time and consistency.

And coliving? There was but one: we were in a city, and we were lonely.

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And we are shooting ourselves in the foot because of it.

The result is that because of this, people straight up lie about their privilege. They don’t acknowledge it. They fall back on the myth of meritocracy, and attribute their success to their own “hard work.” And much of the time, they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

The thing about privilege is that it’s nuanced. It’s not just private school + mansion. It’s being able to speak English. It’s having a US passport. It’s having a safe couch to crash on if you end up homeless. It’s not having young or elderly family members to financially support. It’s having a healthy body free from chronic pain.

I cannot tell you how many influencers, business owners, and otherwise impressive people I’ve met that have been blind to their own privilege. They swore up and down they were entirely self-made, without acknowledging the many helping hands that lifted them along the way: parents that helped pay for their education, growing up in a safe suburb sheltered from violence, even hand me down macbooks from their older siblings from which they launched their first side hustle.

I am not saying this to negate their achievements. For the most part, they were wildly ambitious, creative, driven people in their own right. But by virtue of their advantageous birth, they were beginning their careers a few meters past the starting line. And when you’re given a head start, you should factor that in to your success story.

And maybe I’m biased, but I think wealthy people have a lot of value to share. We should greet them with curiosity, not judgment. There is a MASSIVE difference between a billionaire and a self made millionaire, but internet brainrot discourse cannot make the distinction or nuance, and “nepo baby” has become a witch hunt.

The result is that people simply stop speaking about their upbringings, give themselves all the credit instead, happily reap the compliments. They tell themselves, and others, stories about their success that don’t capture the full picture. And you are left with people from more modest backgrounds, a family to support, comparing themselves to someone that was born with a gold or silver or even pewter spoon in their mouth…

On another note, I find nepo baby as an insult a bit ridiculous because, isn’t that all anyone ever wants? To make it? To provide fabulously for their families and next of kin? I digress…

I was blessed beyond measure to have been born to wealthy parents that valued education, ambition, curiosity, & resilience. Everything I have is because of them. My father was the embodiment of the American Dream, born poor and clawed his way up an unfair system. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him and his wealthy friends, the communities and conversations I was privy to… by not sharing what they’ve taught us, we are furthering the divide between haves and have nots.

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He didn’t believe in deodorant. The rare times he did brush his teeth, the sink would run red with blood. After working all day in the organic garden he managed, he would fall into bed, sleeping in his sweat stained clothes. I called him nomadic, those less charitable would’ve call him homeless: he’d travel seasonally, exchanging work for accomodation. He was kind of an asshole most of the time, and bizarre the rest.

I was utterly obsessed.

Let’s call him… Liam.

The lack of adherence to social norms didn’t repulse me. Instead, it attracted me, somehow - not exactly a moth to a flame - a fly to an overripe fruit, perhaps. I wanted to consume him entirely. When I described Liam to people, I couldn’t leave out his quirks, his transient rudeness. Friends and strangers alike fixated on our odd union, regarding with a mixture of curiosity and mild repulsion. They could not understand why I, a (at that time) bleach blonde, extroverted, part time influencer with a full time corporate job and American money (and teeth) was… well… “slumming it” (their words) with a man who had dirt perpetually caked under his nails, bad hand poke tattoos snaking his grimy body, didn’t treat me particularly well, and qualified for social welfare. But I would shake my head. They just didn’t understand - and I never saw it that way.

He was my swamp captain.

At this point, I should throat clear, politely clarify, and say something like: I’m certain Lana’s man is perfectly respectable and smells great.

Because it’s probably not true. And it doesn’t remotely matter.

Here’s the part that doesn’t translate: Liam was completely unique. He was a gifted community organizer, cooking the most incredible, transcendent, mouth watering vegan meals, sourced entirely from his farm and whatever wild nature surrounded us. He didn’t need his own home, because his community opened up theirs to him: he’d serve us meals in sprawling haciendas, Italian chateaus out of your dizziest cottagecore dreams, seaside cabins perched upon rugged coasts - guests would come for the night and stay for weeks, so magnetic and welcoming was this man’s pull, the orbit of his followers.

He had an arresting gaze, tormented blue eyes blazing out from under a dark cliff of brow. And his hands. He had the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen. Roped with veins, long fingers. Strong enough to haul twice his weight, soft enough to place the most delicate spring bloom atop the handmade desserts he’d present to me from behind his back, smiling shyly. He spoke slowly and softly, choosing his words with a precision. Where sentences would tumble out of me, his were contemplative, considered. He laughed rarely, but when he did, he’d throw back his head, filling the room with it. I, perpetually filming, once caught it on video. I played it back dozens of times, tears in my eyes near the end of us.

