I think there are so many girls walking around with this quiet feeling that they were meant to do something else. They have business ideas sitting in their Notes app, screenshots of apartments in cities they want to live in, saved videos about starting something of their own. And then Monday comes, life gets busy again, and the idea gets pushed to next weekend, next month, next year, once they have more money, once they feel more ready. You know how it goes.

I started experimenting with making money online when I was 17. And by experimenting I genuinely mean trying random things, learning skills, starting things that went absolutely nowhere and slowly figuring out what I actually liked. Honestly, that’s exactly what you should be doing right now. You don’t need to know what your perfect business is going to be. How would you? You probably haven’t tried enough things yet.

At 18, I started my first proper business. Three months later, I moved to Dubai.

Three months, guys.

I think about that all the time because we massively underestimate how quickly our lives can change once we actually start doing something. We can spend six months thinking about an idea, researching it, watching other people do it, saving posts about it and waiting for the perfect moment, while three months of actually trying could take you somewhere you never, ever planned for.

I definitely didn’t have some perfect five-year plan. Like, at all. I wasn’t sitting there at 18 feeling like this incredibly confident business woman who knew exactly what she was doing. I just started, figured things out as I went and let one thing lead to another. That was pretty much it.

And I think that’s something I really want girls to understand because the internet has made entrepreneurship look like a personality type.

Like you need to wake up at 5am, go to Pilates, meditate, drink green juice, have your entire life organised in Notion and somehow answer 50 emails before breakfast.

I’m so not that girl.

I’ve never done pilates in my life and i don’t answer 50 email before breakfast. Instead I’m sitting here at 11:25 am at a Sunday and writing this article.

I like my own stuff and ideas. I love journaling, astrology, pretty things and romanticising completely normal days. Sometimes I’m insanely productive at 11pm and sometimes I spend an hour doing something that absolutely did not need to be done because apparently my brain decided that was more important.

And I’m still successful.

You don’t need to turn yourself into some completely different, hyper-disciplined version of yourself before you’re allowed to build something. You can be soft, emotional, slightly chaotic, feminine, unsure of yourself sometimes and still be really fucking good at business.

You can basically fucking pull it off as yourself.

And honestly, I wish more girls understood that. I think so many of us are waiting to become the type of woman who could start a business, when really you become her by starting one. Confidence usually comes after you do the scary thing, not before. You make something, somebody buys it, and suddenly this thing that only existed inside your head is real.

Your first €10 online won’t change your life financially, obviously, but I swear it changes something in your brain. Somebody just paid you for something you created yourself. And then naturally you start thinking, wait, if I can make €10, could I make €100? Could €100 become €1,000? And suddenly your life feels a little less fixed than it did five minutes ago.

That’s why I think starting small is so underrated.

Make the account. Learn the skill. Put something online. Try an idea for a month. Hate it and try another one. Make something ugly. Have three followers. Make your first sale. Literally nobody is saying your first idea needs to become the company you’re still running when you’re 40. You’re allowed to just be a beginner and figure shit out.

At 17, that’s all I was doing. Trying things.

I couldn’t have planned the life I have now because I didn’t even know half of these possibilities existed yet. One thing taught me something that led to another thing, which gave me another idea, which eventually brought me somewhere completely different. And I think that’s kind of the fun part.

You’re not supposed to know yet.

That’s also why this isn’t really about quitting your job. Some people genuinely love having a 9-to-5, knowing exactly what they’ll earn every month, having colleagues and closing their laptop at the end of the day without thinking about work anymore. Amazing. Seriously.

But there is a huge difference between choosing that life because you love it and settling for it because you’re too scared to find out whether you could have created something else.

I personally don’t want to spend Monday waiting for Friday, January waiting for summer and my entire twenties waiting until I finally feel ready to live the way I actually want to live. I just don’t.

You’re allowed to want more money. You’re allowed to want freedom. You’re allowed to want to live somewhere beautiful, work on something that belongs to you and have a random Wednesday afternoon that doesn’t belong to somebody else’s company. You’re allowed to want a life that maybe sounds a little unrealistic to someone else.

And you really don’t have to apologise for wanting any of it.

Sometimes I think about what the younger version of me would think if she could see my life now. When you’re ambitious, you get used to everything way too quickly. The things you once dreamed about somehow become normal and suddenly all you can see are the things you haven’t done yet. I do this all the time.

But little me wouldn’t care about my next goal.

She’d hear that I started my first proper business at 18, moved to Dubai three months later and kept building things after that. She’d see that I can have some random idea in my head and actually try to make it real.

And I genuinely think little me would find me so fucking cool. l. Although, to be fair, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I mostly just wanted to be a cat mom and have as many cats as possible, which I somehow also managed to pull off hahah.

There are probably so many versions of your life you haven’t met yet. Businesses you haven’t thought of, cities you haven’t lived in, people you haven’t met and things you don’t even know you’re good at yet. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

Maybe the idea sitting in your Notes app becomes nothing. Maybe it makes you €50. Maybe it becomes your first real business. Maybe it leads you to something completely different that you can’t even imagine right now.

You genuinely have no idea and that’s good.

But please don’t be the girl who never finds out because she spent years waiting to feel ready.

Start small. Try things. Change your mind. Be a little delusional about what your life could look like. And most importantly, stay yourself while you do it.

You can pull it off , trust me!

xoxo Melissa