Hi friend! I’m Nabila and I’m many things. I’m a serial career pivoter who built a brand in public and decided to live this wild life on the road. I like talking about being a person who followed all the rules and had so much ambition but no plan. I’ve built up a personal brand by being myself, using my unfair advantages, and living a life thats so uniquely mine.

Upcoming Trips:

Kenya for anyone 30+: Spend 8 days exploring this beautiful African country where you get to go on safari + visit the beautiful beaches that most people skip. Join us this fall.

Morocco Girls Only + Co-Ed: We heard you and you wanted more girls trips so they’re back. This is one of our popular trips and for good reason. Morocco has it all. See you on the girls trip or next years co-ed trip.

Desi Island Bali: our viral singles trip that’s designed to be super social and a trip with friends you don’t know yet. 8 days on the gorgeous island of Bali. We stay in villas and don’t move from city to city. This trip is application only.

Back to the Motherland-Pakistan: a trip near and dear to my heart as it is a trip back home and is deeply healing, transformational, and just so damn beautiful. Join us this October.

Onto the main part…

I’ve spent six years telling you to decenter men. To travel solo. To enjoy your singledom. To make your own money. To take yourself on dates. To go to romantic places alone. To build your own table instead of waiting for a seat at someone else’s.

I meant every word of it. I still do.

Here’s what I wasn’t communicating, in case it came off that way. I never said that that you don’t need anyone. At all. For anything. Ever.

That was never the message. Somewhere along the way, I wonder if it became a takeaway along. Not just with my content but as a generation. We love our independence. As we should. I think it turned into something else, though. So le’ts talk about it.

Decentering men was supposed to mean: stop building your entire life around the pursuit of a relationship. It was never supposed to mean: stop investing in people altogether. Stop needing friends. Stop wanting partnership. Stop being vulnerable. Stop letting anyone in.

We decentered men and then, quietly, without noticing, we decentered everyone. The amount of videos I see of people being friendless, having no friend group, etc makes me sad.

Someone told me recently, “Nabila, maybe you’re harder to date because you talk about not dating or needing to date on your socials.” I sat with that. Then I asked myself: did I ever actually say I don’t want to date? Did I ever say I’m against relationships? Did I ever say I don’t want marriage?

I didn’t. Not once.

I talked about solo travel and it came off as I’m against companionship. I talked about independence and it sounded like I was opposing partnership entirely. The message I was sending and the message being received were two completely different things.

I think this is happening to an entire generation of women right now. We overcorrected. We had to. The question is whether we’re going to recognize it before it costs us something we can’t get back.

independence was never the final destination. it was the requirement.

Let me be clear about why women became independent. It wasn’t a trend. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was survival.

Independence means a woman can afford to choose who she wants to marry instead of doing it as a sacrifice to family for money. It means she can leave when a situation gets dangerous. It means she has options. It means she doesn’t have to rely on anyone and risk being left with nothing.

For South Asian women specifically, independence came from watching our mothers and grandmothers have no exit. Watching them stay in situations they shouldn’t have stayed in because they had no money, no skills, no options. We swore we’d never be in that position. We weren’t wrong to swear that.

Financial independence is a right. The ability to take care of yourself is not a personality flaw. It’s the foundation that makes every other choice in your life genuine instead of desperate.

The problem isn’t that we became independent. The problem is that we made independence the whole personality instead of the starting point.

to the men who hate independent women: have you ever asked why?

If a man is threatened by a woman who can take care of herself, that tells you everything about what he was planning to offer in the relationship. If his value proposition was “I’ll provide for you” and a woman no longer needs provision, he’s not upset about her independence. He’s upset that his leverage disappeared.

The men who are genuinely secure aren’t threatened by independent women. They’re attracted to them. They understand that a woman who chooses to be with you when she doesn’t need to be with you is giving you something far more valuable than dependency. She’s giving you her choice.

If you’re South Asian and a child of immigrants and you don’t understand why the women in your community became fiercely independent, you haven’t been paying attention to what your own mothers went through.

for the righteous ones: don’t forget about Khadijah

I want to speak directly to my Muslim community for a moment.

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid was the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife. She was approximately 40 years old when they married. He was 25. She was 15 years his senior.

She was one of the most successful businesswomen in Mecca. She ran trade caravans across the Arabian Peninsula to Syria, Egypt, and beyond. She was wealthy. She was independent. She was widowed twice before marrying Muhammad. She had established herself as a respected merchant entirely on her own merit.

She hired Muhammad to manage one of her trade caravans. She was impressed by his honesty and character. Some say she proposed (although through a friend).

When Muhammad received his first revelation and came home shaken and uncertain, Khadijah was the first person to comfort him. She was the first human being on earth to accept Islam. She used her wealth and influence to protect the early Muslim community from persecution. The Prophet never took another wife during their 25-year marriage. He identified her as one of the four greatest women of all humanity (Sahih al-Bukhari).

Islam’s most revered woman was independent, wealthy, older than her husband, a businesswoman, and the one who proposed marriage. She used her independence not to isolate herself but to build something that changed the course of human history. Her independence was the foundation but the partnership is the next level.

So when I hear Muslim men criticize independent women, I wonder which version of Islam they’re referencing. It’s certainly not the one Khadijah modeled.

here’s where we overcorrected

I believe everything I just said about independence being a right and a necessity. I also believe we’ve taken it somewhere it was never supposed to go.

We turned “I don’t need anyone” into a badge of honor. We made cutting people off at the first inconvenience a sign of strength. We romanticized solitude so hard that we forgot it was supposed to be a season, not a permanent address.

“Protecting my peace” became code for avoiding anything uncomfortable. Boundaries became barriers. Self-sufficiency became isolation with better branding.

We’re living in a convenience culture now. If anything is inconvenient, we cut it off. A friendship requires effort? Cut it. A relationship requires compromise? Cut it. A conversation gets difficult? Block, mute, unfollow.

We’ve optimized our lives for zero friction and then wondered why everything feels empty.

Here’s what I fundamentally believe: we need companionship. We need friends. We need people who love and care for us. We need to feel loved, seen, and have someone to call when things fall apart. Whether that’s a romantic partnership, a marriage, a deep friendship, or a community is up to you. The specific structure matters less than the presence of people who genuinely care whether you’re okay.

The independence mindset is powerful. It’s also incomplete. “I can do everything alone” is a survival skill, not a life philosophy. Surviving and thriving are different things. Thriving requires people.

what happens when we’re divided

I think about Palestine a lot when I think about community.

The people of Palestine have remained united through the most unimaginable circumstances. A variety of religions standing together. Unwavering faith. They love their land, their home, their culture, and they collectively support each other in a way that most of the modern world has forgotten.

Look at what that unity accomplished. It brought the world together. It inspired people globally to learn about Islam, to study history, to question narratives they’d been fed. Athletes connected their victories to something bigger than sport. Communities formed across continents around shared values. That kind of collective power only exists when people are together.

When we’re independent, alone, and divided, the opposite happens. Our worldview shrinks to whatever bubble we’ve built around ourselves. We’re easier to manipulate, easier to scare, easier to silence. We believe what we surround ourselves with, and when we’ve surrounded ourselves with nobody, we believe whatever the algorithm feeds us.

Our parents’ generation understood this intuitively. The mosque. The dinner parties. The aunties who showed up unannounced. That wasn’t codependency. That was social infrastructure. We dismantled it in the name of independence and replaced it with nothing.

the story that broke me

A young woman was furious about the loud noises from her upstairs neighbor. Banging. Clattering. Thuds at odd hours. She went upstairs to confront whoever was responsible.

The neighbor was an 85-year-old woman with Parkinson’s disease. Living alone. The loud noises were just her trying to do everyday things, cook a meal, get dressed, move through her apartment, with a body that was fighting her at every step. No one to help. No one to check on her. No one to even know she existed.

I sobbed.

This is what the end of the “I don’t need anyone” era looks like if we don’t course-correct. This woman lived her whole life, probably raised kids, probably had a full community at some point, and ended up alone in an apartment where the only person who noticed her was annoyed by her.

More women will be single and childless by choice. That’s a legitimate choice and I respect it completely. The question isn’t whether you have a partner or kids. The question is: when you’re 85 and your body is failing, will anyone care? Will you still have friends? Will you still have community? Will anyone know your name?

what actually matters when the hustle stops

I think about this generation and what happens when we’re older. When the careers slow down. When we’re not posting anymore. When we retire, get sick, can’t do all the hobbies and side quests.

Will AI come check on us? Will our personal brand keep us company?

This isn’t meant to scare you. It’s meant to wake you up. Independence gets you to the table but relationships? They are what keep you fed for the rest of your life.

I’ve been to 80 countries. I’ve been solo for six years. I’ve spent more time alone than most people will in a lifetime. I’ve preached independence, singledom, self-sufficiency.

Here’s what I know from the other side: independence is the starting point, not the finish line. It gives you the freedom to choose. What matters is what you choose to build with that freedom.

I’ve learned to enjoy being alone and building community. That’s why I’ve built Dose of Travel Club the way that I have with thousands of people joining in on the mission.

how to actually rebuild the village (because philosophy without action is just a tweet)

Show up for your people even when it’s inconvenient. Especially when it’s inconvenient. The relationships that last are the ones where both people have been inconvenienced and chosen to stay anyway. That’s not weakness. That’s commitment.

Set boundaries, not barriers. Boundaries tell people how to love you. Barriers tell people not to try. If everyone in your life has been “cut off,” the common denominator isn’t them.

Have the hard conversations instead of disappearing. Ghosting is not a boundary. It’s avoidance. If someone matters to you, tell them what’s wrong.

Don’t let work, optimization culture, or capitalism rob you of the people you love. Cancel the meeting. Skip the networking event. Have dinner with your friend who’s going through something. The deal will still be there tomorrow. The relationship might not.

Allow yourself to be inconvenienced by love. Relationships are inconvenient. That’s the whole point. The convenience of being alone is not the flex we’ve been pretending it is.

Join a community that loves you back. Not a group chat. Not a follower count. Real people who show up, celebrate your wins, sit with you in your losses, and hold you accountable. Shameless plug but that what’s what we’re doing: Dose of Travel Club. Talk about us. Communities are incredibly hard to maintain and even harder when they’re minority founded. Support those in your community.

the balance I’m choosing

My independence is not my whole personality. It never was. It was the tool that gave me the freedom to choose how I live, who I love, and what I build.

What I’m choosing: relationships. Friendships. Community. Marriage when the right person arrives. Pouring into people instead of performing for them. Being inconvenienced by the people I love instead of optimizing them out of my life.

I believe in being independent AND being united. Those aren’t contradictions. Independence gives you the power to choose. Unity gives you something worth choosing.

Khadijah was the most independent woman in 7th century Arabia. She used that independence to build the foundation for one of the most transformative partnerships in human history. Independence wasn’t the opposite of love. It was what made love a genuine choice instead of a survival strategy.

Choose independence. Then choose your people. Then choose to stay, even when it’s hard.

The village our parents had isn’t coming back the way it was. We have to build the new version intentionally. That starts with one decision: being alone was never the goal. It was just the preparation for what comes next.

I’m building a way to connect South Asians globally for travel and social connections. A deep connection and a sense of belonging can change everything… perspective, fulfillment, and it can bring you opportunities.

You were supposed to decenter men. You were never supposed to decenter everyone.

The difference matters. It might be the most important thing we figure out as a generation.

i write about building, identity, dating, and designing a life nobody gave you a blueprint for. free essays weekly. paid essays every other thursday.

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i built dose of travel club because the village wasn’t going to build itself. trips, events, Camp DOTC this summer. See what’s coming up in 2026.

the community app is coming. find your people in your city or abroad.

the brown girl’s guide to traveling the world. Read 60 pages from 10+ years of traveling the world.

This is the guide I wish someone had handed me the first time. Not the “top 10 things to do in Paris” version. The version where you leave feeling like you just lived inside a movie that was written specifically about you.

I’m starting with my absolute favorites, the spots I go back to every single trip. Then the full 5-day itinerary. Then the tips and tricks nobody tells you. Bookmark this. You’ll need it.

MY FAVORITES

☕ cafés

These are my go-to cafés. Some for the coffee. Some for the vibes. All of them are places I’d sit alone for two hours with a book and feel completely at peace.

• Noir Café — the aesthetic is dark, moody, and gorgeous. Great coffee.

• Sevenly Hearts — honestly, the coffee is mid. You go for the photos. The interior is stunning. Get the shot, get the ‘gram, get out.

• Convo — cozy, local energy. A place to actually sit and work or journal.

• Fauna — didn’t get to go but people rave about it. Beautiful space, great drinks, tucked away from the tourist paths.

• Kumquat Café — small, charming, the kind of place you stumble upon.

• Huddle — this is where the cool Parisians go. Cool crowd.

• Niwa — The most gorgeous bakery and cafe, this is what I envision when someone says french bakery.

• Café Nuances — specialty coffee done well. If you’re a coffee snob, this is your spot.

• Ginie — neighborhood gem. Not famous.

• Café Rumi — Arab cafe. Cute space, great pastries, and fun drinks.

• AKA Coffee — excellent espresso. The baristas know what they’re doing. Tucked away in the 14th. Don’t travel for it but its probably the best coffee I’ve had and you can work from there.

• Mamiche — not technically a café, it’s a bakery. Get the vanilla choux. I’m serious. Best bakery in Paris.

  

🛍️ vintage shops

Paris vintage is a whole different level. These aren’t thrift stores. They’re curated collections of pieces you can’t find anywhere else.

• Nuovo

• Chez Snow Bunny

• Dress Drug Dealer

• Bobby

• Bimbo Vintage

• Thank God I’m a VIP (the most iconic vintage shop name in Paris)

• Anything in Le Marais… just walk Rue de Sévigné, Rue des Rosiers, and the side streets around Place des Vosges. You’ll find vintage shops on every block.

Want other guides like this? I spent a month in Sri Lanka and went viral while I was there. It’s the new IT spot and you heard it here first. Grab the guide below.

🛒 shops & designer stores

Where to actually spend your money in Paris (and where to save it).

• La Vallée Village — designer outlet, 40 minutes by train (RER A to Val d’Europe). Gucci, Saint Laurent, Jacquemus, Sandro, Maje, and more at 30-60% off. If you’re buying designer in Paris, do it here. Bring your passport for the VAT refund.

• Le Bon Marché — this is where Parisians actually shop. Not Galeries Lafayette. The fashion curation is impeccable and it feels like a museum.

• Sézane — the quintessential French girl brand. Feminine, effortless, classic. Their Paris flagship is worth visiting even if you don’t buy.

• Soeur — chic, slightly bohemian, very Parisian. One of my favorite French brands.

• Claudie Pierlot — polished French girl energy. Great workwear that doesn’t look corporate.

• Sandro — slightly edgier than Claudie Pierlot. Good leather jackets, structured

• RSVP — concept store with a curated mix of fashion, accessories, and homeware.

• Polène — French leather goods brand that’s become a cult favorite. Beautiful bags at a fraction of luxury prices.

• Louise Carmen — leather goods, notebooks, accessories. Very French, very giftable. Trending on TikTok.

• Le Monge — the best-priced pharmacy in Paris for your French skincare haul. Bioderma, La Roche-Posay, Avène, Caudalie, Nuxe, all cheaper here than at CityPharma and way less crowded.

🍽️ restaurants

Some are fancy. Some are a €15 lunch. All of them are places I’d go back to tomorrow.

• Chez Janou — Le Marais. Go for lunch (cheaper, easier to get a table). Their chocolate mousse is legendary, served from a giant bowl. Don’t skip it.

• Septime — one of the most celebrated restaurants in Paris. You need a reservation weeks in advance. Worth the effort.

• Clamato — from the same team as Septime. Seafood focused. Slightly easier to get into. Just as good.

• Gloria Osteria — Big Mamma group restaurant. Italian, gorgeous interior, massive portions. The wait can be long but the food delivers.

• Le Mary Celeste — cocktails and oysters in Le Marais. One of the coolest spots in the neighborhood.

• Le Petite Marché — classic French bistro. Affordable, unpretentious, delicious. A local spot.

• Specimen Burger — 6th best burger in the world but I wouldn’t say its anything special. I’d say Beaux or Junk are better tbh.

• Kodawari Ramen — yes, ramen in Paris. The interior is designed to look like a Tokyo alleyway. The ramen is genuinely some of the best I’ve had outside of Japan.

• Early June — beautiful brunch spot. Great for a slow morning.

• Le Comptoir Général — not just a restaurant, it’s an experience. A hidden bar/cultural space in a courtyard off Canal Saint-Martin. The kind of place you’d never find without someone telling you about it.

• Dumbo — a good burger spot for a quick bite.

• Gallopin — this is your dinner-to-party spot. Start with a nice meal, end with a party. Historic brasserie energy that transitions into nightlife.

• Derrière — literally means “behind.” Hidden behind a restaurant, through a bookshelf. The interior feels like someone’s apartment. Beds you can sit on. Ping pong table. Secret rooms. The most unique dining experience in Paris.

• Café Charlot — classic Parisian brasserie in Le Marais. Great for people-watching. Order wine and the steak au poivre (super yum) and watch the neighborhood walk by.

  

🍸 bars & nightlife

Paris nightlife doesn’t start until 11pm. Plan accordingly.

• Candelaria — Mexican taqueria in the front, hidden speakeasy cocktail bar in the back. Walk through the unmarked door. Some of the best cocktails in Paris.

• Little Red Door — consistently ranked one of the best cocktail bars in the world. The menu changes seasonally. Every cocktail is a concept. It’s an experience, not just a drink.

• Silencio — It spot.

• Cravan — elegant cocktail bar. Sophisticated, not pretentious. Good for a date night with yourself.

• Bar Joséphine — inside the Hotel Lutetia. Art deco glamour. The most “old Paris” cocktail experience you can have.

• Tiger — good cocktails, fun crowd, not too bougie.

• Le Progrès (Le Marais) — where the locals actually hang out. Grab a table outside. Peak people-watching. This is a “you found real Paris” bar. Nothing fancy at all but consistently good.

• Wanderlust — open-air club on the Seine. Dancing by the water. Summer vibes only.

• L’Arc — near the Champs-Élysées. It is an upscale nightclub. Dress to impress.

• Pachamama — 7 storeys?! Good music, good energy, dancing all night.

• Bisou — cocktail bar with no menu. You tell the bartender what flavors you like and they create something custom. Every drink is a surprise. Very cool concept, kinda like Attaboy.

• Rojo — wine bar in Le Marais. Intimate, warm. Pricier than a glass at a brasserie but the vibe is worth it.

• Le Progrès — if you want drinks at a classic brasserie. Cheap wine, good energy, no pretension.

🗼 whimsical things you must do

• Watch the Eiffel Tower twinkle at night. It sparkles every hour on the hour for 5 minutes starting at sunset. Bring a blanket and a bottle of wine to the Champ de Mars. This is the moment.

• Walk the Seine at sunset. Pont Alexandre III to Pont des Arts. Watch the city turn gold. Costs nothing. Better than any paid experience.

• Picnic at Parc Monceau. Wine, cheese, baguette, a fromagerie on the way. Never crowded. Peak Paris.

• Sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Bring a book. Sit by the fountain. Watch the sailboats. This is what Parisians do on Saturday mornings.

• Visit the Opéra Garnier. Even if you don’t see a show. The building is one of the most beautiful structures in Paris. The grand staircase alone is worth the visit. Self-guided tours available.

• Get lost in Montmartre. No map. No plan. Just walk. Every street has something.

• Café des Deux Moulins. The actual café from Amélie on Rue Lepic in Montmartre. Get a coffee. Take the photo.

• Sit in Place de Vosges. SO whimsical.

• Croissant baking class so you can make pain au chocolates even when you’re home

• Pilates experience in a museum, gallery, or somewhere whimsical.

THE 5-DAY ITINERARY

in this guide, i’m sharing:

• the full 5-day itinerary (day by day, meal by meal, hour by hour)

• how to stay in paris for a month (finding apartments, the hack nobody tells you)

• museum hacks (which ones are free, when, and how to skip the lines)

• you get my Google Maps pins with 149 saved spots (& counting!)

the rest of this guide is for paid subscribers. for the price of a pain au chocolat, you get 5 trips worth of paris knowledge.

✨ why become a paid subscriber? ✨

i write about building an unconventional life with no blueprint. free essays give you the story. paid essays give you the playbook.

paid subscribers get:

• the introverts playbook to networking & having friends all ove the world— how to network where its not transactional and pays off in the long-term.

• the framework on how i make money in 2026 as a founder + creator— the career that allows me to move freely and wake up in a new country whenever i want

• the framework i used to build a 7 figure business that got the industry’s attention — from pharmacist to viral travel club & community.

new paid essays every other thursday. destination guides updated after every trip.