The part I couldn’t articulate was that it was about permission. I can acknowledge I am conventionally attractive. I’m conventionally successful. With that comes the eternal burden of performance. I am never viewing myself, I am viewing myself through the lens of the man in my head, put there by the patriarchy. I remember in my early twenties, my teens even - carefully selecting lingerie, as if it even mattered, as if any man actually cared - all they saw was a willing body, lace clad, be damned. Self tanning, eyelash extending, hair bleaching - all to fit better into those norms, be more fuckable, more universally approved. I often felt as though I was beside myself, viewing myself from above. There was me, and then there was this flesh puppet that represented me - me, but also wholly separate, a thing apart. I was objectifying myself.

With him, the performance stopped. He’s one of the few people - er, men - that looked at me and saw me, past the meat, the avatar. He rejected social norms so completely that polite society found him vaguely repulsive. Yet within the strange moral universe he inhabited, everyone seemed equal. Beauty conferred no status. Femininity was an energy, not a performance. There were no scripts to follow, no points awarded for being desirable. And while he had his faults, his contradictions, he did, for the most part, embody his beliefs.

He once invited me to an energy release and meditation at a fire circle at the home of his childhood friend. Beforehand, I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I put on a body chain, layered a linen dress over it. I did my makeup. Afterward, in the glow of the campfire, I was struck by the utter absurdity of it all. I was surrounded by adults rocking, crying, laughing. We were white folk, stereotyped into oblivion, trying to transcend ourselves in the glow of the full moon. And there was I, choosing my outfit to sit in the pitch dark. I was struck by the utter absurdity of it all.

With him, I loosened the grip I had on myself. I began to exist, instead of perform. I became softer, grungier, looser. And ultimately, more myself. Or maybe he was simply a mirror, and I saw what I wanted to see. I can’t help but wonder if Lana could relate.

10 years ago, I was doing internal IT control audits for a Big 4 consulting firm. I was living in Chicago, and sometimes I had clients that necessitated me working from the suburbs. I would drive out there, dreading my day, sobbing my eyes out the entire, gridlocked way.

These days, I work completely remotely. I make money from a few avenues: paid brand deals, UGC work, consulting calls, and creative ad hoc projects in digital marketing & social media strategy.

I could never have dreamed of working remotely, let alone working as a creative. My path to this point has been far from linear, and the pivot into creative work has not been easy, or quick.

My goal with these guides is to help shave years off your journey. I am writing directly to my younger self, and sharing candidly everything I wish I had known.

Part One went over the mindset / getting back into the habit of creating & how to unlock your creativity and get over the fear of being cringe before you ever think about strategy.

Part Two of this series is the execution phase: your niche, a 30-day action plan, and the exact starting point if you've got nothing built yet.

I am in the phase of my life where I am treating content creation like a business. I want creative work to be my main source of income, because I love it, find it fulfilling, and most of all… it’s really fucking fun. For me, it’s play.

There are two types of creators.

The ones who start as a creative outlet and figure out the money later - that was me.

And the ones who start with a monetization strategy and build the content around it.

Neither is wrong... But one of them costs you years.

When I started, I was creating for the joy of it. No strategy, no goal, no plan. Which is beautiful, and also how you end up five years in with a following and no reliable income, constantly reinventing your revenue model, chasing brand deals reactively instead of building something that pays you whether or not a brand emails you that weeks. I would post for a few months, then take a huge chunk of time off, tanking my engagement and inbounds. And ultimately… I shot myself in the foot, because when I wanted to quit my 9 to 5 for good, I didn’t have reliable enough revenue streams to justify it.

The question I wish someone had asked me on day one isn’t “what’s your niche.”

It’s this one simple question:

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If a generationally wealthy person marries “down”, they are not marrying the woman who’s entire life revolves around a 9 to 5 and rotting on her phone after work. And they are most definitely not marrying the woman cosplaying old money in a houndstooth printed Shein fit while posturing at a hotel bar because a dating guru on TikTok said it was where rich hotties hang out.

They are marrying the socially mobile, upward climbing women who have more drive in their raised pinky fingers than he has in his entire blue blooded body.

If she is “below” him financially, she’s the woman that worked her way through university, maintaining a 3.75 GPA or higher as per her full ride scholarship requirements, the one that went to Wharton before founding an international charity. The daughter of immigrants who started a company, hiring her first employee before her 28th birthday. The resident physician, 170k in debt but specializing in a lucrative subspeciality, her sights set on starting her own practice.

