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Emily A.'s avatar

I am so obsessed with this story, I cannot get enough of it in these newsletters. I’m fascinated and so grateful for you sharing the reality of your life with us. No one else says it like this. No one else executes the truth of it quite like you do (nor takes as much accountability). Life and business are so difficult to navigate and I see so much of my own corporate journey in you (despite mine being on an infinitesimally smaller scale) and learning this from your perspective feels like drinking water after crossing a huge desert. Just stunned. Thank you for sharing with us! I hope it continues. I’m grateful to be here.

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Gail at Large's avatar

As a person who turned my freelancing into a company that exploded (in relative terms) at the height of the pandemic (when I couldn't talk about it, while other people were losing their jobs and livelihoods), I read Part 2 with amazement. Amazement that you could crawl into my head and put into words precisely what I was thinking about all that explosive growth but could not say without sounding "ungrateful".

You've also articulated my own thoughts about entrepreneurship and those selling The Dream of startup culture and Being Your Own Boss. I find so much of the entrepreneur coaching language giving me MLM vibes, like AMWAY. (20 years ago, my brother and his family were caught up in this and I was attemping intervention to save my nieces and nephew from their parents who were slavish to their "uplines". Those uplines were showing off their mortgaged-to-their-eyeballs mansions and on-the-verge-of-repossession fancy cars as a way to motivate their downlines and sell The Dream of limitless wealth.) It's been two decades and I'm still creeped out by it.

My mental health has really suffered in the past 3 years since my business took off, at times red-lining. Meanwhile, the pandemic made things feel so much worse; it was very isolating socially and professionally. My stress levels were through the roof. I haven't smoked since the '90s, but suddenly I wanted to. My mental health has only very recently been improving due to a successful hire in March (after 6 terrible ones across a year and a quarter, which was making me utterly depressed and consumed my morale). I was an island of stress.

I can relate to so much of what you've said in Part 2, I can't wait for Part 3. This is a rollercoaster that feels all-too-familiar and I'm ready for the turn.

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