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You didn’t join TikTok to develop a personal brand. You joined because someone sent you a funny video in 2020 when we were all going through collective boredom at home during lockdown for the very first time and you fell into a 3-hour scroll hole watching people dance on app because you couldn’t go dance at the club with your friends.

You didn’t start using social media as a strategy. You started using it as entertainment, a photo diary, or a way to stay connected with friends.

Then something shifted. Gradually. So gradually you didn’t notice it happening.

The platform that was supposed to be a digital photo album started telling you what to want. What to wear. What success looks like. Who’s attractive. What you should eat. How your apartment should look. What kind of life is worth aspiring to. This course you need to buy. Why you should be building a personal brand.

You didn’t sign up for a system that shapes your worldview. You signed up to scroll, see your friends, but what you started to get wasn’t what you signed up for and have we really talked about it? Like, actually.

Welcome to my inner dialogue of loving and hating social media & how it’s changed over the years, taken over our lives, but also how it’s a form of control on us all.

then capitalism entered the chat

At some point, brands (& the government) realized that attention was the most valuable currency on earth. Attention. Social media had all of it.

Influencer marketing went from a novelty to a $43.9 billion industry projected for 2026. Regular people became marketing channels. “Content creator” became a career. The person you followed because they were funny became a billboard for protein powder or Ozempic.

The platform that started as entertainment became a marketplace. The experience of scrolling, which used to feel neutral, became a commercial. Every post a storefront. Every aesthetic a purchasing guide. Every “day in my life” a carefully produced ad for a lifestyle that looks effortless and costs thousands to maintain.

Here’s where it gets you: you didn’t realize you were being marketed to because the marketing looks like a person living their life. That’s the design.

Nobody is immune to this. Not you. Not me. Especially not me.

what you probably don’t realize social media has decided for you

I’ve been creating content for six years. I’ve spent more time inside this machine than most people. Here’s what I’ve watched it do to the people around me and, honestly, to myself:

It decided what you think is attractive. You didn’t arrive at your beauty standards independently. The algorithm showed you what gets likes. You internalized it. Now you think that’s what beautiful looks like. Step outside the US, leave your feed for a month, and watch how quickly those standards dissolve. Not every one in the real world looks like they do on TikTok. I’m sorry. They don’t. Not everyone’s an influencer and they don’t want to be. Not everyone has 32 foundations, 45 lip glosses, and a whole beauty room in their house. People work 9 to 5s and they’re fine. People don’t make a lot of money and they’re content. The version of life on your feed is not the version most humans are living.

It decided what success looks like. Big apartment. Brand trips. Business class. The version of success you chase didn’t come from you. It came from the algorithm, which promotes what generates engagement. Quietly successful people don’t go viral. So you never see them. So you think they don’t exist. I bet you if you ask some people on the internet, they’d opt for a quiet life with high status but low visibility. There will be creator burnout and most of us have experienced it already.

It decided what you buy. Every scroll is a commercial you didn’t ask for. You think you developed your own taste but you haven’t. You’ve seen what the brands want you to see because they work with your favorite influencers by gifting them the jorts ( i do love jorts) and you’ve seen it so many times that its become either trendy or cute to you because you’ve seen it so many times. You developed it inside a machine designed to make you consume. It’s also why some stores pop off and then die out because the next brand has entered the influencer space. Again, hi, i’m guilty of this too. Try going off social media for a month and going in your closet. What do you wear? Can you put an outfit together or do you need a pinterest board to tell you “summer 2026 outfit aesthetic”

It decided how you spend your time. The average person spends 2.5 hours a day on social media. That’s 38 full days per year. Uhm, I actually feel SICK knowing how much time I spend because it is WAY MORE THAN THAT. A month and a half of your life, annually, given to a platform that profits from your attention and returns anxiety or insecurity. deletes Instagram right now

I’m telling you this from the inside. I’ve profited from this system. I’ve built my career inside it. I’m now questioning whether the career I built is building me or consuming me.

what the game actually looks like from the inside

Now let me tell you what it’s like on the other side of the screen. The side that’s creating what you’re consuming.

You have to time your post so the algorithm picks it up. You have to avoid getting shadow banned, which means following invisible rules that change without notice. Like, not being able to post about human rights and injustices. Yeah so fck that. You have to follow the trends but not too late. You need enough story views to signal that you’re active. You need the right visual hook in the first half-second or nobody stops scrolling. You need the right sound effects. You need to be a better editor than you were last month because the production quality bar keeps rising. You need to be brand-friendly so you can actually get paid. You need hooks that stop the scroll pattern. You can’t be too controversial because you’ll attract the wrong audience. You have to show up as “yourself” while being strategic about every single thing you share.

Here’s the truth nobody in this industry will say out loud: nobody is fully authentic on social media. Look at any creator you admire. Look at Nara Smith. Every video looks effortless. Nothing about it is effortless. The “casual” aesthetic is the most calculated one. The outfit was chosen. The lighting was set. The hook was tested. The posting time was optimized. But also, she was never a trad wife because she was working.

That’s not a criticism of her or anyone. She’s brilliant at what she does. It’s an observation about what the game requires versus what it pretends to require. It pretends to require authenticity. It actually requires strategy that performs as authenticity. Those are completely different things.

When I started on social media, I was documenting my life as a diary. I was a pharmacy student who traveled and liked fashion and travel and wanted to share it. The whole thing was genuine because there was no game to play yet. I’d also say back then though I didn’t overshare on the internet. That was too taboo then. No algorithm to optimize for. No engagement rate to maintain. No brand deals to protect.

Now it’s a career. Now there’s a framework, a pattern, a way to win. It’s no longer about just showing up. It’s about showing up in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right content, formatted for exactly the right platform. It’s frustrating when your content doesn’t perform or get views. You start to feel bad, stagnant, or wonder… am i becoming irrelevant? which feels even embarrassing but it’s also your livelihood. On top of that, these platforms know how much money is in it now so they play games with app updates, algorithm changes.

Every single one of those “exactly rights” takes me further from the reason I started posting in the first place. It’s why I hate social media right now and why it left me depleted this year.

the addiction nobody admits

I have 500,000 followers across my platforms. That’s a number I can’t even visualize. I would genuinely pass out if I had to speak in front of a hundred people. I cannot imagine standing in front of 500,000.

But…I’m still hung up on why it’s not a million.

Half a million people from around the world follow my life, engage with my content, trust my recommendations enough to book trips and buy products. That’s more people than live in most cities.

My first thought isn’t gratitude. It’s comparison. “X person has a million. If they can do it, why can’t I? I post more than them. My content is better. I’ve been doing this longer. Why doesn’t the algorithm reward me the same way?”

Then it’s: “I still haven’t worked with that brand. I still haven’t gotten that many deals. I’m not on YouTube yet. I don’t have a podcast. I’m not growing fast enough.”

I know this is irrational. I know 500,000 is more than most people will ever have. I know comparing myself to someone with a million is the same game that someone with 10,000 is playing with me. The ceiling always moves. You never get there because the number is never enough because the game is designed so that behind is the only feeling available.

That’s the matrix. A system designed to keep you running on a treadmill that moves faster than you can, so you never stop and ask: why am I running?

If you’re not a creator, you’re doing the same thing as a consumer. Comparing your life to feeds that were manufactured to make you feel behind. The mechanism is the same. The treadmill is the same. You’re just on the other side of the screen.

when capitalism entered, authenticity left

I want to be honest about my own role in this because I think it matters.

I’m grateful this is my career. Social media gave me a livelihood. It let me quit pharmacy, travel the world, build a company, reach people I never would’ve reached. I check myself on that constantly because the alternative was counting pills behind a counter for 40 years.

I’m also honest enough to say that making money from content changed my relationship with content.

When your income depends on the algorithm, the algorithm becomes your boss. A boss with invisible rules, no HR department, and the ability to tank your revenue overnight with a single update. You stop posting what’s genuine and start posting what performs. You stop sharing what matters and start sharing what converts. The line between “my authentic life” and “my content strategy” gets so blurry that some days I don’t know which one I’m living.

I started a business one year into being a full-time creator because I realized creating content all day, every day wasn’t fulfilling. That’s my honest take. It gets stale fast. It can be a vain, superficial career if that’s all it is. Producing content about your life without building anything underneath it is a hamster wheel with a ring light.

I needed purpose beyond the performance. DOTC is that purpose. It’s community, connection, bringing people together, creating experiences that exist in the real world, not on a feed. The content now serves the mission instead of the mission serving the content. That order matters more than anything I’ve ever learned about marketing.

the most interesting people I’m meeting don’t have social media

I’ve been meeting a lot of people this year and all my years of traveling. Cannes Lions, DOTC events, trips, dinners. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The most interesting people in any room are the ones who aren’t on social media.

They’re doing interesting things. They just don’t document them. They have stories, perspectives, experiences, opinions that are entirely their own because they weren’t shaped by the algorithm. Their taste wasn’t curated by a feed. Their worldview wasn’t formed inside an echo chamber. They’re just living.

When I started posting, it was because my life was interesting and people told me I should talk about it because not everyone lived this way. The irony is that the internet has slowly made me less interesting. Not because I saw cooler people. The internet has a way of stripping your individuality because everyone is fighting for attention in the same way. The subconscious influence of the algorithm makes everyone converge toward the same aesthetics, the same hooks, the same hot takes, the same “authentic vulnerability.”

There are more people making content about living interesting lives than people actually living them. That sentence keeps me up at night because I’m not always sure which side I’m on.

so what do you actually do about this

Whether you’re a creator or a consumer, here’s what I want you to sit with:

Audit what the algorithm has decided for you. Your beauty standards. Your definition of success. Your purchasing habits. Your idea of what an interesting life looks like. How much of that is genuinely yours and how much came from your feed? If you can’t tell the difference, the algorithm has been thinking for you longer than you realize.

Do something interesting that you don’t document. Not for stories. Not for a reel. Not for content. Just for you. When was the last time you did that? If you can’t remember, that’s the clearest sign.

Measure your life by what you’ve built, not by what the algorithm thinks of you. Followers, likes, engagement rates, these are metrics designed by platforms to keep you inside the platform. They don’t measure impact. They measure attention. Those are different things. What have you actually built? Who have you helped? What relationships are real? What exists offline? Those are the metrics that matter.

Invest in offline. Group dinners. Trips. Events. Walking up to a stranger and saying hi. Calling someone instead of DMing them. The friction of real-world connection is where real relationships form. Every friction point that social media removed was also a connection point it eliminated. Add the friction back. Don’t know where to look? Shameless plug but doseoftravelclub.com.

If you’re a creator: remember the diary. Why did you start posting? What was the feeling before it became a strategy? Can you find that version of yourself again? The version that shared something because it was true, not because it would perform?

why I’m still here (and what I’m changing)

I thought about leaving. Deleting the apps. Walking away. Going to live an interesting life without documenting it.

I can’t. Not because I’m addicted. I can’t because I’ve built something real inside it all. DOTC isn’t content. It’s community. 5,000+ people who’ve traveled together, met each other, changed their lives because I created a room for them to walk into. I know you. I meet you in the cafes, restaurants, streets. All around the world.

The content was never the mission. It was the vehicle that built the audience that funded the mission. The mission is connection. Real, in-person, human connection.

So here’s what I’m changing:

I’m stopping the performance and focusing on the substance. Every piece of content either serves the mission or because I wanted to. I don’t care about the views or getting new followers. I’m detaching. I also don’t care to focus on a niche.

I’m building things that work offline. The community app. Desi Island. Group trips. Events. Things that get people off their phones and into rooms together.

I’m measuring success differently. Not follower count. Not engagement rate. How many people showed up? How many came back? How many lives actually changed?

The most radical thing you can do in 2026 isn’t building a bigger brand. It’s remembering who you were before the brand existed and making sure that person is still in there.

She is. You just have to go find her.

DOTC exists because I believe the offline version is better than the feed version. Trips, events, Desi Island.

The community app is coming. Find your people, in your city or abroad. Get on the waitlist: doseoftravelclub.com/community

You know networking matters. Every career book, every business podcast, every LinkedIn guru has told you that your network is your net worth. You believe them. You also physically cannot bring yourself to walk into a room full of strangers, hand out business cards, and make small talk about the weather while secretly hoping someone important notices you.

That’s not a personality flaw. You just have the wrong idea of networking and tbh, that version makes my skin crawl, too.

Most networking advice is designed by extroverts for extroverts. Walk into the room with energy. Work the room. Be memorable. Follow up aggressively. That advice works great if your battery charges from human interaction. If your battery drains from it, that advice is a recipe for exhaustion, avoidance, and eventually just not showing up at all.

Here are five approaches to building real professional relationships that work specifically for people who hate the traditional version.

approach 1: stop networking. start being useful.

The best networkers I’ve met don’t “network.” They help people.

They see someone post about a problem on LinkedIn and they DM a solution. They introduce two people who should know each other without being asked. They share someone’s work with their audience because they genuinely think it’s good. They offer something before they ask for anything.

That’s how I built my first network without even knowing I was doing it. When I was in health tech, I connected people from the pharmacy world with people in the startup world. Not because I had a networking strategy. I just saw two people who could help each other and introduced them. Those introductions built more relationships for me than any conference I’ve ever attended.

The reframe: Networking isn’t “meeting people who can help you.” It’s “being the person who helps other people meet each other.” That shift changes everything because it removes the self-serving energy that makes networking feel gross. You’re not performing. You’re providing.

Try this week: Find one person in your industry who posted about a problem you can solve. DM them with the solution. No pitch. No ask. Just value. That’s a relationship seed. Water it.

approach 2: go where the activity is, not where the networking is.

Traditional networking events (mixers, happy hours, “networking breakfasts”) are designed for extroverts who thrive on cold conversation. If that’s not you, stop forcing yourself into formats that drain you.

Instead, go where people are doing something together.

A workshop where everyone is learning the same skill. A volunteer project where you’re working side by side. A fitness class. A cooking event. A hackathon. A group trip. Any environment where the activity is the focus and the connection is the byproduct.

You know we got you covered in the group trip + event department. Join us.

The best relationships I’ve built in four years of running DOTC all started this way. Two strangers on a group trip in Morocco bonding over a shared love of photography. Someone on Desi Island meeting their future business partner during a pool party. Me at Cannes Lions in the South of France and meeting at one influencer event and then meeting up again in Paris. Meeting a friend in South Africa who works in film + photography and since I’m a creator, we hit it off. I met him in Dubai, London, and France for conferences. People connecting not because they “networked” but because they did something together and the conversation happened naturally.

At Cannes Lions, the best conversations didn’t happen at the panels or the official networking events. They happened between events. Walking from one activation to the next. Standing in line. Getting B12 shots at the Ciroc Athletic Club. The shared activity (surviving the heat, navigating the chaos, being a firs timer, working in marketing) created the connection.

The reframe: You don’t need to be good at small talk. You need to be in environments where small talk isn’t required. When people are doing something together, the conversation takes care of itself.

Try this week: Find one event in your city that’s activity-based, not networking-based. A class, a volunteer day, a workshop. Go alone. The connections will happen without you having to force them.

That’s why I’m building an app that connects people together. Not networking, not dating. It connects people based on their cultural roots and travel/being global as the shared interest. South Asians connecting with the diaspora all over the world to stay connected to their roots and find people in their city or wherever they’re traveling to. Get on the waitlist now to get early access!

approach 3: go deep with 5 people instead of wide with 50.

Extroverts collect contacts. Introverts build relationships. Both are valid. Only one compounds.

Most people leave a networking event with 20 business cards and follow up with zero of them. That’s not networking. It also doesn’t really work.

What actually builds your career over time is having 5-10 relationships where the other person genuinely knows you, trusts you, and thinks of you when an opportunity arises. That requires depth, not breadth. Depth is the introvert’s superpower.

After Cannes Lions, I didn’t follow up with 200 people. I followed up meaningfully with about 15. Specific messages referencing specific conversations. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about X.” “I’d love to continue the conversation we started about Y.” Those 15 relationships will be worth more over the next year than 200 LinkedIn connections ever could.

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Hi! I’m Nabila and I’m many things. I’m a serial career pivoter who built a brand in public and decided to live this wild life on the road. I like talking about being a person who followed all the rules and had so much ambition but no plan. I’ve built up a personal brand by being myself, using my unfair advantages, and living a life thats so uniquely mi…

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Hi! I’m Nabila and I built a 7 figure business from ambition, being lost, and on my phone. I used to be a pharmacist… I spent more time studying it than working as one. I pivoted careers 5 times to get where I am today.

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Your parents told you to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer because they needed you to be safe. They came from scarcity. They immigrated so you wouldn’t have to struggle. They picked careers with guaranteed income because guaranteed income was the most radical act of love they knew how to give.

They were right for their generation. They’re wrong for yours.

The economy your parents prepared you for no longer exists. Stability doesn’t come from a single job title anymore. It comes from being adaptable, visible, and valuable across multiple domains. The safest career in 2026 isn’t the one with the best benefits package. It’s the one where you’ve built skills that transfer regardless of what industry gets disrupted next.

This essay is for the ambitious, smart person who followed the plan, got the degree, landed the job, and wakes up every morning knowing they’re capable of more but terrified of what happens if they leave.

Here’s how to evaluate whether the safe path is actually costing you more than it’s protecting you.

the hidden cost of “safe” that nobody talks about

The safe career actually has a price tag. It can run quite high but it’s not necessarily high on the “invoice.”

It costs you your curiosity. When you spend 8-10 hours a day in a role that doesn’t challenge you creatively, your brain starts to shut down the part that asks “what else could I do?” That’s not burnout…that’s atrophy. The longer you stay, the less capable you feel of leaving. The muscle for risk just weakens from disuse (it’s happening to me again now and happens more as you age it seems).

It costs you your network. Your professional circle narrows to the people in your industry. You stop meeting people from different fields, different backgrounds, different levels of ambition. Your reference point for what’s possible shrinks to the room you’re in every day.

It costs you your time. The average American changes jobs 12 times in their career (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The median tenure at a job is 3.9 years. If you’re going to pivot eventually anyway, every year you delay is a year of skill-building you’re losing in the thing you actually want to do.

It costs you your identity. “What do you do?” becomes who you are. Your career becomes your entire personality. When someone asks what you’re passionate about and the only answer is your job title, that’s not stability. That’s an identity crisis disguised as a paycheck.

how to know if you’ve outgrown your career (a framework)

This isn’t about impulsively quitting. It’s about honestly evaluating. Ask yourself these five questions:

1. Are you learning or are you performing?

In the first 1-2 years of any role, you’re learning. New skills, new people, new challenges but after that, most roles shift from learning to performing. You know how to do the job. You’re executing, not growing. If you haven’t learned something genuinely new in over a year, the role has given you what it’s going to give you. Point blank.

2. Do you admire anyone on the path ahead of you?

Look at the people who are 5-10 years ahead of you in this career. Do you want their life? Not their salary. Their actual daily life. If the answer is no, the path doesn’t get better. It gets more of the same, at a higher pay grade.

3. If you had zero financial pressure, would you still be here?

This question strips away the golden handcuffs. The benefits, the 401k, the PTO, the healthcare. Those things are real and they matter. They’re also the most common reason people stay in careers that make them miserable. If the only reason you’re staying is the paycheck, that’s information. It’s called golden handcuffs for a reason.

4. Are you building transferable skills or institutional knowledge?

Transferable skills (writing, strategy, management, sales, marketing, operations) go with you everywhere. Institutional knowledge (how this specific company does this specific thing) stays when you leave. If most of what you’ve built is institutional, you’re more trapped than you think.

5. Does the thought of being here in 3 years make you feel secure or stuck?

Security and being stuck feel similar. They’re both predictable. The difference is that security feels like a choice but being stuck feels like a sentence. Be honest about which one you’re feeling.

If you answered honestly and 3 or more of these are pointing toward “go,” the safe career is costing you more than it’s protecting you.

the pivot isn’t as risky as you think (here’s the math)

The risk of leaving a stable career feels enormous because the downside is tangible. You can calculate exactly how much money you’d lose. The upside is abstract. You can’t calculate what you’d gain because you haven’t done it yet.

Here’s what the data actually says:

The average American works 40+ years. If you’re 28 and you pivot now, you have 35+ years of career ahead of you. The “lost” income from 1-2 years of transition is less than 5% of your lifetime earning potential. The skills you build in those transition years compound for the other 95%. This is how I made sense of my first career pivot.

59% of US professionals were actively looking for new work in 2024. You’re not the outlier for wanting to leave. You’re the norm. The outlier is the person who stays in the same role for 30 years and doesn’t feel trapped.

The creator economy alone is projected to hit $43.9 billion in ad spend by 2026. Personal brands are generating six and seven figures for people who started with nothing but a phone and a perspective. The barriers to building something of your own have never been lower. The ceiling is limitless.