And yet countless women are counting on “him” - that vague, faceless, generationally wealthy knight - to come and pluck her from obscurity & financial ruin so that she may float away into a cloud of old money oblivion.

Dowries, the idea of an advantageous marriage, marrying “up” - those tremulous Jane Austen era ideals of what it means to marry well - have far from gone extinct. They’ve simply changed form.

And this is a specific brand of female oppression that is particularly insidious because not only is it unacknowledged in society, it is celebrated:

The idea that someone is coming to save you.

My parents that modeled traditional gender roles - my father was the breadwinner, my mother the SAHM. In the wealthy suburb I grew up in, this was the norm, not the exception.

From day one, it was instilled in us girls that at some point, we would marry someone at our above our own level. I identify as a feminist, and as someone who’s fiercely independent - sometimes to a fault.

And yet when I turned 30, the hum of unconscious programming in my head became too loud to ignore. While I was happy, with a vibrant life, I had to accept an uncomfortable truth: my life looked nothing like I had always imagined it would. All the things I had assumed would happen to me simply for virtue of being an adult had never come to fruition. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have children. I didn’t own a sleek apartment in a capital city.

Many of my friends hit all of those milestones. They married and began to build lives with their partners. I didn’t see it then, but the fault line between singles and couples appeared, began to deepen. When one of my closest married friends purchased her fourth property, the ground began to give way.

It wasn’t the “missed” milestones that were bothering me. It was the financial reality of my singlehood. Without realizing it, I had spent the entirety of my young adulthood operating under the assumption that I would one day marry someone and join our finances. I hadn’t missed out on years of coupled bliss - I had missed out on years of financial benefits, and my bottom line showed it. While my friends were splitting rent, groceries, hotels, and getting tax breaks, I had the financial equivalent of a slow bleed. Across a lifetime, some estimates put the cost of being single at close to $1 million when you factor in taxes, housing, insurance, and retirement savings over a career.

Not only were we single folk hemorrhaging money, we but we were also subtly course correcting our own lives to align with a reality that would never be ours.

My friend MK desperately wanted to move home to be nearer to her deteriorating family, but quietly confessed she didn’t want to leave the Southern town she had moved to for fear she wouldn’t find a family oriented man if she did leave. Another friend entertained heinous behaviour from a loveable & chivalrous yet ultimately impotent fuckboy - er, fuckman, as he was pushing 40 - for years on end because he owned multiple properties, including one on a lake (can you blame her?) and seemed to be one of the few viable prospect to SAHM life in the wasteland we call heterosexual dating. On the phone, she daydreamed - he, or one of the his clones on Raya - would surely be her ticket out from the hourly grind she was chained to in the suburbs of San Jose.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her: he isn’t out there, he’s not coming.

On TikTok and Instagram, the hunt for high value men is lucrative. Faceless coaches, AI generated ones, and real women alike swap and sometimes sell tips and guidebooks, calendars, and coaching. They recommend cocktail bars and hotel lounges, suggesting outfits and funny bunny nails to best ensnare a HVM of discerning taste. The comments sections on these videos reveal my friends are not alone in recalibrating their lives in the hopes of finding a mate - from lurking outside of luxury apartment complexes to maxing out their budgets to join country clubs - it’s becoming insidious. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with changing your behaviours if your goal is to attract a partner.

The difference is passivity.

Going on dates is one thing - it’s taking an action, putting yourself in the driver’s seat. Letting your life, habits, and schedule slowly drift in the hopes they one day have a new sun to orbit? That’s a different story.

And I can’t help but wonder - what would be the financial payoff if instead of trawling Home Depot aisles, we actually got our hands dirty, poured into our own passions, molded ourselves into our own versions of rich men? Attracting - versus chasing - while making our own money and putting down our own financial roots instead of vaguely wishing?

For not only is it unlikely that the distant heir to the Monaco throne is lounging at your local Sheraton bar, it is statistically improbable that he even clears 100k. Using my dear friend Chat, I crunched some numbers, and they are staggering:

Only 0.2% of men meet the criteria most women are quietly orbiting their entire lives around. The man you are waiting for is statistically unlikely to exist. And while you wait for him, consciously or not, your fourth decade is passing, your investments are not growing, and your life is happening without you fully in it.

I am no better. In 2024, I was adrift. I moved to Chicago, and then NYC, both times to follow a different man, relationships that sparked and faltered before I could sign a gym membership. I’m not proud of it. In hindsight, I see my actions were symptoms of a societal disease. I still believed, on some level, that I could relinquish the paralyzing weight that was the agency of my own life and surrender it over to someone else. I could stop driving, exit the freeway entirely, get in line for my white picket fence.