Have you already made a pivot and you’re in the growth phase? If you’re looking for more direction and someone to hold you accountable, I do accountability and mentorship calls. Email nabila@doseoftravelclub.com and my team will get more over to you.

The risk isn’t leaving. The risk is staying in a career that slowly erodes your confidence, your curiosity, and your belief that you’re capable of more.

what to build before you quit (the non-reckless pivot plan)

Pivoting doesn’t mean quitting tomorrow. It means building the bridge while you’re still on solid ground.

Step 1: Build your personal brand while you still have a salary. Start posting on LinkedIn or Instagram about what you know, what you’re learning, what you think. You don’t need to be “an influencer.” You need to be visible. Visibility creates options. Options create exits. I wrote a beginner guide if you feel like you’ve been surrounded by people who would never build a personal brand and think you can’t either.

Step 2: Create one digital product. A guide, an ebook, a template, a workshop. Something that proves people will pay for what you know. Price it at $15-$50. Sell it to your existing network. That first sale rewires your brain from “I’m an employee” to “I’m someone who can generate income independently.”

Step 3: Build an email list. Even 100 emails. Start a free newsletter about your area of expertise. Those 100 people are your safety net. They’re the audience that follows you wherever you go next.

Step 4: Set a financial runway. Save 6 months of expenses before you make the jump. You won’t need all of it but knowing it’s there removes the panic that makes people take bad deals, accept low rates, and compromise on what they’re building.

Step 5: Make the decision before you’re ready. You will never feel ready. The gap between “I want to leave” and “I’m ready to leave” never fully closes. At some point, you have to trust the preparation and go.

I quit pharmacy without feeling ready. I left health tech without feeling ready. I started DOTC without feeling ready. Every single pivot felt premature from the inside. Every single one was overdue from the outside.

the career that makes you rich in 2026

It’s not the one with the highest starting salary. It’s the one that builds skills which compound, gives you optionality, and makes you impossible to replace with a tool.

The careers that are AI-proof aren’t the ones that require the most technical skill. They’re the ones that require the most human skill. Trust-building. Storytelling. Community creation. Taste. Cultural fluency. The ability to make someone feel something. The ability to bring people together. The ability to see a gap in the world and build something to fill it.

Those skills don’t show up on a resume. They show up in what you build, who trusts you, and what people are willing to pay for because of that trust.

Your parents wanted you safe. You can honor that and still build something they never imagined. The safe career got you here. The career you build next gets you where you actually want to go.

The pivot isn’t a rejection of what they gave you. It’s the best possible use of it.

This is the kind of essay I write on my free Substack every week. The paid tier goes deeper: business frameworks with real numbers, tactical playbooks, and the stuff too specific for a free post. $7/month.

I need to say something I haven’t said clearly enough: none of that was ever meant to be the final stop or a declaration of the right way to live.

Independence was supposed to be a chapter and it is. One I’m proud of. However, we turned it into the whole book. We romanticized solitude so hard that we forgot it was supposed to be temporary. A season of figuring yourself out before building with other people. Instead, we made it a personality trait. We made “protecting my peace” code for “I stopped trying.” We made boundaries the entire structure instead of the foundation.

I’m watching my generation sleepwalk into a loneliness crisis while posting about how unbothered they are. I’m watching people confuse isolation with empowerment. I’m watching careers become entire identities and “I don’t need anyone” become something we’re proud of instead of something we should be concerned about.

I’m afraid we’re losing the plot. This essay is about why, and what I’m doing about it for myself and for anyone who cares.

the numbers should terrify us

1 in 6 people worldwide experiences persistent loneliness (WHO, 2025). The crisis is linked to approximately 870,000 deaths per year globally. That’s roughly 100 deaths every hour attributed to disconnection. The health impact of loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (US Surgeon General).

41% of US adults report feeling lonely. Gen Z is the loneliest generation at 67%, followed by millennials at 65% (Cigna/Evernorth, 2025). 17% of Americans report having zero close friends. In 1990, that number was 3%.

Read that again. We went from 3% of people having no close friends to 17% in one generation. Uh, thats more than just a few people. That means structurally and systematically theres been a change.

Loneliness costs the US economy $406 billion annually in absenteeism, healthcare, and lost productivity. Companies are literally losing money because their employees don’t have friends.

We built an entire economy optimized for individual productivity and consumption. We designed cities around cars instead of people. We replaced front porches with garages. We moved away from family for jobs. We traded group dinners for DoorDash. We swapped the village for the feed.

Then we wondered why everyone feels empty. Nothing like being reminded of this when living somehwere else. Greetings from Paris where they hate to work, they have third spaces, they have balconies & terraces, and love a good reason to celebrate, party, or drink.

Ready to escape the US and experience a new culture? Good news. We’ve got a few spots left on our trip to Morocco, Japan, and Kenya. Book your spot now.

we need to stop romanticizing being alone

I say this as someone who has been single for five years and has genuinely enjoyed it. I say this as someone who has posted about the beauty of solitude, the power of independence, the freedom of not needing anyone.

I meant all of it when I said it. I’m not taking it back. I also think we’ve taken it too far.

There’s a difference between choosing solitude for a season and building your entire identity around not needing people. There’s a difference between having boundaries and using boundaries as a wall that keeps everyone out. There’s a difference between protecting your peace and being so protected that nothing and nobody can reach you.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating relationships as liabilities instead of assets. Friendships are “draining.” Dating is “exhausting.” Family is “toxic.” Community is “too much work.”

We’re not better off alone. We just got used to it. We mistook numbness for peace. We mistook isolation for independence. We mistook the absence of conflict for the presence of happiness.

Our parents weren’t weak because they needed their village. They were wise. They understood something we’ve forgotten: humans are not designed to do this alone. Not careers. Not parenting. Not aging. Not grief. Not joy. None of it.

The most fulfilling parts of my life, every single one, involve other people. DOTC trips where strangers become family. Dinners where someone says something that changes how I see myself. Phone calls at midnight with a friend who actually knows me. Those aren’t luxuries. That is the whole point!!!!

capitalism ruined more than the economy

I’m going to say something that might sound dramatic. I think capitalism has systematically dismantled every structure that used to keep us connected.

Data centers are draining water from communities that need it. Social media replaced real relationships with parasocial ones. The gig economy made stability a privilege. Private equity bought up the places where community used to happen: local gyms, neighborhood restaurants, community centers, churches. Everything has been optimized for extraction. Very little has been built for connection.

Our careers became our entire personality because the economy demands it. “What do you do?” is the first question at every dinner party because your economic output is how America measures your worth. We don’t ask “who do you love?” or “what lights up your soul?” or “who would you call at 3am?” We ask what you do for money.

We stopped having kids because we can’t afford them. We moved back in with our parents because housing is impossible. We’re watching our politicians move us backward while we’re too exhausted from our jobs to do anything about it. Everything is private equity. Everything is a subscription. Everything costs more and delivers less.

In the middle of all of this, we decided that the solution was to need less. To want less. To expect less from other people. To “protect our peace” by eliminating the very relationships that would give us actual peace.

That’s not empowerment.

i come from a culture that was built on community

My parents are Pakistani immigrants. They came to the US with nothing and built a life inside a village they created from scratch. The aunties who brought food when someone was sick. The uncles who helped each other find jobs. The mosque where everyone gathered on Fridays. The dinner parties where 40 people showed up and nobody RSVP’d because showing up was the norm.

That village wasn’t perfect. It had gossip. It had judgment. It had the suffocating surveillance that comes with everyone knowing your business. I’ve written about running from parts of it.

Here’s what I didn’t appreciate until I’d been living without it for six years: the village worked. People were not lonely. People were not isolated. People were not performing independence as a personality trait because they had people. Real ones. In their home. Every week.

I’ve now traveled to 80+ countries. I’ve lived in New York, Dubai, Bali, Houston. I’ve built a career that lets me be anywhere in the world at any time. I have more freedom than my parents ever imagined having.

I also have fewer consistent relationships than they had at my age. I wouldn’t consider that a flex.

The irony of my life is that I’ve gained the world and thinned the village. I don’t want that to be the final trade. I want both. I think we can have both. I think we have to.

what i’ve learned from bringing 10,000+ people together

I’ve been running Dose of Travel Club for 4 years. I’ve taken 5,000+ people on trips and hosted events across four continents. I’ve watched what happens when you put people in a room who share a cultural identity and give them permission to just be themselves.

They exhale.

That’s literally what happens. You can see it. The shoulders drop. The performance stops. The “where are you from, no where are you REALLY from” conversation doesn’t need to happen because everyone already knows.

The woman who hasn’t made a single friend since moving to a new city eight months ago? She comes to one dinner and leaves with five numbers in her phone.

The girl who’s been traveling solo for a year and loves it but is quietly lonely? She comes on one trip and realizes she’s been craving something she didn’t want to admit she needed.

The guy who moved to Dubai for work and doesn’t know anyone who understands why he feels guilty about not visiting his parents more? He shows up to one event and meets ten people living the exact same tension.

That’s what community does. It doesn’t fix your life. It reminds you that you’re not the only one living it. That reminder is worth more than any self-help book, any therapy session, any algorithm-optimized wellness app.

The problem is I can’t be in every city. I can’t host dinners every week. I can’t personally introduce every person in my DMs to every other person who’s looking for the same thing.

I get messages every single day. “I’m in London, do you know anyone?” “I just moved to Dubai, I need friends.” “I’m in Bali alone, is anyone else here?” 500,000 people across my platforms, all wanting the same thing: someone who gets it, in their city, right now.

I’ve been the bottleneck for six years. I’ve been the human switchboard manually connecting people across time zones, cities, and continents. That can’t scale. It shouldn’t have to.

so i’m building the village

The DOTC community app is the infrastructure that replaces me as the bottleneck and lets you find each other directly.

You set your city. You see who’s there. Someone posts “anyone want to go to the Diljit Dosanjh concert Friday?” Three people respond. You go together. You meet in person. Maybe you become friends. Maybe you just had a great night. Either way, you weren’t alone.

You’re traveling to London next month. You switch your city. You post “visiting for a week, anyone want to grab dinner?” Locals respond. You have plans before your flight lands.

DOTC trips, events, Camp DOTC, all of it lives in the app. Book directly. See who else is going. Get early access now.

The app is specifically for South Asians because the cultural shorthand matters. You don’t have to explain why you don’t drink. You don’t have to explain the family guilt. You don’t have to explain why you’re 31 and single and your mom calls every week asking about it. The shorthand is the product. The shared identity is why it works.

30+ million South Asians in the diaspora. We come from a culture literally built on community. There is not a single app designed to help us find each other and actually do things together. That’s insane to me. So I’m fixing it.

The goal is simple: get people together and then get them off the app. This isn’t another platform designed to keep you scrolling. We’re not building another Tinder or Hinge. No algorithms. No upsell to get you access to good people. It’s a bridge to real life. Find the person, make the plan, put the phone down, show up. I’m using tech to connect people around the world for those who already see the benefit of having a village, seeing the world, and believe in relationships.

Our parents’ village happened by default because everyone lived on the same street. Our village has to be intentional because we’re scattered across the world. The app makes the intention easy.

→ Join the waitlist. The first 1,000 people shape the entire community.

We’ve just launched beta and it’s so exciting! If you want to be a beta tester, email info@doseoftravelclub.com why we would let you test this community app early and have you as one of our first users.

the plot we need to recover

We are not better off alone. We are better having boundaries, decentering our worth, and having self respect. Some of us were just hurt, so we built walls and called them boundaries. We were exhausted, so we stopped trying and called it peace. We were scared of being vulnerable, so we performed independence and called it strength.

Our parents weren’t weak for needing their village. They were right.

The solution isn’t going backward. I don’t want the version of community that came with surveillance and judgment and control. I want a new version. One that respects the individual while protecting the collective. One where you can be a pharmacist who quit to build a travel company and still have a dinner table full of people who love you. One where you can be divorced and have a crew of people who support you for leaving a toxic relationship rather than snicker behind your back. One where independence and belonging aren’t opposites.

That’s what I’m building. Not just an app. A culture shift. A reminder that the most radical thing you can do in 2026 is invest in the people around you.

Capitalism took the village. I want it back. I think you do too.

I write about building, identity, and designing a life nobody gave me a blueprint for on my Substack. Free essays weekly. Paid essays with business frameworks, dating confessionals, and tactical breakdowns every Thursday.

upgrade to paid!

DOTC trips and events that don’t require you to be in the app just yet. We’ve got spots for our Morocco, Japan, and Kenya trip left.

The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World

Ready to build your Personal Brand? This is a beginner guide. If you’ve already got one but feel stuck, haven’t monetized, watch this space because I have a new offer coming.

Sources:

• WHO Commission on Social Connection (June 2025): 1 in 6 people experience persistent loneliness. 870,000 deaths/year linked to disconnection.

• US Surgeon General Advisory (2023): Loneliness equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes/day.

• CDC (2024): 41% of US adults report feeling lonely.

• Cigna/Evernorth (2025): Gen Z loneliness 67%, Millennial 65%.

• Gallup: Zero close friends rose from 3% (1990) to 17% (2024).

• Fortune (March 2026): Loneliness costs the US economy $406 billion annually.

I said “I’m a creator and I work for myself.”

They nodded politely. The conversation moved on.

Later that night, someone else asked the same question. This time, for whatever reason, I actually answered it. I told them I run a global travel and lifestyle company for South Asians. That I’ve taken 5,000+ people on group trips across four continents. That I have 270K followers and I built it solo with no team, no investors, no blueprint. That I’m launching a community app. That I’m hosting the largest South Asian adult summer camp in the US and singles trip in Bali. That I run a paid newsletter, sell digital products, and am building a media company from my phone.

They stared at me. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”

I didn’t have an answer. I’ve been thinking about it every day since.

i’ve been doing new things while introducing myself as the old version

Here’s what I realized. I’ve been building a completely new life for the past two years. New business verticals. New revenue streams. New rooms. New ambitions. New capabilities. I am genuinely not the same person I was even 18 months ago.

I’ve been narrating all of it through my old identity.

I kept calling myself a travel creator even though I haven’t been creating traditional travel content in months. I kept talking about being lost and starting over even though I’ve already started and already built something substantial. I kept referencing my pharmacy career as context for why I’m impressive, as if what I’ve built since then isn’t impressive enough on its own.

I was doing the new things while anchoring them to the old story. Every time I spoke about my business, I started with the humble version. “I’m a creator.” “I work for myself.” “I run a travel page.” All technically true. All dramatically underselling what I’ve actually built.

The result: I was attracting people who related to the old story. People who are lost. People who are still figuring it out. People who haven’t taken action yet. Not because there’s anything wrong with being in that phase. I’ve been there. I’ve written essays from that place. Those essays resonated because I was genuinely in it.

I’m not in it anymore. I just kept talking like I was and so I keep seeing myself as that.

the old identity was comfortable. that’s why I kept wearing it.

The old Nabila was relatable. She was the girl who quit pharmacy and didn’t know what was next. The girl who was figuring it out. The girl who traveled solo and was still finding herself. The girl who talked about being single and confused about dating and unsure about her career.

That version of me was easy to be because she was safe. Nobody feels threatened by someone who’s still figuring it out. Nobody judges you for being humble. Nobody calls you arrogant when you lead with your struggle instead of your success.

The new Nabila is a founder who runs multiple businesses. She’s a creator CEO. Her personal brand is one business. Dose of Travel Club is another. The community app is a third. She’s built something that major travel companies have used in their competitive analysis. CMOs at companies know her name. She’s been recognized on subways in New York, in cafés in Pakistan, on streets in Dubai, in random coffee shops in Paris. (STILL INSANE TO ME!).

Leading with that version felt egotistical. So I didn’t. I kept leading with the pharmacy story, the struggle story, the “I’m still figuring it out” story. I made myself small because small felt safe. Small felt humble. Small felt like it wouldn’t invite judgment.

Here’s what small actually invited: people who wanted to stay small with me.

the moments where I caught it

People have been telling me this for months. I just wasn’t hearing it.

“You’re a founder. Why do you keep calling yourself a creator?”

“You’ve taken 5,000 people on trips. Why do you say that like it’s casual?”

“You’ve been featured, recognized, invited to rooms that most people don’t know exist. Why do you bury that?”

At Cannes, it hit differently. I was sitting across from founders and executives who I thought were levels above me. People who move tens of millions of dollars. People who’ve built companies I admire.

They asked me about DOTC. I told them the real version. Not the humble version. The real one.

Their response wasn’t “cool.” It was “wait, you did that by yourself? How? I want to learn more.”

People I found impressive found me equally impressive. The only person who didn’t find me impressive was me.

That’s the sentence that broke the pattern expedititiously. If you don’t find yourself impressive, nobody else gets the chance to.

what I was actually doing wrong (and you might be too)

Let me be specific about the mechanics of this because I think a lot of ambitious people are stuck in the same trap.

I was doing the right things and narrating them wrong. I was closing brand deals, hosting events in multiple countries, growing a paid newsletter, building an app, selling out trips. Then I’d get on Instagram and talk about how hard it is and how I’m still figuring it out. The actions were new. The story was old. The audience believed the story, not the actions.

I was comparing myself to people who are doing the same things I’m doing. I’d see another founder and think “they’re so much further ahead.” Then I’d look at the actual numbers and realize we’re at the same level. Sometimes I’m ahead. The comparison wasn’t based on data. It was based on how confidently they talked about their work versus how I talked about mine.

I was inviting my old audience by speaking their language. When you talk about being lost, you attract people who are lost. When you talk about rejection and fear, you attract people sitting in rejection and fear. When you talk about starting over, you attract people who haven’t started yet. None of that is wrong. It served me when I was genuinely in that place. I’m not there anymore. The language needed to catch up to the life.

I was trivializing the hard stuff. Moving to a new country alone? Hard. Leaving a pharmacy career to build something from scratch? Hard. Being South Asian, Muslim, a woman, building in spaces that weren’t designed for any of those identities? Hard. Taking 5,000 strangers on group trips across four continents with no team? Incredibly hard. I kept glossing over all of it like it was normal. It’s not normal. The old Nabila just did it without thinking twice. The new Nabila needs to acknowledge that what she did required courage, skill, and relentless execution, and stop acting like anyone could’ve done it.

the new identity (a declaration)

I’m writing this section as a line in the sand. For myself and for anyone reading this who needs permission to stop shrinking.

I am a founder. I run three businesses. My personal brand, Dose of Travel Club, and a community app launching this year. I built all of it from scratch with no co-founder, no investors, no family money, no team, and no blueprint.

I’ve taken 5,000+ people on trips and hosted events across four continents. I’ve built a community of 500K people who trust me enough to show up in a new country with strangers because I told them it would be worth it. It always is.

I’m a creator CEO. I create the content, run the operations, close the deals, manage the logistics, write the essays, film the reels, build the automations, and make the decisions. All of it. From my phone. With $200/month in AI tools.

I’ve been recognized in New York, Dubai, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Paris. Not because I chased fame. I genuinely don’t want fame…I want impact. The recognition means something I built actually reached people. That’s not ego. That’s evidence. Its going to get easier saying this out loud.

I wear designer clothes because I like them and I’ve earned them. I care about how I show up because how you show up signals how seriously you take yourself. I’m done apologizing for looking good while building something great.

I surround myself with people who are down-to-earth, humble, kind, curious, and ambitious. People who want more for themselves and aren’t afraid to go get it. People who respect each other and show up with zero ego. That’s the community I built with DOTC. That’s the community I’m protecting.

I don’t engage with victim mindset. I have deep empathy for people who are struggling. I’ve been there. I’ve written from that place. I also know that staying in that place is a choice, and the people I want around me now are the ones who’ve already decided to move.

If you’re looking for a change or going through one, most people who book a DOTC trip are too and they find it super helpful to find a different version of themselves. Join us!

the shift that changes everything

When you build from a place of feeling small, scarce, insecure, guilty, fearful, you attract exactly that energy. You attract people who want to commiserate, not collaborate. You attract opportunities that match the story you’re telling, which is smaller than the life you’re actually living.

When you build from a place of acknowledging what you’ve done, owning what you’re capable of, and speaking about your work with the same confidence you used to actually build it, everything shifts.

The rooms change.

The people change.

The opportunities change.

The conversations change.

I’m not talking about being arrogant. Arrogance is pretending you’re something you’re not. but confidence? Confidence is accurately describing what you are.

I’ve been inaccurately describing myself for two years. Underselling. Shrinking. Leading with the struggle instead of the substance and that ends now.

if you’re doing this too

Check yourself on these:

When someone asks what you do, do you give the impressive version or the safe version?

When you talk about your work publicly, do you lead with what you’ve built or with how hard it was?

When you’re in a room with people you admire, do you assume they’re ahead of you without checking the actual evidence?

When you post content, are you narrating from where you are now or from where you were a year ago?

When you introduce yourself, does the introduction match the reality, or does it match the version that feels less threatening to say out loud?

If there’s a gap between what you’ve built and how you talk about it, that gap is your ceiling. It’s not your skills, your network, your resources but your narrative.

Update the narrative. The rest will follow.

I write about building, identity, and designing a life nobody gave me a blueprint for on my Substack. Free essays weekly. Paid essays every Thursday with business frameworks, dating confessionals, and the tactical stuff. $7/month.

upgrade to paid!

I’m running a personal brand workshop for women who are ready to step into the new version. How to position yourself. How to pitch. How to stop shrinking. 2 hours. 30 mins Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. [Link to workshop]

Dose of Travel Club is for people who’ve already decided they deserve to live and do more. Trips, events, and Desi Island Come find your people and make memories.

Find your friends and your people with the new app dropping soon. Get on the waitlist to get best pricing when it drops!

The creator economy is at an inflection point. AI can now generate content, write captions, edit videos, produce music, design graphics, and create entire campaigns without a human being involved. The technical barrier to creating content has collapsed to zero.

So what’s left?

Trust. Identity. The thing that happens when a human being stands for something and an audience decides to stand with them.

AI can write a perfect caption. It cannot build the trust that makes someone book a $3,000 trip with a stranger because they’ve been following her for three years and believe in what she’s building.

AI can generate a stunning visual campaign. It cannot make 45,000 people cry in a stadium because the person on stage has spent a decade proving, through every decision and every refusal to compromise, that he means what he says.

AI can optimize engagement rates. It cannot create the feeling I had standing in that Paris stadium watching people wave flags from their home countries while singing lyrics in a language half the audience doesn’t speak. That’s belonging. You can’t automate belonging.

the creators who will win are the ones who can’t be faked

I’ve been in the creator economy for six years. I’ve watched trends come and go. I’ve watched creators blow up overnight and disappear just as fast. I’ve watched people chase algorithms, change their content every month, and slowly erode the trust they spent years building.

The creators who are going to succeed over the next decade are the ones who are ten toes down on who they are and what they stand for.

That means being willing to lose followers by taking a position. It means refusing to change your content just because the algorithm shifted. It means standing for something specific enough that the wrong audience self-selects out.

Bad Bunny could have crossed over into English-language pop and tripled his mainstream audience. He didn’t. He locked in on Spanish, only Spanish (not a single word of English at his 3 hour concert), he locked in on Puerto Rico and his identity. He stayed himself. That decision cost him the casual American pop listener. It earned him 600,000 people flying to his island to see him on his home turf.

He wasn’t for everyone and may not be for everyone, but I mean… he did the halftime show at the Super Bowl. The refusal to dilute is the differentiator.

humility, honesty, and the ability to apologize are competitive advantages

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about since Cannes Lions.

There’s too much riding on creators right now. The ad spend flowing into the creator economy reached $37 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $43.9 billion in 2026. That’s real money. Real pressure. Real consequences when someone gets it wrong.

The creators who survive this pressure are not the ones who never make mistakes. They’re the ones who can apologize, be honest, and show up as a human when the internet demands perfection.

Humility is a competitive advantage. The ability to say “I got that wrong” in an era where most public figures double down on every mistake is rare and magnetic. People trust the person who admits fault more than the person who never acknowledges it. That’s not a weakness even when they try to make that one. That’s the kind of trust that turns followers into a community.

I think about this constantly in how I run DOTC. I’ve made mistakes publicly. I’ve over-committed, things didn’t go according to plan, I’ve gotten logistics wrong on trips. Every time, the choice was: perform perfection or be honest. Being honest has kept my community loyal through every single stumble. They don’t expect me to be flawless. They expect me to be real. That expectation is the foundation of everything I’ve built.

cultural movements are the highest form of brand building

Let me connect the Bad Bunny case study to what I see happening across the creator economy more broadly.

The most powerful creators are not building content brands. They’re building cultural movements.

Bad Bunny built a movement around Puerto Rican identity and pride. His concerts aren’t just entertainment. They’re cultural rallies. People show up to be part of something bigger than themselves. They show up to belong. I’m not even Latina and I was EMOTIONAL THE WHOLE TIME. It was beautiful.

I’m building something similar on a different scale. DOTC isn’t a travel company. It’s a cultural movement for South Asians living unconventionally. When women come on a DOTC trip, they’re not just traveling. They’re walking into a room that says “you’re not the only desi girl doing this.” That feeling of being seen, of belonging, of shared cultural identity, that’s not something a content calendar creates. It’s something trust creates over years. I told you I was in it for the long game and ugh, sometimes it really is hard to have patience.

At the Paris concert, I watched people bring flags, sing in alignment, engage with social causes, and feel connected to complete strangers through shared identity. 45,000 people who agreed on certain values showed up in the same place. You can’t come to a Bad Bunny concert and not appreciate language, culture, and diversity.

I watched it and thought: this is what I’m building. On a smaller scale, in a different community, with a different cultural lens. The mechanics are the same. Build trust. Stay true to your identity. Refuse to dilute for mass appeal. Let the right people find you. Give them something to belong to.

That’s not a content strategy, that’s a movement. Movements outlast algorithms.

what brands should be paying attention to

I think the marketing and advertising industry needs to hear this.

The most valuable creators are not the ones with the biggest following. They’re the ones whose audience trusts them enough to act.

Trust drives action. Followers drive impressions. Those are fundamentally different currencies. A creator with 50K followers and deep community trust will outperform a creator with 500K followers and shallow engagement on every meaningful metric: conversion rate, return on ad spend, brand sentiment, customer lifetime value.

The creators who build cultural movements, who stand for something specific, who have audiences that share an identity, those creators deliver disproportionate ROI because their audience isn’t just watching…they’re participating. Guess what? The engagement might not even look the same. Videos could have lower engagement but look at conversion. In my case, I’ve got a community that shows up to my events IRL. Sometimes, I get people showing up to events but they don’t follow me and haven’t seen my content but they know about it because they already decided they belonged to it because of culture or identity.

Bad Bunny didn’t just fill a stadium. Some will say that people didn’t watch his Super Bowl performance or that it was the worst half-time because it wasn’t in English but guess what… He drove $200 million into Puerto Rico’s economy. He made 600,000 people buy plane tickets. He increased spending across an entire city by 20%. That’s not “influence.” That’s economic power built on cultural trust and so many more people win with that.

The brands that understand this will partner with creators who have deep, identity-driven communities. The brands that don’t will keep chasing follower counts and wondering why their campaigns underperform.

I reach 500K+ South Asians, the highest-income demographic in America, through travel, events, content, and a community they feel they belong to. That’s not an audience. That’s a movement. The brands that get the difference are the ones I want to work with.

the bottom line

AI will automate content creation. It will not automate trust.

AI will generate personalized campaigns at scale. It will not generate the feeling of standing in a stadium singing in a language you don’t speak because the person on stage made you believe in something bigger than music. Look at Diljit Dosanjh for the South Asian/Punjabi community.

AI will optimize everything that can be measured. It cannot touch the thing that matters most: whether a human being trusts another human being enough to act.

The creators who will win the next decade are not the ones who create the most content. They’re the ones who build the deepest trust. Who stand for something specific. Who refuse to compromise their identity for reach. Who treat their audience like a community, not a metric.

Bad Bunny built a $200 million economic event by being unapologetically Puerto Rican. I’m building a global community by being unapologetically a desi girl who chose to live an unconventional life and build a sense of belonging for those navigating the same thing. Sure, the scale is different (I’ll get there ;)) but the mechanic is the same.

Trust. Identity. Refusal to dilute. Everything else is noise.

I write about the creator economy, identity, and building an unconventional life on my Substack. Free essays weekly. Paid essays every Thursday. $7/month.

Subscribe now

Dose of Travel Club is the movement I’m building for South Asians. Trips, events, Camp DOTC this summer, and a community app launching this year. www.doseoftravelclub.com

For brand partnership and speaking inquiries: partnerships@doseoftravelclub.com

Hi, I’m Nabila and this is Do It Anyway, essays for the ambitious people who want to live a life there’s no blueprint for. I talk about non-traditional careers and lifestyles, from pivoting careers, building businesses, and building a magnetic personal brand.

Everyone’s talking about being replaced right now.

AI is coming for your job. Layoffs are accelerating. Entire departments are being automated. People are scared. LinkedIn is full of “how to stay relevant in the age of AI” posts from people who’ve had the same job title for 15 years.

I’m not scared. Not because I’m delusional. I’m not scared because I’ve already done the thing everyone’s afraid of. I’ve reinvented myself six times. Pharmacist. Health tech marketer. Journalist. Unemployed. Content creator. Founder. Each time, the old version of my career died and I built a new one from whatever I had left.

That’s not a resume. That’s survival training. Right now, survival training is the most valuable credential you can have. So is a non-linear career. Why? You know how to pivot, adapt, change, and you can think differently than others. It’s your unfair advantage. It’s how I got a job at a health tech company as a pharmacist. Everyone on the team came from a tech background but had NO idea on how healthcare works, the pain points, the inner workings, and how healthcare people think. I brought all the insider knowledge that they could never get.

the job that broke the ceiling I didn’t know I had

I was a pharmacy student doing a hundred things at once. Studying for exams, writing a blog, creating content, getting invited to events for free, doing interviews. The blog was the first signal. People were actually reading what I wrote. Strangers. That meant something, even if I couldn’t name what it meant yet.

I also liked fashion. I was studying pharmacy. The fact that I could do both felt significant in a way nobody around me understood. If I could be a pharmacy student AND a fashion blogger AND a content creator, then the categories everyone else was living inside didn’t actually apply to me.

The real pivot came when I got my first job outside of pharmacy. Health tech marketing. Remote. Unlimited PTO. Free food. Happy hours. Didn’t have to dress up for work. A startup where people were building products and shipping them into the world.

Nobody I grew up with worked in tech. I didn’t have proximity to that world. I didn’t have access. I didn’t have a single person in my circle who could’ve told me this kind of job existed. Getting it felt like finding a door in a wall I’d been staring at my entire life. It still blows my mind how my life and world was so small and I never thought the things I have now existed or could’ve been possible. NEVER EVER.

I remember thinking: if I can get from pharmacy to tech without anyone showing me the way, then the path can go anywhere. The script my parents gave me, the one that said pharmacy was the safest option, was one version of safety. Knowing I could adapt, pivot, and land in industries I’d never been trained for? That was a different kind of safety entirely.

I didn’t think it could get better than that job. Remote work in my twenties with unlimited time off? I thought I’d peaked.

I was so wrong. Everything that came after was bigger.

the thing i wish someone told me at 22

I wish someone had told me to stop listening to the people closest to me who didn’t want more for themselves.

That sounds harsh but it’s the honest truth.

For the longest time, I thought I was “too much.” Too ambitious. Too restless. Too interested in everything. But at the same time, everything people my age or around me were interested… never interested me. I didn’t think I was destined for good things, ambitious, or cool, I thought something was wrong with me. I never quite felt like I fit in even though I had so many friends growing up. Boys didn’t interest me, I was interested in fashion, working, and content. The people around me weren’t dreaming the same way I was and I interpreted that as evidence that my dreams were unrealistic.

I hung out with people who didn’t want the best for me. Some of them didn’t even want the best for themselves. They were comfortable. They’d picked their lane. They didn’t understand why I kept pivoting, kept wanting more, kept looking for something I couldn’t even name yet.

I wish I’d expanded my circle earlier. I wish I’d found mentors. I wish I’d challenged myself to be around people who were building at a level I aspired to instead of settling for people who validated my comfort zone.

Cannes Lions gave me this in real time. I was in rooms with people who move tens of millions of dollars. CEOs walking around the Croisette like it was a Tuesday. Founders and creators who’ve built empires and were still showing up, still pitching, still learning. That proximity shattered something in me. Not because I’m intimidated by it. I realized I should have been seeking it years ago.

The people you surround yourself with determine the size of your imagination. Full stop. If nobody around you is dreaming big, your dreams will shrink to fit the room.

Now, that I’ve been in those rooms, I need to learn how to work those rooms, fit in, and ask the right questions because I’ve never had this opportunity.

what I actually tell people when they say “I want to do what you do”

People DM me this constantly. “I want your life. How do I do it?”

Here’s what I tell them: I don’t have one job. I have six running simultaneously and they all feed each other.

I’m still a licensed pharmacist. That gave me operations, leadership, and the ability to translate complicated things into simple language. I’m a marketer. That gave me campaigns, branding, and an understanding of what makes people pay attention. I’m a creator and entrepreneur. That gave me an audience, a voice, and the ability to sell without selling. I run a travel and social club where we organize group trips and events across four continents. I’m essentially a media agency because I’ve grown a 500K-person personal brand and travel community that brands want access to.

Nobody trained me for this combination. No degree covers it. No job title captures it. I built it by stacking skills from every career I’ve ever had and refusing to believe that any of them were wasted.

That’s what I tell people. You don’t need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life. You need to get really good at learning new things fast and trusting that the skills will stack in ways you can’t predict yet.

I wrote a whole guide on building a personal brand. If you’ve nailed down who you are, know what you’re good at, and what you want to build a brand around, grab the book and get to it so you don’t wait around like I did. Grab it here!

why the nonlinear career is the one that survives

Let me connect this to the thing everyone’s panicking about right now.

AI is not coming for the people who can reinvent themselves. It’s coming for the people who can’t.

If you’ve spent 15 years in one role, doing one thing, building expertise in one narrow domain, and that domain gets automated, you have one skill set and zero experience adapting. The pivot is terrifying because you’ve never done it before.

If you’ve pivoted six times? The pivot is just a regular Tuesday. You’ve already proven to yourself that you can learn a new industry, build new skills, and create value in environments you weren’t trained for. That’s not instability. That’s the most in-demand capability in the market.

At Cannes Lions, the creator economy was the main character. Creator partnerships are no longer a supplemental line in a media plan. They’re a primary channel. The people who’ve built personal brands, who’ve learned to create content, who’ve developed audiences, who know how to tell stories and make people care, those people are becoming the most valuable professionals in marketing and advertising.

That’s not a trend… it’s a structural shift. Creators are becoming a legitimate career path, and the industry is finally paying for it. I’ve been doing this for four years. I watched it go from “so you post pictures on Instagram?” to “we’d like to discuss a six-figure partnership.” The trajectory is clear.

The nonlinear career isn’t the backup plan for people who couldn’t pick a lane. It’s the path that stands the test of time because it’s built on adaptability, not specialization. The world rewards depth, yes. It rewards breadth more. Especially now.

personal branding is the greatest career asset that exists right now

I need to say this directly because I don’t think enough people understand it yet. I talk about it in my personal brand workshop (not offered anymore).

A personal brand is not vanity, It’s not “being an influencer” and it’s not posting selfies and hoping someone notices.

A personal brand is a career insurance policy. It’s the thing that follows you from job to job, industry to industry, pivot to pivot. When your company lays you off, your personal brand stays. When your industry gets disrupted, your audience stays. When AI replaces the task you were hired to do, the trust you’ve built with real humans stays.

I have 500,000 followers across platforms.That audience has generated seven figures in revenue across trips, events, digital products, brand deals, workshops, and a paid newsletter. That audience is mine. Not my employer’s. Not a platform’s. Mine.

If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have my Substack subscribers. If Substack disappeared, I’d still have my email list. If everything disappeared, I’d still have the reputation I’ve built over the years of showing up consistently and giving people value.

That’s what a personal brand does. It makes you unfireable… not because you can’t lose a job bc you can lose every job. You just can’t lose the audience that trusts you.

At Cannes, they weren’t paying for ad space. They were paying for creators. For people with audiences. For people who’ve built trust at scale. The most valuable thing in marketing right now isn’t a billboard. It’s a person that other people believe.

Well, shit. Writing that out kinda gave me anxiety on how much rides on your personal brand and how you show up. Okay, we’re not going to think about that bc then I’ll never post again haha and get paralyzed.

Proof that even when you start, you have doubts or moments like this I guess. I ahve them a lot more bc I share my opinions, I stand for things, but I’m not perfect. That’s the wave I’ve been riding for 4 years. I want to help you ride it too.

Want to travel the world but don’t have anyone to go with? Come with us at Dose of Travel Club.

enter my world

Here’s what I want you to know about me if this is your first time reading my work.

I’m Nabila. I’m 32. Pakistani-American. Muslim. Daughter of immigrants. Eldest daughter (can you tell?). I quit pharmacy, pivoted careers 5 times, moved abroad, built a global travel and lifestyle community of 270K people, took 5,000+ women on trips and events across four continents, and I did it all solo from my laptop with $200/month in AI tools and some contractors.

I write about the life I’m designing and everything that comes with it. The career pivots, the dating at 32 as a desi woman, the identity navigation, the business building, the cultural tension, the faith journey, mental health, and building a magnetic personal brand that gets you paid. All of it. Every week. On this Substack.

The free essays are the ones people send to their group chat. The paid ones are where I get into the real stuff: business breakdowns with actual numbers, dating confessionals that are too honest for Instagram, tactical frameworks you can implement the same week you read them.

If you’re someone who’s building an unconventional life, if you’ve pivoted or you’re thinking about pivoting, if you’re tired of being told your career doesn’t make sense, if you want to see what it looks like when a girl throws out the script and builds something nobody can categorize, this is where it happens.

Subscribe now

Subscribe. Stick around. The best is coming.

Free essays weekly. Paid essays every Thursday. $7/month.

Personal brand workshop: 2 hours. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. [Link to workshop]

Dose of Travel Club trips and Camp DOTC this summer: [doseoftravelclub.com]

I wrote some guides based on my experiences:

80 countries visited solo. I wrote a 60 page eBook covering it all for all types of solo travelers, whether you’re college bound and a budget travelr or a first-timer who neds street smarts.

The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World

I’ve made multiple 6 figures from my personal brand. You’ve watched me over the years. It’s been a long game. I help you fast-track that with this guide.

Personal Brand Guide

Social media is not real. Cannes Lions was a live masterclass in that.

I just got back. My voice is gone. THE HEAT. I’ve never felt so hot in my life. I’ve neveer met so many people I admire while being a sweaty mess. I was so hot I apologized to people for how I looked while introducing myself. I slept maybe four hours a night. I ate one real meal a day because there was no time & activations were serving cocktails but barely any food. I spent more on Ubers than I’d like to admit.

It was also the single most valuable professional experience of my life. Here are my hot takes from a first-timer who formerly worked in marketing and is now a creator entrepreneur.

what Cannes Lions actually is (for those who don’t know)

Cannes Lions is the largest international festival for marketing, advertising, and creativity. 13,000 to 15,000 top CMOs, brand executives, agency heads, platform leaders come together for a week of learning, networking, and partying in Cannes. This is where supposedly multi-million dollar deals get discussed over drinks on a yacht at midnight.

This year the creator economy officially landed. Brands sponsored Creator Passes. YouTube alone brought over 200 creators. Adobe sponsored a Creator Pass at roughly 70% cheaper than the standard marketing pass, and 2026 marks Adobe’s largest Cannes Lions investment ever after doubling their spend in 2025 and returning as the first headline partner of Lions Creators. Adobe was everywhere. I don’t think there was a single activation that didn’t include them in some capacity.

I went because I’ve been in the creator economy for six years. I’ve built a community of 500,000 people. I’ve taken 5,000+ South Asians on trips and hosted events for thousands across four continents. I knew the direction of this festival was moving toward creators, and I knew the people I wanted to be around were going to be in one city for one week.

Nobody flew me out. No brand paid my way. I booked my own flights and hotel, announced I was going, prayed for the best, and showed up. That distinction matters and I’ll come back to it.

i went for one reason: proximity

Not the session, activations, or the content opportunities (it was too hot to get any good content anyways.) I went for proximity.

I wanted to be in rooms with people who have built seven, eight, nine-figure businesses. People who have innovated, who are pioneers, who are as passionate about what they do as I am about what I do.

Honestly? I was also craving my own sense of belonging. After four years of building community for people through DOTC, I needed to feel seen by other creators as I work all of the time. I needed to be in a room where I wasn’t the host, the organizer, the one making sure everyone else had a good time. I needed to just be a person in a room full of people who understand this work.

That’s the real reason I went. Everything else was secondary.

the sessions could be so much more (and here’s what i’d want to see)

The speaker lineups on paper were incredible and the talent was there. The expertise was most definitely in the room. What I think was missing was depth.

Most sessions stayed surface-level. Polished answers, PR-trained responses, accomplishments presented without the process behind them. I get it. When you’re on stage in front of hundreds of people, you want to talk about the wins. However, as a creator looking to learn, I would’ve loved more depth and maybe separate areas for sessions/networking.