A relationship meant I didn’t have to face the terrifying reality of my true desires: hacking away at every rope tying me to the US, packing up my life, moving to a city I that both attracted and scared me: Paris. A relationship was a convenient and noble excuse. I wasn’t a failure - I was in love. I no longer needed to go. I wouldn’t need my second full time remote job, I could quit and we’d combine forces, I could be a DINK for real. I can’t say for certain when the realization hit me - I guess somewhere around my third failed relationship, my fourth failed talking stage. It was sobering. While the men I fawned over followed their passions with laser focus, I was following them, worrying about whether or not they liked me while my friendships stagnated, my hobbies sat abandoned.

Subconsciously, I kept waiting for someone to come and save me. Now I am actively saving myself.

You’re probably reading this because some part of you is jealous of people that create for a living. I don’t say that to be condescending. I say it because I recognize it - I used to be that person too, and everything I write is written to my younger self.

I would doom scroll past creatives building international lives, getting paid to write and travel and exist on their own terms, and feel something close to grief. It seemed completely impossible from where I was standing - or rather, sitting - in an artificially lit cubicle in the Midwest, watching the clock.

My creative career began because of one conversation. I hope this can be that conversation for you.

A lot of how-to guides jump directly into strategy, brain dumps, goal setting, and defining your pillars and niche.

While this is extremely necessary and will definitely be part of the series, I think it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse. You can’t become creative if you don’t feel creative, and you certainly can’t start creating if you can’t even write a sentence. The aim of Part One of this guide will be to help you tap into your inner artist and your inner creative and to start transitioning from consumer to creator. You also can’t post if you feel awkward, hate being on camera, and cringe at the idea of people you know seeing you so this guide will also cover…

…the fear of being perceived, and how to get over cringe mountain.

The other day, my boyfriend asked me where I get my ideas from. I told him that I needed ideas, I go to the idea tree, and pluck down an idea. I told him that it also works with money: if I want $1,000, sure enough the next day there will be in my inbox. Waiting for the taking. He told me I must live in a forest. I agreed.

While simplistic, the nature metaphor holds true. Creativity, while not quite a forest, is most definitely a garden, one that must be cultivated. Creativity is a daily practice with seasonal spikes. If you were just starting your creative journey, it most likely feels like a daunting task. You see people tapping into this seemingly endless well of ideas, and start despairing. You’re stuck staring at your blinking cursor on your page, taunting you. Or worse… you open TikTok to find “inspiration” and end up doom scrolling for two hours…

The good news is that creativity can be taught. The even better news is that it’s a habit.

A big goal I have for my Substack is to encourage more people to create. I truly believe that within every one of us is a hidden creative, and that life, the circumstances of just surviving in this dystopian world, have stifled that artist. It’s our job to excavate them. I would also like to note that this is a core belief of “The Artist’s Way,” a book I found very inspiring in my own journey to get reconnected with my inner writer, a book I highly recommend to anyone beginning this journey.

Back then, I could only create if I was heartbroken or drunk, and the most ideal circumstances were when I was both. I could never imagine a world where ideas came naturally to me… where they ideas came continuously; when they came sober, when they came when I was tired, when they came when I was motivated, when they came when I wasn’t.

The reality is that that’s how it works for me now. I write daily, I create daily. I rarely take days off, not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to. I love what I do, and I hope that it always shows in the work that I create.

Here is the most essential thing you need to understand:

The people you admire are not more creative, intelligent, or qualified than you.

They are more consistent than you. That’s the only difference.

When I first started posting videos, I was terrible. I genuinely had no idea what I was doing. If you go back far enough on my feed, you can watch me learn in real time.

It’s now been 5 years. I’ve worked with small businesses, Fortune 500 companies… and everyone in between. Entirely self taught. I never paid for coaching, or an editing tool.

The only differentiator? While my peers gave up after a few months, I kept posting - through no views, dry spells, months of zero clients.

I didn’t wake up one day knowing how to edit. I put in thousands of reps and got good - not great, not amazing, but good enough.

I promise that is the only difference.

We have our “why” - let’s get down to the “how,” and the actionable steps that have helped me the most to step into my power as a creative and make money while doing it.

If you like guides that are bossy, tell you exactly what to do with actionable steps, and are a bit tough love, this ones for you. This all took me forever to learn with a lot of trial and error so just do what I say.

My tactical guides are reserved for paid subscribers. I’m obsessed with ungatekeeping things, and I write candidly about the creator economy, my remote work journey, finances, and everything in between.

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