Here’s what I wish more sessions looked like: show me the strategy that took you from six to seven figures. Walk me through the systems you put in place. Tell me your biggest mistake and what it cost you. If we’re talking about AI, pull up your actual prompts on screen. Let me watch how you talk to AI in real time. Show me a good ad versus a bad one. Show me your trial reels. Tell me how many people are on your team to produce that many videos. What type of content actually drives the most views for you? What are brands looking for in creators? etc etc. How much marketing budget do you have and where’s it going vs. the ROI? How do you manage all your content deliverables? How do you film and edit every day? How do you get partnerships or sponsorships… like show me a good pitch deck.

That’s the content people came for. The real, specific, tactical stuff that you can’t Google. The kind of conversation that happens at a mastermind, not a marketing panel. With the caliber of people in these rooms, Cannes has the potential to be the most educational week in the industry. I’d love to see more sessions designed for practitioners. Smaller rooms. Unscripted Q&A. Workshops where people actually build something together instead of listening to a keynote.

Cannes has every ingredient to make that happen. The people are there. The expertise is there. The budget is there.

what i noticed about the activations (as someone who builds events for a living)

I’ve been building events and experiences through DOTC for 4 years across four continents. I don’t walk through activations as a guest anymore which honestly surprised me too. How did I go from pharmacist to marketer to journalist to creator to travel & events company? I had no idea I’d pick up on things like this and how much I had learned along the way.

Here’s what I took away from the builds at Cannes, organized by the principles that separated the ones people talked about from the ones people walked past.

The brands that solved for the heat won. This sounds basic. It was the single biggest differentiator. Most activations were outside on the Croisette with no shade, no fans, no AC. Gorgeous builds that people couldn’t enjoy because they were physically miserable… to no fault of any of the brands. None of us saw the wildest heatwave coming. Edelman had Edelman House. They built an indoor space from scratch that genuinely felt like a house so it felt really intentional and cozy, but also so different from everything else bc there was virtually no branding. Obviously, the AC. For one of their parties, they served KFC on silver platters, which was so unexpected and playful. LinkedIn built their Wellness Oasis indoors with air conditioning and even had headphones so you could follow programming from anywhere in the space. Those two brands earned more time with me because I didn’t want to leave. Add in Chez Vayner because it was also in a restaurant off the Croissette,

The brands that fed people earned loyalty. Drinks were everywhere. Food was not. Most activations had open bars but barely anything to eat. Restaurants were booked by brands for private dinners. Getting a reservation on your own was nearly impossible. The Ubers to off-Croisette restaurants took forever. Most of us were running on coffee and dehydration. Vayner Media’s Chez Vayner was the exception. It was set up at a restaurant with actual meals, pasta and steak, plus an ice luge, a creator salon with gifting suites, and a curated guest list. Gary V was walking around. I had some of my best conversations of the week there and it’s because the room was curated or maybe because I got to eat.

The biggest infrastructure problem at Cannes was that sessions and networking were competing in the same room. Speakers on stage while people networked ten feet away. Audio that couldn’t cut through the conversation. Adobe solved this. Their stage had incredible sound that worked no matter how many people were around. You could choose to listen or choose to network without either experience being compromised. Adobe nailed it and they were the main sponsor of Cannes this year and it showed. Incredible lineup, so many activations, so many side events, so many creators.

The brands that went off-script stood out. Pinterest surprised me. At a marketing conference where everyone lives online, their entire activation was offline. Tattoos, arts and crafts, & vision boards. Everything was designed to get creators off their phones. That’s a bold move at Cannes and it worked beautifully because people were doing something together instead of performing for each other. The best networking happened without anyone trying to network (also my favorite way to network) As someone who runs a travel and social club, I love getting offline and pushing for more IRL.

The brands that built for recovery understood the room. By day three, everyone was destroyed. The Ciroc Athletic Club got this. Pickleball, B12 shots, IV drips, massage, gorgeous venue that felt like a wedding location (it is). It was the activation that met people where they actually were instead of where the brand wanted them to be. It was 30 minutes away from the other events and they provided a shuttle to get there. That’s a level of empathy in event design that most brands miss.

The brands that went exclusive went deeper. Spotify Beach was the most exclusive activation at the festival with UTA being up there as well. I tried getting in but I did not have any luck. It’s on my 2027 list.

The brands that built creator-specific infrastructure got it. Patreon, FiveTwoNine, and Billion Dollar Boy co-hosted a happy hour designed specifically for creators. The Creator Fund that FiveTwoNine runs with Billion Dollar Boy is exactly the kind of structural support that gets creators into rooms like Cannes. Their event reflected that intentionality. Adobe also had creator happy hours and a dinner that I got to attend.

I’m taking every one of these observations into how I build every DOTC event going forward. The event design was SO cool to see and I found myself dreaming up what I could do for DOTC if I had an insane budget. No, honestly, I’d love to know how much brands drop every year for their activations and their ROI.

not everyone is sponsored. even less ppl than i thought.

This was the biggest surprise of the week.

From the outside, watching the content, it looked like hundreds of creators were flown out, all expenses paid, staying in five-star hotels, getting paid to post from the Croisette. The posts all looked equally luxurious. You could not tell who was sponsored and who wasn’t.

The reality? Only a small percentage of creators were actually paid to be there or had their expenses covered. A lot of people paid out of pocket. Some pitched themselves and got partial sponsorships afterward. Some were strategic: they had a brand who wanted travel content or clothing content from the south of France, so they aligned the timing. Smart, but not “sponsored to attend Cannes.”

I was genuinely shocked by how many creators I assumed were sponsored who weren’t. People with massive followings. They were investing in themselves, just like me. This one hit me hard and reminded me to pitch more and that nothing is easy as it seems. Everyone is working hard.

Here’s the takeaway that I think every creator and founder needs to hear: no matter how big you are, you still have to pitch yourself. You are constantly chasing, being proactive, maintaining relationships. Speakers still pitch to speak. Creators still pitch to attend. The pitching never stops at any level. If you thought there was a level where everything just comes to you, that level is much higher than Instagram makes it look. Or maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

Most creators pay their first time as an investment and then come back with sponsors and that’s what I fully intend on doing. I’ll be speaking at Cannes next year.

I teach this in my personal brand workshop or in my paid substack. How to pitch yourself. How to create your own access. How to invest in the right rooms. 2 hours. 30 mins Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $20 off.

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the heat, the food, and the crashouts

I cannot overstate the heat. It was the most brutal I’ve experienced in my life. I’ve lived in Dubai and Houston. This was worse.

No shade at most activations. Open bar everywhere but barely any food. The drinks were flowing but food was hard to come by. A lot of brands booked up the best restaurants for private dinners, so getting a reservation on your own was nearly impossible. Ubers took forever. Events overlapped constantly.

By day two I was choosing survival over style. The cute outfits I planned? Impossible. Every conversation started the same way. “How’s your experience going?” “It’s so hot.” That was the universal Cannes greeting.

I met creators I’d admired for years and opened with “I’m so sorry, I look terrible right now.” Multiple times. I was impressed by how GOOD people looked, their outfits, and their dedication to film content. I swear some people are built differently but that goes to show the effort and hard work goes into this. There were creators making LOADS of content, like content machines. I was so overstimulated I could barely function or talk to people. I definitely had a moment to talk to Gary V and I froze and awkwardly smiled at him at his own event. I was so mortified that I didn’t even say hi or thank you for having me at your event. If you’re planning for 2027: portable fan, battery pack, eat before you leave the hotel, have snacks. This is not optional.

The days are long, incredibly long. You’ll find yourself on the streets eating pizza at 3am with hundreds of people. I didn’t realize how many parties and late night events that would occur.

Everyone wanted to go on a yacht, myself included, but it was probably the hottest place to be haha. Everyone would go inside where the a/c was so you weren’t really enjoying the deck because of the heat.

the best conversations happened in between

Not at panels. Not at activations. Not at staged networking events, but in between.

Walking from one event to the next. Standing in line (and the lines were LONG, probably the only time I’ll ever see established, successful people willingly stand in line for 30 minutes with no shade). Sitting on the Croisette between sessions because you needed a break and the person next to you happened to be building something incredible.

I went alone. That meant I had to put myself out there constantly. Walk up to strangers. Introduce myself to rooms where I didn’t know who was hosting. There were moments where I was nervous. Moments where I felt like the dumbest person in the room. Moments where I was sitting across from someone who signs forty-million-dollar deals and I’ve never seen that kind of money in my life.

Those moments were the whole point… You can’t level up if you can’t see the next destination.

I haven’t come from wealth and I want to unlock the next level but my reference point for “success” has been limited to what I can see from my own orbit. Cannes showed me the next level up close. People who move real money. Who operate at a scale I’d only imagined. Sitting across from them, hearing how they think, watching how they move, that broke a ceiling I didn’t know I had.

The Adobe dinner was the moment everything clicked. Every person at the table was a woman. Multi-hyphenate. Building multiple things at once. I looked around and recognized half of them from following their work for years. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a visitor or a fan and started feeling like a peer. This was probably my biggest unlock. I deserved to be there. I had a lot to say. I know a lot of things. People know who I am. Brands invited me to their events. I was hanging out with the best of the best in the industry and they saw me as a peer so I should, too.

the private events were the real Cannes

The invite-only events were consistently the most impactful experiences of the week for me. Curated guest lists. Twenty to fifty people. The brand already knew who you were before you walked in. These rooms were where the real conversations happened because the size forced intimacy and the curation forced relevance.

The biggest lesson: the people who got access to these rooms already had relationships with the hosts. They’d been nurturing them for months or years. The access was earned before the festival started. That’s a 12-month game, not a one-week game.

For my favorite events, it genuinely felt like freshman year orientation. Everyone was in the same space, excited and nervous and open. No ego. People approaching each other to make friends. Late nights together that felt like college. Walking the Croisette at 2am, free pizza at 3am, home at 4am, couldn’t sleep because my brain was still processing everything. The most fun I’ve had professionally in years!!! Cannes, you’re gonna see me again.

what i’d do differently for 2027

I’m going back. Here’s what changes.

Schedule one-on-one meetings in advance. With specific brand reps, agency leads, executives. Coffee at 8am before the chaos starts. This is the single highest-ROI activity at Cannes and I didn’t do enough of it.

Skip most panels. Prioritize private events and meetings. The curated rooms and invite-only dinners were where every meaningful conversation happened.

Start building relationships now. Twelve months of nurturing before the next festival. Not three weeks.

Stay 3-4 days. Two and a half is too short. Five is too long. Arrive day one, leave day four.

Portable fan. Battery pack. Eat before you leave the hotel. Survival essentials. Non-negotiable.

Book hotel in advance and always make sure it has A/C because its not guaranteed.

Rent a villa with other creators/founders: if you’re going next year, let’s go together and divide and conquer sessions, activations, events, and get content!

the bottom line

Cannes Lions is overwhelming, expensive, physically brutal, and one of the most important things I’ve ever done for my career.

The lines were insane. The heat was inhumane. My diet was all over the place. No sleep was crazy. My outfits were ruined.

None of that matters. What matters is that I walked into rooms I dreamed of being in,, had conversations with people operating at levels I’d only imagined, realized that I belong in those rooms, and left with more clarity about what I’m building than I’ve had in months.

The most valuable thing at Cannes Lions is not on the stage. It’s not in the activation. It’s not in the programming. It’s standing next to someone who makes you think bigger. That’s proximity. T

If you’re a creator or a founder thinking about Cannes 2027: go. Pay for it yourself if you have to. Set up the meetings in advance. Skip the panels. Go to the private events. Bring a fan.

Do it anyway. Even when nobody invites you. Especially then.

I think horoscopes are vague enough to apply to anyone. I think mercury retrograde is not responsible for your bad decisions. I think the position of the stars at the exact moment you were born has nothing to do with why you can’t text back.

I also need to state for the record that I am the most Gemini person alive and I genuinely cannot explain it.

Born June 13. The textbook. The poster child. The walking, talking, can’t-pick-a-city, can’t-pick-a-career, can’t-pick-a-restaurant-for-dinner embodiment of everything astrology says a Gemini is supposed to be.

I don’t believe in it. I also can’t argue with the evidence. So let me present the case and you can judge for yourself.

Exhibit A: I’ve Had 6 Careers and Loved Every Single One.

Pharmacist. Health tech marketer. Journalist. Unemployed (that counts). Content creator. Founder.

Geminis are described as “easily bored, constantly seeking new stimulation, unable to commit to one path.” I prefer “multi-passionate with a low tolerance for things that don’t challenge me anymore.”

The result is the same though. I’ve never stayed in one career long enough for anyone in my family to finish updating their mental model of what I do. My mom just introduced me as “my daughter, she has a company” which is the safest possible phrasing after a decade of trying to keep up.

Every career pivot made sense at the time. Every single one felt urgent. I wasn’t running from anything. I was running toward the next version of me that hadn’t arrived yet.

Gemini trait or just an ambitious woman who refuses to settle? I genuinely don’t know. The astrology girlies will say it’s the former. I’ll say it’s the latter. We’ll both be right.

Exhibit B: I Can’t Pick a City and It’s Becoming a Problem.

New York. Dubai. Bali. The three cities I rotate between. None of which I fully commit to. All of which I defend when someone asks “so where do you actually live?”

The honest answer is I don’t know. The polished answer is “I split my time.” The Gemini answer is “wherever I am right now is where I’m supposed to be” which sounds enlightened but is actually just indecision dressed up as philosophy.

I tried New York for three months last summer. Didn’t hate it and didn’t fully love it.. Left. Tried Bali for months. Built a whole life there. Left. Moved back to Houston. Already thinking about leaving.

Geminis are described as “adaptable and restless, needing variety and change to feel alive.” I’m described by most people as “a flight risk” or “homeless.”

The worst part: I’m happy in every city for exactly the amount of time it takes to start feeling settled. The moment something starts feeling like routine, my brain goes “okay but what about somewhere else?” That’s either Gemini energy or a legitimate attachment issue. Possibly both.

I built DOTC partly because of this. I needed community that wasn’t tied to one city because I can’t stay in one city. The app is the solution for everyone like me. Find your people wherever you are. Get on the waitlist here: https://www.doseoftravelclub.com/community/

Exhibit C: Dating Is a Nightmare When Your Personality Has Two Settings.

Setting one: I am a confident, worldly, sarcastic, independent woman who has traveled to 70+ countries and runs a global company and needs absolutely nothing from anyone.

Setting two: I want someone to watch a movie with on a Tuesday and not have to explain why I’m crying during the sad part.

Both of these are real. Both of these exist simultaneously. The switch between them can happen mid-sentence.

Geminis are described as “dual-natured, showing different sides to different people, hard to pin down.” Some would describe me as hard to read or intimidating.

I may be hard to read and its because I’m complex. There’s a difference. The problem is that dating apps give you a profile box and a few photos to communicate the entirety of your personality. You get one setting. I have twelve.

I’m the girl who will plan a solo trip to a country she’s never been to and also panic about going to a dinner party where she doesn’t know anyone. I’m the girl who will negotiate a five-figure brand deal and then not be able to decide what to order for lunch. I’m the girl who will talk loudly on the internet about things I believe in and be super shy and nervous on a date.

Gemini? Or just a 31-year-old woman trying to figure out how to be soft and strong at the same time? Either way, the men are confused and honestly, fair.

Exhibit D: I’m an Introverted Extrovert Who Built a Brand on Being Social.

This is the one that really gets me.

I don’t like attention (most times). I’m more camera-shy than you’d expect but also kinda good at it. I’m an introvert who recharges alone these days (I blame COVID). My ideal night is me, a long walk, or sitting at the beach journaling.

I also run a community of 270K people, host events across four continents, and built my entire career on being visible, present, and “on.”

Geminis are described as “social chameleons who can work any room but need solitude to recharge.” I’m described by my friends as “the most extroverted introvert they’ve ever met” which is the nicest way of saying “she’s confusing.”

The start of my introverted journey probably came from all that solo travel. If you want to look inward and you’re new to solo travel, here’s my 60 page guide with everything you could possibly need. The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World [

The truth is I’ve learned to perform extroversion so well that people don’t believe me when I say I’m introverted. I can host a 100-person event and talk to every single person. I can give a speech and make it look effortless. I can network a room and leave with 20 new contacts.

Then I go home and don’t speak to anyone for 48 hours.

That’s not a contradiction. It’s capacity management. The Gemini explanation would be “dual nature.”

Exhibit E: I Can’t Commit to Dinner. How Am I Supposed to Commit to a Life Plan?

Ask me where I want to eat. I dare you.

I will suggest three places. Change my mind about two of them. Google a fourth option. Ask you what you’re in the mood for. Disagree with your answer. Go back to my original first choice. Then change my mind in the car.

Now scale that to life decisions.

Where should I live? What should I prioritize this quarter? Should I go to that conference or stay home and work? Should I launch the app first or the workshop first? Should I book the flight now or wait for a better price?

Every decision feels like closing a door on another equally good option. The Gemini in me (the one I don’t believe in) wants to keep every door open forever. The founder in me knows that indecision is its own decision, and it’s usually the most expensive one.

I’m working on this. Deciding faster. Committing harder. Accepting that choosing one thing means losing another thing and that’s okay.

It’s going... fine. I’m still changing my dinner plans mid-drive. Progress isn’t linear. (A Gemini would say that.)

Exhibit F: I Contain Multitudes and It Confuses Everyone Including Me.

Muslim who lives freely. Pharmacist who became a founder. Introvert who hosts events. Solo traveler who craves partnership. Confident in business, insecure in dating. Sarcastic in public, emotional in private. Loves routine, hates staying still. Wants roots, keeps moving.

Geminis are described as “containing contradictions, being multiple people at once, shifting between versions of themselves.”

I’m described by my therapist as “a work in progress” which I think means the same thing.

Here’s the real talk though. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like the contradictions were a problem. Like I needed to pick a lane or Be the confident one or the vulnerable one. Be the traveler or the homebody. Be the ambitious one or the soft one.

I don’t think that anymore. The contradictions are what make me me. The reason people read my essays is because I hold multiple truths at the same time without pretending one of them is the answer. The reason DOTC works is because the community is full of women who also contain contradictions and are tired of picking a lane.

Do I believe in horoscopes? No.

Do I think being born on June 13 has anything to do with the fact that I’ve changed careers six times, lived in three countries, been single for five years, and still can’t pick a restaurant?

... I’m going to plead the fifth on that one.

If you related to any of this, you’ll probably like my paid Substack. The dating essays, the identity breakdowns, the business confessionals. The stuff that’s too honest and too specific for Instagram.

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If you’re a desi woman who contains contradictions and is done apologizing for them, want to live your best, free life, come on a DOTC trip this year. You’ll be in a room where nobody asks you to pick a lane. doseoftravelclub.com

I’ve also lost money. Real money. Not “I invested in myself and it didn’t pay off immediately” money. Actual losses. Bad decisions. Misplaced trust. Things I should have known better about and didn’t because nobody teaches you how to run a business when you’re a pharmacist turned content creator turned accidental founder.

This essay is for the paid subscribers only because it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever written about the business side of DOTC. Just the specific mistakes, what they cost me, and what I’d do differently.

If you’re building something or thinking about building something, this is the essay I wish someone had written for me before I made every single one of these.

If you’re looking to build a personal brand, I have a workshop or a guide that teaches you everything to get started today and stop wasting time. Grab it here for a limited time.

Mistake 1: Working for free and calling it “building relationships.”

The first two years of DOTC, I said yes to everything. Free hotel stays in exchange for content. Free brand collaborations in exchange for “exposure.” Free event appearances in exchange for “the opportunity.”

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I’ve written essays about dating, about identity, about career pivots, about moving back to the US. Those essays have structure….they usually have a thesis and a conclusion and a hopeful ending. This one doesn’t because it is just notes. Things I’m thinking about that I haven’t said out loud yet.

Some of these will resonate with you. Some won’t. That’s fine. I’m writing this more for me than for you, which is probably why it’ll connect more than anything I’ve written with an audience in mind.

Here goes.

1. The paradox of infinite choice is quietly ruining my life.

I can live anywhere. I can work from anywhere. I can book a flight tomorrow to any country in the world and my business doesn’t skip a beat.

That sounds like freedom. It is freedom. It’s also paralyzing.

I don’t know if I want to stay in Houston. I don’t know if I want to go back to Dubai. I don’t know if Bali is calling me or if I’m just nostalgic. I don’t know if I should try LA, or London, or somewhere I’ve never lived.

The nature of my work means nothing is anchored. There’s no office I have to show up to, no lease I have to honor, no reason I have to be anywhere specific on any given day. Most people would kill for that flexibility. I’m drowning in it.

What ends up happening is I can’t decide. I wait too long. I become a last-minute planner. Then I get screwed on flight prices and availability. Then I’m frustrated with myself for not committing earlier. Then I don’t go anywhere. Then I sit in Houston feeling stuck because I chose not to choose.

The luxury of unlimited options is that you can do anything. The cost of unlimited options is that you can’t decide on anything. Indecision is the worst feeling.

2. I’m an introvert running a public-facing brand and the math isn’t mathing.

People don’t know this about me. I actually don’t like attention. I’m camera-shy. I can film reels in my room by myself all day. Put me in a room full of people and I can sometimes clam up. I get in my head. I put pressure on myself and being perceived makes me run loops in my head all day long.

I love one-on-one conversation. Deep, real, no-small-talk conversation. That’s where I come alive. A dinner with one person I trust. A long phone call with a friend who actually knows me.

The problem is I’m now hosting more events than ever. DOTC dinners, meetups, Desi Island planning, brand activations, networking events. Every single one requires me to be “on.” To be the founder. The host. The connector. The energy in the room.

I do it well. I do love being a connector. I think I have good energy and I’m welcoming. As a desi woman who was told to play by the rules, not speak up, and didn’t take up space for most of my life, doing so is really hard. I still don’t love the attention but I love the outcome. I love watching women meet each other for the first time and exchange numbers. I love the rooms I create. I just don’t love being the center of them in large settings!!

That’s a weird thing to admit when your entire business is built on your personality. The brand is me. The community follows me. The events are hosted by me. I won’t lie, I do think I’m a cool girl and that I’m meant to be doing this but maybe it’s a limiting belief, maybe it’s the pressure, or maybe I genuinely love to be low key with high impact?

Some days that feels like purpose. Some days it feels like a trap I built myself.

3. I don’t want to be famous. I want to have impact. Those are different things.

I need to say this clearly because I think people assume that anyone with a following is chasing fame.

I’m not. I genuinely do not want to be famous. I don’t want to be recognized in grocery stores. I don’t want strangers having opinions about my personal life. I don’t want the nazar. I don’t want my every move being watched… i’m not famous now and i’m not saying this happens to me now but these are things that do shift once you put yourself in the public eye. Take a look at how you view celebrities, their gossip, and what people say about them. We’ve all had opinions on people we don’t know but think we know.

What I want is to build something that matters. A community for South Asian women and men that didn’t exist before me. Trips that change how people see the world. Content that makes someone feel less alone at 2am. An app that gives my community a digital home. A summer camp that becomes the highlight of someone’s year.

I want impact. I want legacy. I want to create the thing that no one else was creating the way I’d want it to exist and needed it to exist. If no one else is going to build it, then I will. That’s the whole reason I started.

The attention that comes with it? That’s the tax. I pay it because I have to, not because I want to.

This is also why I teach. I was adjunct faculty at my alma mater. I’ve mentored interns. I’ve always been drawn to the part where I help someone else figure it out. The personal brand workshop is an extension of that. 2 hours. 30 mins Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $20 off.

4. Being perceived is starting to give me real anxiety.

Here’s the thing about having even a modest following. I have 270K on Instagram. I don’t consider myself a big influencer. More people have seen my content than follow me. People recognize me who I’ve never met. They know things about me that I shared publicly but forgot I shared. They have opinions about my life based on a version of me that’s real but incomplete.

That’s getting to me more than I expected.

When I meet someone new, there’s always this question in the back of my mind: do you know who I am? Have you already formed an opinion? Are you talking to me or talking to the idea of me?

In dating, it’s worse. I’ve written about this before. The perception problem. Men who pursue me for the platform, not the person. Men who are intimidated by it. Men who’ve already decided who I am before we’ve had a single real conversation.

I’m a solo traveler. I’m Muslim. I dress the way I dress. I live an open lifestyle. I know what some people assume about me based on those facts. The stereotype exists and I feel it in rooms even when nobody says it out loud.

I’m authentic in who I am. I know that. The anxiety isn’t about whether I’m being real. It’s about whether anyone else can see it through the noise of their own projections.

5. I get reduced to “influencer” and it makes me want to scream.

I don’t know how to introduce myself sometimes. That’s a weird sentence to write when you’ve built a whole personal brand.

If I say “I run a travel company,” people nod politely. If I say “I’m a content creator,” they glaze over. If someone else in the room says “she’s an influencer,” I watch the respect drain from people’s eyes in real time. If I say I’m a pharmacist, people say “omg really?” and it still feels like that introduction holds “more respect”

I’m a founder. I’ve built a real thing. I’ve taken 5,000+ people on trips. I’ve built a community of 270K. Thousands of people come to a DOTC event in just a month. I’m launching an app. I’m hosting the largest South Asian adult summer camp in the US. I write essays that thousands of people read.

None of that fits in the word “influencer.” That word reduces six years of building into a girl with a ring light and a following. This is no shame to being an influencer but I think most influencers will agree that people reduce them to “good looking people who take videos and pics of themselves all day" and “that it’s not a real business.” It erases the operations, the strategy, the financial risk, the sleepless nights, the business. If it was so easy, you’d be doing it. Everyone would be doing it. I work with men all the time and they treat me as their version of an “influencer” when I know that I’ve generated $40-250,000 USD for businesses. EASILY.

I’ve started saying “I’m a founder” and leaving it there. If they want to know more, they’ll ask. If they don’t, they weren’t my people anyway.

6. My close friends being scattered across the world is starting to actually hurt.

I have incredible friends. Women who know me fully. Who I can call at any hour and say “I need to talk” and they’ll pick up.

They’re in Dubai. Bali. London. New York. LA. Vancouver. Scattered across every time zone because that’s what happens when you build your life internationally for six years.

Global friendships and sisters everywhere is beautiful. The kind of bond that survives distance because it’s built on something deeper than proximity.

It is beautiful. It’s also lonely on a Tuesday night when I want to sit across from someone at dinner and just exist. No FaceTime. No voice note. Just a person, across from me, in the same city, who already knows the context of my life.

Houston doesn’t have that for me yet. I’m building it. It’s slow. The friendships I make here are new, and new friendships don’t have the weight of shared history. They can’t, yet. That takes time.

Time is the one thing I’m impatient about. It also requires me to stay. But making genuine friends again is harder when you have a following— what is their intention of wanting to hang out?

7. I’m married to the game. I also want to make room for a person.

I don’t talk about this enough because the internet loves a “boss babe who doesn’t need a man” narrative and I’ve been cast in that role.

The tension is that my life doesn’t make space for it. I’m building constantly. I’m traveling. I’m hosting events. I’m writing. I’m strategizing. Every hour of my day is allocated to DOTC, to my brand, to the community. But also, the negative noise puts me off. So do the sloppy and gross DMs in my inbox. I’d prefer a guy who doesn’t know I have an online platform lol.

I tell myself I’d make time for the right person. I believe that. I also know that “the right person” would have to fit into a life that’s already extremely full. That’s a big ask. I’m aware of that.

I don’t know how to solve this one. I think the honest answer is I haven’t tried hard enough. I’ve been using “married to the game” as both a truth and a shield. Both things can be real at the same time.

8. Building alone has made me tough. Maybe too tough.

I’ve built everything from scratch. No co-founder. No investors. No family money. No handouts. No supportive circle. Minimal recognition in the South Asian creator space or even interaction with. I’ve built it alone when it comes to the building side but I’ve not been alone because of the community. (The community I’ve built of down to earth, open-minded, real, curious, and intellectual people who follow me have been the biggest support so I had to shout you out) Every relationship I have in this industry, I earned. Like, I put myself out there more times than I count in so many different career paths because of my unique career journey.

That’s made me strong. It’s also made me guarded.

I have a hard time trusting people. I’ve been burned by collaborators who wanted access without the work. I’ve worked with people who smiled to my face and competed behind my back. I’ve given opportunities to people who took them and disappeared. People who show up when it’s convenient or for the perks or for the access, but are never there when I need them.

The result is I do a lot by myself. Recently, I hired on some people to the team and they have been SO great. You know who you are and I thank you.

But in general, I just don’t trust that anyone else will care about this thing the way I do or trust them when there’s been a few bad eggs.

9. I came from a woman-dominated field. Working with men has been a whole education.

Pharmacy is mostly women. My class mates were mostly women. My team was mostly women. I was the person in charge of the pharmacy and my boss was a male but he wasn’t a pharmacist so I made all the clinical and healthcare decisions. In a way, I was already my own boss. I didn’t realize how much that shaped my professional identity until I entered an industry dominated by men.

The travel industry, the events industry, the brand partnership world, the tech side of building an app. Men everywhere. Men who negotiate differently than women. Men who take up space differently. Men who sometimes assume I’m the assistant or just an influencer, not the founder.

It’s made me tougher. More direct. Less apologetic. I’ve learned to hold my ground in rooms where I’m the only woman, the only brown person, and the youngest person at the table. Sometimes, it makes me too intense and even I feel it. Sometimes it makes me guarded.

I don’t love that I had to learn those things. I do appreciate that I have them now.

No Neat Ending

I told you this essay wouldn’t have a clean conclusion. It doesn’t.

These are the notes from a life that looks aspirational from the outside and feels complicated from the inside. I’m not complaining. I chose every part of this. I’d choose it again. I’m just telling you what the choosing actually feels like when the cameras are off and the essays are done and it’s just me, in my apartment, trying to figure out the next right move.

I think the version of me that exists on Instagram is real. She’s just not complete. She’s the highlight reel of someone who also stares at her ceiling wondering if she’s doing any of this right. which I also talk about a lot because every founder i speak to, even the ones more accomplished than me, say the same thing. We don’t know what we’re doing but we keep going.

I’m doing it anyway. That hasn’t changed. I just wanted you to know what “doing it anyway” actually costs.

If you resonated with any of this, more of it lives on my paid Substack. The dating essays, the business breakdowns, the stuff that’s too honest for Instagram. $10/month.

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If you’re building something alone and want to be in a room with women who get it, join a DOTC trip

The community app to find your tribe no matter where you are.

I’m not an events person. I didn’t study hospitality. I didn’t intern at a production company. I didn’t grow up throwing parties or managing logistics for a living. I was a pharmacist. Then a marketer. Then a journalist. Then a content creator.

Somewhere along the way, I started bringing people together and it clearly wasn’t because I had the background for it. Nobody else was doing it for my community and I couldn’t sit with that because it was affecting my life. I didn’t want to be the unicorn or I didn’t want that line… “beta, I don’t see anyone from our community doing that” or why can’t you be like so-so who is becoming a physician.

Yeah, that’s the real reason but then as time went on, it really was because I wanted to meet like-minded people. Just because I loved traveling didn’t mean I wanted to be a hippie and throw away responsibility. My love for travel turned to an obsession because it taught me there isn’t one way to live. There’s no right or wrong way to live. There’s so much out there and the world and life is so much bigger than the bubble you grow up in. There are all kinds of people in the world. That’s what did it.

Anyways…

The first DOTC event wasn’t a production. It was a meet up. One girl showed up. I was mortified and told her that soo many people had come but had just left and the meet up was ending. That was in 2019.

After that, I never did a meet up again lmfao. I jumped straight to a group trip in 2022. Yeah, brave. It sold out. From strangers on the internet. A trip that was close to $2,000. People wanted to travel with me, see life differently, and meet other people wanting the same thing.

That trip turned into a second one (Cape Town). The second one turned into a third. The trip turned into a community (but I guess company). The community turned into events in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Australia, London, Houston, New York, Dubai, Bali, and counting.

I’ve now taken 5,000+ people on trips and hosted events across four continents. I still don’t have a large team. I do most things myself. I don’t have big budgets. I don’t have many industry connects. I still don’t come from this background. I just care about the thing more than I care about doing it perfectly.

The Way I Built This Doesn’t Follow Any Playbook

Every business advisor will tell you the same thing: pick one city, go deep, build local, then expand.

I get why that’s the advice. It’s efficient. It’s measurable. It makes sense on a spreadsheet.

It doesn’t make sense for a global diaspora.

DOTC isn’t for women in one city. It’s for South Asian women who are everywhere. London, Toronto, Dubai, Sydney, Houston, Bali. They’re scattered. They’re building lives in places where they’re often the only desi girl in their friend group. They’re not going to wait for me to “establish presence” in their market before they need community.

So I go to them. Wherever they are. Even when I’m not living in that city. Even when I don’t have a network there yet. Even when the logistics are ten times harder than they’d be if I just stayed in one place and focused.

I’ve hosted events in cities where I knew almost nobody. Where I had to build relationships from scratch with venues, vendors, and local partners in a matter of weeks. Where my network had gotten smaller the longer I’d been away, which meant every event required more outreach, more cold calls, more proving that DOTC was worth their time.

See our line up global events and trips happening right now!

It would be so much easier to pick Houston and go deep. Host monthly events in one city. Build a loyal local base. The smart move.

I don’t do the smart move. I do the hard one and I REALLY WISH I KNEW WHY BECAUSE DAMN. My community is global, so DOTC has to be global. Even when that means the work is exponentially harder.

What Nobody Sees Behind the Events

I want to be transparent about what this actually takes because I think people see a sold-out event flyer and assume there’s a machine behind it.

There’s no machine unless you count me as the machine. There’s me, one person on my team, and a commitment to making it happen regardless of the constraints.

Most of the events we’ve hosted, especially in the early days, were free. We didn’t charge. We didn’t break even. We lost money. Not a little. I ended up pouring so much of my time on top of that so I lost time which is money.

I did it anyway because the act of bringing people into a room together mattered more than the margin. A desi girl in London who’s never met another South Asian woman who travels solo showing up to a DOTC dinner and realizing she’s not alone? That’s worth more than a ticket price. That’s the whole mission.

We’ve got an app dropping that will make this all so much easier. Get on the waitlist now.

Even now, we keep our events affordable and accessible. That’s intentional. I’ve seen what happens when community brands price out the people they were built for. It defeats the purpose. Quality matters, absolutely. We’re not cutting corners on the experience. Also, I think most people do community wrong. Yeah, I’m gonna write about that next. I want my audience to be global, I want people from South Asia to be able to join, especially if I’m hosting events and trips in their part of the world.

The challenge is maintaining that standard while also not running the business into the ground. Every event is a negotiation between what I want to deliver and what the budget allows. I’ve gotten creative with that negotiation. Brand partnerships help. Sponsorships help. Scaling the trips to subsidize the events helps. It’s a constant puzzle that I’m solving in real time.

The Real Challenge: Building a Global Brand While Not Being There

Here’s the part that makes what I’m doing genuinely hard, not just busy.

For the last six years, I’ve been traveling. Moving between countries. Living in Bali, Dubai, Houston, sometimes for months, sometimes for weeks. That lifestyle gave me incredible content, global perspective, and the ability to connect with my community in person across multiple continents.

It also meant that every time I left a city, my network in that city got a little smaller. Relationships that needed in-person maintenance went quiet. Venues I’d built rapport with moved on to other partners. Local collaborators found someone who was actually there.

So when I come back to a city to host an event, I’m often rebuilding relationships that would already be warm if I’d just stayed put. The work doubles. The outreach triples. I’m reintroducing myself to a market I already cracked open, because I left before the roots went deep.

Want to be a partner or vendor to get visibility at our sold out events? You can apply here.

Most event founders live in the city where they host events. They know the venues. They know the vendors. They have relationships built on years of being present. I’m doing the same work from a different time zone, sometimes planning an event in one country while physically sitting in another.

I’m not complaining about this. I chose it. I’m naming it because I want people to understand that what DOTC does isn’t easy, and the fact that it happens at all is a testament to how much this community matters to me. Not a testament to some genius business strategy.. A testament to caring about the mission enough to figure it out every single time, even when the conditions are working against me.

Why I Keep Going

I’ll tell you exactly why.

I was at an event recently. Small one. Nothing fancy. A group of DOTC women sitting around a table, eating, talking, laughing. One of them came up to me afterward and said “I moved to this city eight months ago and I haven’t made a single friend until tonight.”

That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

I don’t come from an events background. I don’t have investors funding this expansion (but at some point, I wish I did). I don’t even really work with brands or have that many sponsors. I don’t have a team scouting locations and managing logistics in every city. I have a phone, a community that shows up, and a belief that bringing South Asian women & men together in a room is one of the most important things I can do with this platform.

We’re looking for UGC creators who want to attend our events or trips and can make impeccable, meaningful, and high quality content. Apply here.

The business model isn’t traditional. The approach isn’t conventional. The expansion doesn’t follow any playbook. I’m building wide when everyone says go deep. I’m hosting in cities where I don’t live. I’m keeping events affordable when the economics say charge more. I’m doing it alone when the workload says hire.

I do it because every time I walk into one of these rooms and see women who found each other through something I built, I know it’s working. Not perfectly. Not at scale yet. Not with the margins a business advisor would approve of. It’s working in the way that actually matters. People are less alone because DOTC exists.

That’s the metric I optimize for. Everything else I’m figuring out as I go.

What’s Coming Up

I’m going to use this section to tell you what we have planned because if I’m going to write about how much this matters to me, I should probably show you. If you believe in our mission, we appreciate your support. I know you see an influencer, you see hundreds of thousands of followers, and you think she’s good. Community works when we are in this together. Share a post, like a post, share an event with your friends, tag someone who would want to go on a trip.

EVENTS:

HOUSTON:

Singles Night where you can pitch a friend & mingle with other singles

Six Figure Personal Brand Workshop: A 1 hour workshop followed by 1 hour of mingling at Sky Yoga.

Female Founders Retreat on May 29-31 where we bring together 6 female founders to bond in nature at a weekend retreat

DALLAS:

Summer Kick Off this Friday on 5/15 where I’ll be there for once! Dress cute and summery because summer hits early in Texas

Singles Night for 30+ in Plano at a South Asian Art Gallery

NEW YORK:

Hike + Farm to Table Lunch Upstate on June 13th

NYC 30+ Singles Night in Flat Iron where we dress up in traditional clothes with some fun brand surprises!

DUBAI:

Korean BBQ Supper Club at a Pakistani-chefs home on 5/14

GROUP TRIPS:

PAKISTAN

DESI ISLAND BARBADOS

PERU

KENYA

MOROCCO

JAPAN

DESI ISLAND BALI

THAILAND RETREAT

COSTA RICA

Every single one of these exists because I believe bringing people together is worth the effort, even when the effort is unreasonable. Come to one & see what I mean.

The Long Game

I think about this a lot. Whether what I’m doing is sustainable. Whether the wide approach will eventually become the smart approach. Whether playing the long game just looks like chaos in the short term.

Here’s what I know. Every event in a new city is a seed. Every trip is a proof of concept. Every woman who comes to one thing and then comes back for another is evidence that this works. The brand partnerships are growing. The community is growing. The name recognition is growing in rooms I’m not even in.

Most people who build communities start local and go global. I started global and I’m learning how to go deep in the places that matter most. It’s not the traditional path. It’s mine. I care about this thing too much to shrink it into something manageable. I’d rather it be overwhelming and real than small and safe.

If you’re building something that doesn’t follow the playbook, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It might mean you’re building something the playbook hasn’t caught up to yet.

Do it anyway.

This is the kind of essay I write on my free Substack every week. The deeper stuff, the business breakdowns, the dating pieces, the stuff too honest for Instagram, lives behind the paywall. $10/month.

Subscribe now

When I was 25, she introduced me as “my daughter, she’s a pharmacist and lives in Los Angeles.”

When I was 26, she introduced me as “my daughter, she works in tech… something online? for a health company but I don’t know what she does.”

When I was 28, she introduced me as “my daughter” and then changed the subject until the other aunty asked if I’m married. Then I walked away and she got embarrassed to answer that question.

Now I’m 31 and she introduces me as “my daughter, she has a travel company, she’s very successful, mashAllah” with the energy of someone who just survived a war and is telling you about the view from the other side. Just kidding. She says she’s 31 aur iski shaadi nahi hoee hain or whatever.

This is my desi girl pipeline. It just doesn’t go where anyone expects.

The Pipeline They Planned

If you grew up South Asian, the career conversation in your household sounded like a multiple choice question with only three correct answers:

A) Doctor B) Lawyer C) Engineer

Anything from D-Z was straight disappointment.

There was no option for “I want to try different things and figure it out as I go.” There was no option for “I want to build something that doesn’t exist yet.” There was definitely no option for “I want to quit my stable career with benefits and start an Instagram page.”

The average American changes jobs 12 times during their career (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Median tenure at a job is 3.9 years. 59% of US professionals were actively looking for new work in 2024. Career pivoting is statistically normal. It’s the American default [ got deep thoughts on this too. why do we have to work multiple jobs at a time to survive right now?]

Unless you’re desi. Then it’s a crisis.

Every pivot I’ve made has come with a family meeting I didn’t ask for and at least one person saying “but you worked so hard for that degree.” As if the degree expires when you stop using it. As if the only acceptable return on education is doing that exact thing forever.

The Pipeline I Actually Took

Here’s my real career timeline. I’m going to walk through each one because every single pivot taught me something I use today as a founder, and none of them were wasted.

Career 1: Pharmacist

This was the “correct” answer. The one my parents approved of. The one that made sense to every auntie at every dinner party.

I ran a pharmacy. Not just filled prescriptions. I ran the operation. Managed a team. Handled inventory, scheduling, customer complaints, insurance disputes, hiring, training. Every day was triage: what’s urgent, what can wait, who needs help, what’s falling apart.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but pharmacy was my first business. I was the person in charge. Even thought it wasn’t my business, I saw the ins and outs. You’d think as a pharmacist, I’d focus on the clinical bits but no… I did scheduling, inventory, customer success, stocking, cash register, literally everything. When something went wrong, there was no manager to call. I was the manager even though I wasn’t.

The skill I stole: operations and leadership. Every time I manage a DOTC trip with 20+ guests across 3 countries and 15 vendors, I’m running the pharmacy. Different product. Same muscle.

The other skill I stole: translating jargon. My entire job was taking complex medical information and making it make sense for a normal human. That’s literally what I do now. I take complex ideas about identity, culture, business, travel, and make them accessible. The Substack essays, the Instagram captions, the workshop curriculum. It’s all pharmacy brain. .

I also learned how to work with people. All kinds of people. Patients who were scared, angry, confused, demanding. Staff who needed motivation. Doctors who needed to be told they were wrong without making them feel wrong. People skills aren’t optional in pharmacy. They’re the entire job.

I left because I knew within a year that I’d chosen the career for my parents, not for myself. The stability was real. The fulfillment was not. I was 26 and I could see the next 30 years laid out in front of me and I wanted to throw up.

Career 2: Marketing at a Health Tech Company

Here’s the funny part. I got this job because of pharmacy.

I’d been networking on LinkedIn without knowing that “networking on LinkedIn” was a thing people did strategically. I was just connecting with people from the pharmacy world, posting about healthcare, having conversations. I was already looking for an out but I never thought I could have one. Obviously, being a frontline worker during COVID motivated me to find a way out.

I already understood marketing before I ever had the title. I understood what makes people trust a product, how to communicate value, how to talk to people, how to take jargon and simply it. Pharmacy taught me all of that. The health tech company just gave me a team, a budget, and a title. I was able to sell myself in that role. I was something that company didn’t have… someone with experience and a pharmacist. Nobody else on my team was from a healthcare background at a health tech company.

The skill I stole: marketing, influencer marketing, paid ads, campaign strategy, and what it takes to ship a product in the tech world. I learned how to build a marketing campaign from scratch. What to consider. How to measure whether it’s working. How to work with influencers (which is hilarious in retrospect because I had no idea I’d become one).

I also learned networking as a strategy, not just a behavior. Pharmacy built me a network without me trying. Health tech showed me what happens when you leverage that network intentionally.

Everything I learned about marketing and pitching in this role is what led me to build my personal brand. Ran it last month and people asked for it again so… May 31st, 2026. 2 hours. 30 mins Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $20 off.

Career 3: Journalist

This is the pivot nobody in my family understood.

Pharmacy made sense. Marketing made sense (sort of). Journalism? “You want to write? For money? Who’s going to pay you to write?”

Everyone, apparently. Turns out the ability to write clearly, tell stories, and share ideas is the most valuable skill I’ve ever developed.

Journalism taught me how to structure a narrative so people keep reading. How to take a complex story and find the angle that makes it interesting. How to put my name on something and let strangers have opinions about it.

That last part was the most important. The first time I published something under my own name, I was terrified. What if people disagreed? What if they judged me? What if they thought I was stupid?

They did all of those things. I published more anyway.

The skill I stole: writing, storytelling, and the ability to share my ideas publicly without needing permission. My Substack essay about dating that went viral with thousands of views and became my highest-converting piece? That’s a feature story. I just didn’t pitch it to an editor. I published it myself but… I have written for Forbes, Fodor’s, Travel & Leisure, Business Insider, and more which is PRETTY INSANE TO ME.

I still think my storytelling isn’t as good as it could be. I’m working on it. The fact that I’m aware of that gap is also something journalism gave me. The ability to self-edit and know when something isn’t hitting the way you want it to.

Career 4: Unemployed

Most people leave this part out of their career timeline. I’m including it because it’s the most important career I’ve had.

I didn’t have a job nor a plan. I didn’t have the safety net of a title that made me sound like I had my life together.

What I had was clarity.

When you strip away the job title, the routine, the salary, the identity that comes from “I work at ___,” you’re forced to sit with one question: who am I without all of that?

The answer I came to: I’m someone who builds things. I’m someone who connects people. I’m someone who’s better at creating opportunities than following them. I have great ideas and I need to learn to trust myself. I see problems and come up with solutions.

I wouldn’t have started DOTC if I’d gone straight from journalism to another comfortable job. The gap was the gift. It was uncomfortable enough to force me to build something of my own instead of building someone else’s thing. It was the best but worst chapter of my life and one that deserves its own post or two.

Career 5: Content Creator / Influencer

This is the career everyone sees and the one that’s hardest to explain to desi parents.

“So you post pictures on Instagram?”

Sure, mom. I also taught myself photography, videography, copywriting, editing, analytics, community management, email marketing, automation, brand strategy, sales, and negotiation. I became an entire marketing department in one person…from my phone and no roadmap, guide book, instruction manual.

The moment I (should’ve) realized this wasn’t a hobby was the first time someone paid me for a post. Not a lot. Enough to make me think “wait, there’s a business model here.”

I say should’ve because I didn’t think that way immediately. It was a fluke. It was by accident. It wasn’t possible to turn this into a career because of my deep seeded insecurities and limited mindset. I always kick myself because if I had more confidence and was okay being a pioneer or a leader in the very early days, I might be somewhere else. Yeah, I was positing OOTDs in 2012. I wasn’t afraid of cringe back then. Anyways, that was a side note to let you know that it wasn’t always easy and that these articles never fully get to the depth of it but I try to be really honest and authentic.

The skill I stole: how to make people care. That’s the skill underneath every other skill in content creation. How to stop someone mid-scroll. How to make them feel something. How to earn trust through a screen. How to turn attention into action.

Every trip I sell, every ebook I launch, every workshop I run, every Substack subscription I earn, it works because I spent years learning how to connect with an audience. That skill is worth more than my pharmacy degree. There, I said it.

I wrote a full guide on building a personal brand from scratch. From choosing your platform to pricing your first product. If you don’t want a workshop and you prefer reading about it, this one is for you.

Career 6: Founder

This is where every thread comes together.

Let me tell you what a single day at DOTC looks like. Yesterday I wrote a Substack essay (journalism), negotiated a brand partnership (health tech), managed logistics for a 25-person international trip (pharmacy), filmed 3 Instagram reels (content creator), built an automation sequence for my email list (tech), and stared at my ceiling for 20 minutes wondering if any of this makes sense (unemployed).

Every career I’ve ever had shows up in my work daily. Nothing was wasted. The pharmacist brain runs operations. The marketing brain runs campaigns. The journalist brain writes the essays. The content creator brain builds the audience. The unemployed brain reminds me to keep going and to launch my wild ideas into the world.

Dose of Travel Club is a travel club, a media brand, a community platform, a content business, and a lifestyle brand all in one. It does so many things because it’s an extension of me. Trips to Morocco, Bali, Pakistan, Japan, Peru, and beyond. Camp DOTC this summer. A community app launching this year. Two ebooks. A paid Substack. A workshop.

None of that is possible without the 5 careers that came before it. The pivots were all apart of the journey!

The Pipeline Nobody Designed

Here’s what I want to say to everyone who’s being told their career doesn’t make sense.

The pipeline your parents designed (doctor, lawyer, engineer) was built for stability. It was built by immigrants who needed certainty because they’d experienced the opposite. It was built with love, even when it felt like control.

The pipeline you’re building doesn’t have a name yet. It doesn’t have a clear trajectory. It doesn’t look like anything your family recognizes. It looks like 12 jobs in 10 years (which, by the way, is the American average). It’s also apart of a different generation. To be honest, we’re making more money than our parents and can’t afford the same things like a house. We have AI to work up against. Some of us are working multiple jobs despite earning 6 figures. You almost need to be able to think differently and know how to pivot when shit hits the fan. It looks like pivoting when something stops fitting. It looks like trusting yourself enough to leave the “correct” answer for the honest one.

I’ve had 6 careers by 31 and it’s not because I couldn’t commit. Each one taught me something the next one needed. The pharmacist couldn’t have become the founder without the marketer, the journalist, the content creator, and the unemployed girl staring at her ceiling wondering what she was supposed to do with her life.

So even if your journey doesn’t make sense to anyone, including yourself. If you didn’t go to school for it or if you’re the only one…

Do it anyway.

I’m running a personal brand workshop for anyone who wants to build something of their own. 2 hours of everything I’ve learned to build the personal brand that pays me and has helped me get to where I am today. 2 hours with 30 mins of Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $20 off. I don’t do these often, taking time out of my Sunday for anyone who’s serious. Join me here!

The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World is for the desi girls ready to see it for themselves.

The Personal Brand Guide is for the ones ready to build something.

If you want to be in a room full of women who want to live a free life, travel the world, and want to take the leap, join a DOTC trip or Camp DOTC this summer.

Find friends in your city or abroad. The DOTC community app waitlist is open.

Sources:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024): The average American worker changes jobs 12 times during their career. Median tenure 3.9 years as of January 2024.

• High5 Test, citing LinkedIn Workforce Report (2024): 59% of US professionals were actively looking for new work.

• Pew Research Center: Indian Americans have the highest bachelor’s degree rate of any ethnic group at 75%.

• US Census Bureau (2023): Asian American median household income $112,800, 43% higher than national median.

Not because I’m rich and it’s not bc brands are comping me. If they were, I’d be requesting a PJ like Acquired got for her bachelorette bc that’s insane? It’s bc I know how to travel hack and I’ve been stacking credit card points for years. One thing about me is if I’m earning or spending money, I’mma make it work for me.

The thing is travel hacking works but it’s tedious as hell.

You have to manually search award calendars. Track points across five different programs. Remember which card gets you 3x on dining and which one gets you 5x on office supplies. Set calendar reminders to use your travel credits before they expire. Check availability every single day because award seats disappear in hours.

I’ve been doing this for years and I’m good at it but I’m also busy running a business, and frankly, I got tired of doing the mental gymnastics every time I wanted to book a trip.

So I handed the whole operation over to AI.

Now it automates the annoying parts so I can just live my life and let it tell me when there’s a deal and so it can optimize my points so I don’t have to.

Here’s what that looks like so you can do it, too.

The Basics: How I Travel for Free

If you’re new to this, here’s the extremely simplified version.

Credit cards give you points. Those points can be transferred to airline and hotel programs. Those programs let you book flights and hotels for way less than you’d pay in cash.

Example: A business class flight to Paris costs $4,000 in cash. Or 70,000 points. If you have the right credit cards and you’re strategic about how you earn, 70,000 points is about three months of normal spending.

So instead of paying $4,000, you just... use points you were going to earn anyway.

The catch? You have to know which cards to use, where to transfer your points, when to book, and how to spot a good deal vs. a terrible one.

If you’re reading this and you’re like huh? Let me stop and share which cards I have so you can get on board.

Chase Business Card: I got the Business one with United to use for my business expenses.

Capital One Venture X: If I could only have one travel card, it would be this one. The annual fee isn’t ridiculous like some of the others, I still get lounge access, TSA, and other perks. It pays for itself and I use all of the perks. Get it here.

Chase Sapphire Preferred: This is only $95 and is a good starter card. The Reserve would be the next one and that competes with Capital One Venture X (but more expensive).

Next is the ATM card I use for travel, so there’s no credit card points for this one but it gives you all your ATM fees back so it really is that girl when it comes to travel. The Charles Schwab Debit Card is that girl.

That’s the part most people don’t want to learn and honestly, I don’t blame them.

That’s where AI comes in. Claude, do your thang.

I use AI in many ways both personally and for my business. I wrote an article on the tools I use that cost me $200/month. If you like topics like this, you can read it here.

What I’m Booking This Summer

I’m going to Paris in July and Pakistan in October (well, that’s the tentative plan. Rio or Mexico City sound good. So, does NYC. Ahhhh decisions, decisions). Both flights will be free. Here’s how.

Paris (July 2026)

The flight: Houston to Paris, roundtrip, business class (one way) and economy (return).

The cost: 90,000 United miles. Zero dollars.

What it would cost in cash: Around $3,500 for business class one way, $800 for economy back. Call it $4,300 total.

How I’m paying for it: I have 141,000 United miles sitting in my account. I earned them by putting business expenses, software, and travel on my United Business Card, flying United a few times this year, and transferring some Chase points over when there was a bonus.

I didn’t do anything fancy. I just used the right card for the right purchase and let the points pile up.

Pakistan (October 2026)

The flight: Houston to Karachi via Istanbul, roundtrip.

The cost: 45,000 Capital One miles transferred to Turkish Airlines. Zero dollars.

The bonus: Turkish lets you do a free stopover in Istanbul. So I’m actually getting two trips (Pakistan and a long weekend in Istanbul) for the price of one award booking.

What it would cost in cash: $1,200-1,500 for the flight. Another $600-800 if I booked Istanbul separately.

How I’m paying for it: I have 32,000 Capital One miles right now. I need 13,000 more by October. At 2x points on everything, that’s $6,500 in spending. I’ll hit that naturally by summer just with my normal spending.

The Problem: Travel Hacking is a Full-Time Job

Here’s what I used to do before I automated this.

Every time I wanted to book a trip, I’d spend hours:

• Manually searching award calendars on United, Air France, Turkish, Emirates

• Checking dates three days before and after to find availability

• Comparing cash prices vs. points to see if it was even worth it

• Transferring points between programs and hoping I didn’t mess up the math

• Setting reminders to check again tomorrow in case availability changed

And even then, I’d sometimes miss deals because I wasn’t checking at the right time or I forgot to look at a specific airline.

It’s exhausting and I don’t enjoy this but I enjoy not paying money for flights.

For most people, this is why travel hacking never happens….it’s not because they don’t have the points but bc the execution is too annoying.

Now you can hack your flights and book a Dose of Travel Club trip. Our 2026 line up is FIRE. We’ve got Barbados, Thailand, Pakistan, Kenya, and Japan.

How I’m Using AI to Automate the Whole Thing

I gave Claude (the AI I use for everything) a simple task: monitor award availability for my trips and tell me when there’s a deal.

Here’s what it’s doing for me.

1. It’s tracking flights across multiple airlines

Every day, AI checks:

• United (Houston to Paris)

• Air France (Houston to Paris)

• Turkish Airlines (Houston to Pakistan via Istanbul)

• Emirates (Houston to Pakistan via Dubai)

It’s looking for business class availability under 70,000 miles for Paris and under 85,000 miles for Pakistan. I gave it a target threshold, you can set one too. You tell it if there’s a point drop of over 20,000 miles, notify me.

When it finds something, it emails me. I click the link, book the flight, done.

I don’t have to remember to check. I don’t have to search manually. I just wait for the alert.

2. It caught gaps in my credit card strategy

I thought I had my setup dialed in. Turns out I was leaving money on the table.

AI flagged:

• I wasn’t using my $300 annual Capital One Venture X travel credit (just letting it expire like an idiot)

• I was booking hotels direct instead of through the Capital One portal, missing out on 10x points vs. 2x

• I was putting dining spend on the wrong card (2x instead of 4x with Amex Gold)

Small stuff but it adds up to about 180,000 extra points per year I wasn’t earning.

That’s another free international trip I was just not collecting.

3. It built me a 12-month roadmap

AI mapped out exactly:

• Which cards to use for which purchases

• When to apply for new cards (and in what order to avoid 5/24 violations)

• How much I need to spend to hit signup bonuses

• When my points will hit thresholds for specific trips

I don’t have to think about it anymore. I just follow the plan.

The Part You Actually Care About: Can You Do This?

Yes. Even if you’ve never travel hacked before.

Here’s what you need:

1. A few credit cards (ideally transferable points cards like Chase Sapphire, Capital One Venture, Amex)

2. A rough idea of where you want to go

3. Access to AI (I use Claude)

I’m a United girlie, so I got a through them and Chase. I also have the Capital One Venture X.

You give AI your credit card list, your points balances, and your travel goals. It tells you:

• How to book the trip for the least points

• Which cards to apply for if you’re short on points

• Where you’re leaving value on the table

The hard part used to be knowing which airline partners to transfer to, which routes have good availability, and how to maximize category bonuses.

Now AI just does that for you.

You don’t have to become an expert. You just have to ask the right questions.

What I Built (And What You Can Steal)

I didn’t stop at asking AI for advice. I had it build me a flight monitoring system.

Here’s what it does:

• Checks award availability daily across United, Air France, Turkish, Emirates

• Sends me an email when business class drops below my target price

• Tracks my points balances and tells me when I can book specific trips

• Reminds me to use travel credits before they expire

It’s running in the background right now. I don’t touch it.

If you want to build the same thing, here’s the breakdown:

1. Give AI your routes (origin, destination, flexible dates)

2. Set your thresholds (max points you’re willing to spend per trip)

3. Let it monitor availability and alert you when there’s a match

The Mindset Shift

Travel hacking isn’t about being rich or having a million points.

It’s about being strategic with the money you’re already spending.

I’m not putting extra purchases on my cards to earn points. I’m just using the right card for purchases I was going to make anyway.

Same spending=More points=Free flights.

The difference is I’m not doing the math in my head anymore or the tracking. AI is.

When award availability opens up, I’m not frantically searching five airline websites. AI already found it and sent me the link.

All I have to do is book.

What’s Next

I’m booking Paris and Pakistan in the next few weeks. Both for free.

After that, I’m going to keep letting AI run the system in the background. It’ll keep monitoring flights, tracking points, optimizing my card usage.

When I decide I want to go somewhere new, I’ll just tell it where and let it figure out the rest.

This is how I’ve been traveling for years. The only difference now is I’m not doing the annoying part anymore.

I’m just living and AI is making sure I never pay for a flight again.

P.S. If you want to try this yourself, here’s the exact prompt I use:

“I have [X points in Program A, Y points in Program B]. I want to fly from [origin] to [destination] in [month]. Analyze all possible redemption options (direct bookings, transfer partners, stopover routes) and tell me: 1) the option that costs the least points, 2) the option with the best value per point, 3) any gaps in my credit card strategy where I’m leaving points on the table.”

Copy that. Fill in your info. Send it to Claude or ChatGPT.

It’ll give you a full breakdown in under a minute.

Then decide if you want to do the booking manually or have it monitor availability for you.

You’re welcome.

Quick context. I’m Nabila. I run Dose of Travel Club, a South Asian travel and lifestyle brand with 270K+ followers. I’ve been doing this for three years. I quit pharmacist, pivoted into health tech, became a journalist, built a personal brand, then a business, and then a few others that failed or I gave up on. I run a lean team with $200/month in AI tools. I’ve generated seven figures from the internet.

I’m not saying that to flex. I’m saying it because the internet is full of people teaching you how to make money who have never made money from anything other than teaching you how to make money. I’ve actually built the thing. Multiple things. Here’s what works.

1. Paid Community / Membership

What it is: People pay a monthly fee to be part of your world. Could be a Substack, a Discord, a Circle community, or an app.

Read more

She’s the CEO of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, and she went on Keke Palmer’s podcast and said “work from home culture is career suicide for women.” She doubled down in Elle: “I believe that it disproportionately affects women.”

The internet lost its mind. People called her out of touch. Privileged. Tone-deaf.

I think she’s right. I also think she’s wrong. Let me explain.

She’s right that visibility matters. That being in the room, being seen, being physically present creates opportunities that Zoom never will. She’s wrong that this only applies to women in traditional jobs. It applies to everyone, including the girlies who work for themselves, run their own brands, and technically can work from anywhere.

I know this because I just lived it.

The Decision

I spent six years living abroad. Dubai. Bali. 30+ countries. Working remotely and bouncing between countries like it was normal because for me it was. I built my entire business from a laptop in places most people only visit on vacation. I was productive. I was creative. I was genuinely happy.

Then I moved back to the US.

Not because I wanted to. I had to.

Here’s the truth that digital nomad content never shows you: as an influencer and creator, you make the most money in the US. Full stop. I really wanted that to not be true because I genuinely believe I work just as well remotely. I can get so much done from anywhere, especially when I’m somewhere that makes me happy and creative. I think I do better abroad actually.

It doesn’t matter. The industry knows when you’re here. I don’t fully understand how. Even with a VPN, even posting at US hours, they know. Being physically present in the US means:

• Getting added to PR lists

• Invitations to speaking events, conferences, summits

• Brands and agencies responding to your emails

• Access to networking that simply doesn’t happen over Zoom

• People treating you like you’re serious about your career

Heavy on the last one. Not sure what it is, whether its jealousy or whether its not hating your life that makes it seem like you’re not serious. People just respond differently when they know you’re here and available. The proximity signals commitment in a way that “I’m based in Bali” never does.

I wanted to prove that wrong. Six years of building a successful business from abroad should have been proof enough. It wasn’t. Or maybe it was, but my goals and the vision I have required me to come back.

One Month Back. The Proof.

I’ve been back for one month. One. Here’s what’s happened:

I’ve been added to more PR lists than I was on in the last two years combined. How do they even know I’m back? I genuinely don’t understand the mechanics of it. I didn’t announce it. They just... know.

I was invited to speak at an Ivy League university. (I later declined, but the invitation itself was a first.)

I’ve been in touch with more agencies than ever. Conversations that were crickets from Bali suddenly have momentum.

I’ve been throwing events in Houston and New York. Collaborating with desi brands. I just gave away four tickets to the Hasan Raheem concert as a community perk for the DOTC app waitlist.

One month. After six years abroad where I had to fight for every single opportunity, one month back in the US and the doors started opening on their own. I know if I went all in and made more US travel content, made more brandable content, that would all explode.

That’s the part that made me angry. Not grateful. Angry. I was the same person with the same following and the same business six months ago. The only thing that changed was my location. The opportunities didn’t find me because I got better. They found me because I got closer.

Emma Grede was right. Visibility drives access, not just being online either. I just wish it wasn’t true.

The Part Nobody Talks About

According to the US Department of State, over 70% of expats experience reverse culture shock when returning home. A 2024 systematic review found that 56% of returnees report moderate re-entry stress, with some studies showing rates as high as 92% (International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2024).

Here’s the part that makes reverse culture shock hit different for me: I’ve never actually lived in Texas before.

I’m from New York. Graduated at 24 and moved to Los Angeles. I’ve been traveling around ever since. Now I’m in Houston… this is the longest time I’ve been here. My family relocated here. I don’t have a friend group here. I don’t have a community. I don’t have a favorite coffee shop or a gym I go to or a neighborhood I know. I’m not “coming home.” I’m starting over in a place that’s technically home but practically brand new.

Last summer I tried New York for three months. I gave it a real shot (since traveling non-stop). I did get some opportunities. Clearly it wasn’t enough to make me stay. The cost of living was brutal, the energy was intense, and I still felt like I was performing a version of my life instead of living it. I don’t know if I want to do New York again. I do miss the opportunities, network, and access but I also hate the environment there and how it feels so uninviting at times… maybe I’ll do a post on creator events and being in those rooms.

So now I’m in Houston. Close to family. That’s the only reason for being here.

It’s also a city where, professionally, I feel like I’m at a disadvantage. The events, the networking, the industry, it all happens in New York and LA. Houston is incredible for food, for community, for affordability. It’s not where creators or entrepreneurs go to level up. That tension lives in my chest every single day and I still feel like I’m not being “serious” about my career to others despite me being so locked in.

Why I Came Back (the real reasons)

I want to be honest about all of it…not just the strategic reasons.

I came back to make more money. That’s true. I also came back because I want to meet my person. I want to be in a place where I could meet my potential husband. Traveling all the time meant I was constantly coming and going, meeting incredible people who were sometimes at the very beginning of their journey, just figuring out who they are and what they want. That’s beautiful. It’s also not where I am anymore.

I want to be around people who are also building. Who are further along. Who challenge me intellectually and professionally. I missed certain levels of conversation, networking, ambition. Bali has builders, for sure. It also has a lot of people on a gap year calling it entrepreneurship.

I feel like you have to be somewhat settled, have a home base, have a network, to really build to the next level. As much as I love travel, I also love my mission. I love what I’m building with DOTC and my personal brand. I’m building for the long haul. That requires roots, even temporary ones.

I want to be close to family. I’m the eldest of four. My parents are getting older. The guilt of being 12 time zones away when your mom calls hits different once you’re past 30. The world feels really heavy right now and being away from family felt even heavier.

All of these reasons are real. They’re also in constant tension with each other. I need to be in the US for money and access. I need to be near family for my heart. I need to be abroad for my sanity. No single city satisfies all three.

I built Dose of Travel Club specifically for women navigating this. The need for community when you’re between worlds. If you’re in this in-between space, come on a trip or Camp DOTC this summer. You’ll be in a room full of women who get it without you having to explain it.

What I Miss about the Nomad Lifestyle

I miss being out in nature every day. In Bali, I’d ride my scooter past rice paddies to get coffee. Here I drive past a Chick-fil-A and a car wash.

I miss healthy food being the default, not the expensive exception. A smoothie bowl in Bali was $4. A smoothie bowl in Houston is $16 and I have to drive 25 minutes to find one.

I miss not being surrounded by consumerism and capitalism at every turn. Every surface in America is trying to sell you something. Every interaction has a transaction underneath it. I forgot how relentless that is until I came back. So much so that it makes me not want to leave the house.

I miss being able to walk. Anywhere. Without a car. Without a parking lot. Without a highway.

I miss feeling free. That’s the hardest one to articulate. It’s not about freedom in the political sense. It’s about the feeling of lightness that comes from living somewhere that doesn’t demand you perform productivity every waking hour. I’ll be productive anyways but its because I want to be.

I miss going to the beach every day. Seeing sunset without planning it. Sitting somewhere beautiful without it being a “special occasion.”

I miss not feeling this constant pressure to perform. In Bali, I worked when I was inspired and rested when I wasn’t. Here, if I’m not working, I feel guilty. The American productivity machine gets inside your head fast.

I miss the community energy that exists outside of the US. Everything here is so individualistic. In Bali, in Pakistan, in Thailand, in Morocco, in most of the places I’ve lived, there’s a collectiveness to daily life. People eat together. Neighbors know each other. The rhythm of the day includes other humans. Here, everyone’s in their car, in their house, on their phone, alone.

Since I’ve been back, all I do is work... because that’s what everyone I know is doing. I do love my work, but I love a balanced lifestlye. I kinda do think the whole hustle & grind, boss babe movement is not it. You can work, earn well, and live well without giving everything else up. Weekends are chill and people don’t seem to make plans. I never waste a weekend and I fear I’ve “wasted” every single one so far… I’m not sure if its the generation, the age, or the rising of cost of everything but it feels like there’s a larger disconnect than before. I always made plans even when I lived in NYC.

The Loneliness of Coming Home

Here’s the thing that caught me off guard.

Abroad, I was a solo traveler. I was technically “alone” a lot of the time but I was rarely lonely.

Here, I’m surrounded by family. I’m in my hometown. I have people who love me within driving distance. I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been.

The loneliness isn’t about being physically alone. It’s about context. Nobody here shares the context of the last six years of my life. I can’t reference a sunrise in Ubud or a random Tuesday in Dubai or the feeling of hearing the call to prayer in Marrakech and have someone across the table nod because they were there too. I just write about it all and maybe I’ll have to turn it into a book one day.

My family loves me. They don’t fully understand my life. My friends here are wonderful. They’re also in a completely different chapter: mortgages, kids, 9-to-5 routines. I’m building an app, hosting new group trips, scaling my team, and writing Substack essays at midnight.

The gap between my internal world and my external environment has never been wider.

The community app I’m building is specifically for this… an opportunity to meet like-minded people to travel the world with. Find friends to travel with. Find friends in your city. You won’t have to explain travel to them. You’ll be able to find someone with the same interests. Waitlist is open.

Where I’m Landing

I don’t have a clean answer…but I have a plan.

Stay in the US through the end of this year. Launch new trips. Launch the app. Hit the financial targets. Film the content. Throw the events. Build the thing. Take advantage of the proximity that apparently matters so much to this industry. I guess this means I need a trip to NYC as well.

Then reassess. Maybe Dubai for Q1 2027. Maybe Bali for a creative season. Maybe somewhere I haven’t lived yet.

Emma Grede was right about visibility. Being here has opened more doors in one month than two years of being abroad. That’s the practical reality. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter.

She was also talking about a traditional corporate structure. I’m not in one. I built my business specifically so I could work from anywhere. The fact that “anywhere” still defaults to “America if you want to make real money” is something I’m still wrestling with.

The freedom to choose is the whole point. I didn’t build a location-independent business so I could stay in one location. I built it so I could choose. Right now I’m choosing the US for strategic reasons. That doesn’t mean I’m choosing it forever.

To anyone who’s lived abroad and came back and feels like they don’t fit: you’re not ungrateful. You’re not dramatic. You’re not “too good” for where you came from. You just changed. The place didn’t change with you. That gap is real and it takes time to navigate. If you’re in the same boat, hit me up. I’m still wrestling with the idea on where to plant my roots, settle down, or where to invest my time and money.

This is the kind of essay I write on my free Substack every week. If you want the deeper stuff, the dating pieces, the business breakdowns, the stuff too honest for Instagram, the paid tier is $10/month. Next article is on all the ways you can monetize with a personal brand.

I teach how to build a six-figure personal brand that generates income from anywhere in my workshop. 2 hours of everything I’ve learned. 30 minutes of Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. I don’t do these often, taking time out of my Sunday for anyone who’s serious.

The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World was written for women thinking about this exact leap.

Sources:

• Emma Grede on Keke Palmer’s podcast “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer” and Elle interview (April 2026): “Work from home culture is career suicide” for women.

• US Department of State, cited in GoAbroad.com: Over 70% of expats experience reverse culture shock.

• International Journal of Intercultural Relations (2024): Systematic review finding 56% of returnees report moderate re-entry stress, with rates as high as 92%.

In six years I’ve collected a lot of opinions I’ve never said publicly because the internet is not kind to women who say what they actually think. Except the ones about human rights and things that everyone should talk about. I’ve paid the price for that, too. Especially brown women. Especially brown women who aren’t angry enough to be “activists” and aren’t quiet enough to be “grateful.”

Today I’m saying them. All of them. It’s not because I want to start drama.I genuinely don’t. Social media, content creation, online businesses, being in the public eye… has so many perks but at times, it feels like a social experiment. It feels lonely. It feels like we all need to touch grass some times. It’s detrimental. It can be peformative. It can be so fake.

Here’s my running list of things that would probably get me cancelled if I said them on Instagram. Good thing this is Substack. Don’t cancel me and while you’re at it, subscribe so you can get more posts like this… the raw, the good, and the deep. It’s free.

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1. Influencers are the cheapest labor in marketing and brands know it.

I’ve been offered “exposure” more times than I can count. Hotels want 3 days of content in exchange for a free stay. Brands want a reel, 3 stories, and a carousel in exchange for a product worth $40. Tourism boards want full campaign coverage for a flight and a hotel. I turned down a dream campaign because they had strict deliverables and the PR person knew I wouldn’t accept it but she was honest and said last year, someone took the same campaign and posted 40+ times for the campaign… WHAT.

Here’s what that same content would cost if they hired a photographer, a videographer, a copywriter, and a social media strategist separately: $5,000 to $15,000. Minimum.

They’re getting all four of those roles from one person. For free. Then calling it a “partnership.”

The math is not mathing and everyone in this industry knows it. The problem is most creators are too scared to say no because they think exposure will lead to paid work later. It rarely does. It leads to more free work because you’ve now set the precedent that your labor has no price tag. This happens even more when new creators join the scene, do work for less, or creators who don’t treat it like a business and a hobby. There are creators with a million followers who make no money, there are other creators with millions and make money that blows your mind and makes you hate creators, and then there are micro creators who make more than you do at your 9-5. It’s a crazy range and sometimes, it makes no gdamn sense.

I stopped saying yes to free work two years ago. My income went up, not down. Funny how that works.

I will be teaching this in my personal brand workshop. How to price your work. How to negotiate. How to walk away. 2 hours of everything I’ve learned with 30 minutes of Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. I don’t do these often, taking time out of my Sunday for anyone who’s serious about this.

Grab Your Seat Here!

2. Being a brown girl in the creator economy means watching people with half your audience get twice your opportunities.

I have 220K+ followers on my personal brand. I have 177K on DOTC. I’ve built a company. I’ve taken thousands of people on trips. I’ve been creating content for 6 years, I’ve been doing it full-time for 4 years.

I still have to pitch. Cold email. Follow up. Prove myself.

I’ve watched non brown creators with 30K followers get inbound brand deals from companies I’ve been pitching for months. I’ve watched PR agencies send gift packages to creators or communities just because meanwhile I’ve had to prove myself just to be added onto a list or get a response. I’ve been left off press trips where every other creator invited looked... the same.

I’m not saying every brand is like this but I’m saying the system has a default setting and that default setting doesn’t look like me.

The irony? Asian Americans have the highest median household income in the United States at $112,800 (US Census Bureau, 2023). That’s 43% higher than the national median. Indian Americans specifically have the highest bachelor’s degree rate of any ethnic group at 75% (Pew Research). South Asians have enormous purchasing power.

Brands are leaving money on the table by ignoring this audience. Maybe there’s another reason but it seems like the adoption to this is so so sooo slow when there are hundreds of thousands of brilliant, entertaining, aesthetic South Asian creators and businesses.

3. Building a brand FOR South Asians has been the hardest business decision I’ve ever made.

Nobody warned me about this part.

I built Dose of Travel Club specifically for South Asians. The desi girls who travel solo. The women navigating cultural expectations. The community that needed a space designed for them.

You’d think the hardest part would be building the audience. It wasn’t. The hardest part has been working with South Asian brands and organizations. I’ll say it: working with South Asian brands has been harder than working with non-South Asian brands. Non-South Asian brands are hard enough.

There’s this weird dynamic and competition sometimes. The asks are really ginormous but it’s never really positioned as a partnership and sometimes the conversations don’t feel intentional or treated with respect. Free work, taking forever to pay you, changing their word, and expecting you to go the extra mile when they haven’t done the same.

I love my community. I built my entire business around it. That doesn’t mean my rates change based on cultural affiliation.

4. My dating content gets more views than my travel content and that’s not my fault.

People love to tell me “you always talk about dating” as if I’m the one deciding what goes viral.

Here’s how the algorithm actually works. I post a travel reel. It gets 10K views, lately barely 3K views. WTF Instagram. I post a dating reel. It gets 500K views. The algorithm promotes what people engage with. The people have decided they want dating content.

I’m a travel founder. I love travel. That’s how I got my start. That’s my business. I would love for my travel content to get the same reach as my dating content. It doesn’t. I’ve tested it a hundred times. Same production quality. Same effort. Different results. But hey, I also like talking about dating content… but not for the reasons most people think. I find it similar to travel.

In our community, desi girls traveling by themselves isn’t as celebrated or supported. It’s much more common now but it requires a bit of a fight and goes against previous social norms or expectations. Being single in your 30s goes against social/cultural norms, too.

So yeah, I talk about dating. I also run a global travel community, host Camp DOTC (the largest South Asian adult summer camp in the US), am building a community app, and have taken 5,000+ people on trips across the world.

The dating content gets attention… but for the wrong reasons. I also fear it makes dating harder on top of it already being hard for every single person this day and age but also being a creator in a very specific niche.

5. Being a content creator, single, and conventionally attractive means people assume you’re…

I need to say this one clearly because it makes me genuinely angry.

There is a stereotype that exists for single women with public platforms who are considered conventionally attractive: she must be easy, accessible, or promiscuous. People treat it as fact. Men slide into your DMs with zero respect. Some men are intimidated or think that you wouldn’t be dating/wifey material. Some men don’t want anything to do with a creator. Some people just watch and consume you and like the idea of you. Women make assumptions about how you got opportunities. Some of these I don’t relate to but I’ve had deep chats with some other creator friends.

Industry people project an entire narrative onto your life based on your appearance and your relationship status.

It’s something I don’t correct or justify anymore. I could sit here and tell you that I don’t partake in X but none of that matters to the people who’ve already decided who I am based on what I look like and the fact that I travel alone. It’s now only a privilege that real friends or people I know in real life get to know.

This stereotype is deeply gendered. A man who travels solo and has a large following is “inspiring” and “driven.” A woman doing the exact same thing is “suspicious” and “probably gets around.” The double standard is exhausting and I’m done pretending it doesn’t exist.

6. A lot of influencers are broke and performing wealth.

The creator economy incentivizes performing success over actually building it. Performed success gets followers. Actual success takes years and looks boring on camera.

As someone who is extremely hard working and hard on herself, I always used to compare myself but not everything you see online is real. You don’t know the truth or the whole story. You don’t know what’s rented, you don’t know how people manage their money. Some people use brand trips to make it look like personal trips, have rented cars or collaborations that make it seem like they own the car. It all depends on what you consider rich and wealth, but you’ll never know just by the display of branded good in a video.

A lot of creators also make a lot of money and you’d never know they do because their wealth is in their assets and the less glam things like stocks, real estate, & new businesses.

7. People hold creators to a higher standard than politicians, governments, and actual institutions.

A creator posts a tone-deaf caption and their career is over by dinner. A politician lies on camera and does unimaginable things and gets re-elected.

We’ve genuinely lost the plot.

Cancel culture hits influencers and creators faster and harder than it hits anyone with actual power. A 22-year-old with a ring light and a following can get destroyed overnight for a bad take. Meanwhile, corporations exploit labor, governments fail entire communities, and institutions cover up actual harm, and the internet barely blinks.

The energy people bring to holding creators “accountable” is wildly disproportionate to the energy they bring to holding systems accountable. We treat content creators like public servants who owe the world perfection while giving actual public servants infinite grace.

I’m not saying creators shouldn’t be held accountable. I’m saying the scale is broken. The standards applied to someone who makes beauty reels or gets invited to Coachella & gets paid more than you think they should should not exceed the standards applied to people making policy decisions that affect millions of lives.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that a person with a following is more dangerous than a person with actual power. That’s misdirected rage.

8. Success genuinely makes dating harder for women. Not “harder to find the right one.” Actually harder.

I wrote 5,000 words on this in a previous essay so I’ll keep this short.

Men say they want ambitious women. Many of them don’t know what to do with one when they meet her. The ones who are genuinely secure and excited by a partner who’s built something? They’re rare. They exist. They’re just rare.

I’m not bitter about this. I’m hopeful. I’m also being honest. The pool doesn’t expand when you level up. It contracts. Your standards get higher. Your tolerance for mediocrity disappears. The number of people who can match your energy shrinks.

I’d rather have a small pool of aligned people than a large pool of people who can’t handle the full version of me.

9. Being Muslim and visible means everyone has an opinion on how you practice your faith.

Too liberal for the conservative Muslims. Too conservative for the secular crowd. Not hijabi enough for one group. Too Muslim for another.

Why does our own community bring us down when we already have everyone else bringing us down? If we can’t back each other up and be kind to each other, how do we ever expect it from others?I’ve had people in my DMs telling me I’m going to hell for traveling alone. I’ve had people in my DMs telling me I’m too religious because I talk about Ramadan. I’ve had men tell me they wouldn’t date me because I’m “not Muslim enough” and other men tell me they wouldn’t date me because I’m “too Muslim.”

My relationship with my faith is mine. It’s personal, it’s evolving, and it’s not up for public debate. The last thing we need is our own community attacking each other, ya feel me? I built DOTC with cultural and spiritual nuance baked into everything because I was tired of choosing between being seen as Muslim or being seen as modern. I’m both. I always have been.

Here’s what I want to be clear about though.

I just spent 3,000 words telling you everything that’s hard about this industry. Let me spend a few hundred telling you what’s changed my life about it.

Building a personal brand gave me financial freedom. It gave me the ability to live in Dubai, Bali, and Houston whenever I want. It connected me with 500K people who feel like extended family. It let me quit a career I didn’t love and build one I designed from scratch. It gave me a voice, a platform, and a business that runs while I sleep.

I would do it all again. Every rejection, every lowball offer, every person who underestimated me. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

The problems I listed above are real. They’re also the problems of someone who actually built something. I’d rather have these problems than the alternative: working at a job I hated and wondering what would’ve happened if I’d tried.

If you’re reading this thinking “I want to build something too,” good. You should. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to start.

The workshop is where I break down exactly how. From zero to brand. From brand to business. From business to freedom. 2 hours of my Sunday, for anyone who’s serious. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. Grab a seat here.

Where to find me and everything I’m building:

The writing: Free essays weekly, paid essays every Thursday on how to build a business.

The community: Dose of Travel Club. Group trips worldwide. 5,000+ women have come on one. www.doseoftravelclub.com

Camp DOTC: Largest South Asian adult summer camp in the US. This summer.

The app: Launching this year. The first digital home for South Asians living unconventionally. [Waitlist: subscribepage.io/NYpZuQ]

The ebooks: The Brown Girl’s Guide to Traveling the World and the Personal Brand Guide.

The workshop: 2 hours. Personal brand building. Pricing. Negotiation. Q&A. Use EARLYBIRD for $30 off. Book here.

Brand and press inquiries: info@doseoftravelclub.com

Sources:

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey (2023). Median household income by race and ethnicity.

• NCRC, “Racial Wealth Snapshot: Asian Americans” (2023).

• Pew Research Center, “Second-Generation Americans” and “The State of the Asian American Middle Class” (2024).