Let me set the scene: it is 2022, and I am burnt out to the core. I am juggling an inhuman amount of things: building a company, managing a growing team, working a full time remote role as Head of Social Media for a company in Silicon Valley, and on top of that… enrolled in a full time Master’s degree. I was 20 – and as if that wasn’t enough, I was also in a very emotionally taxing relationship, that drained maybe 90% of my energy; so after all that, my baseline was pretty much completely depleted. Unless you’re Grace Beverley, doing twenty different things at once that all somehow require your full energy is usually not second nature. Yet, that’s where I was.
I won’t bore you with the details of my story, but if you’re wondering why and how, the answer is that while I was a student, I launched my company – but I didn’t want to raise investment, nor was I genetically blessed with being a nepo baby. So, the only way to grow a startup to a viable company and build a career of freedom, at the start, was through many unconventional ways. I worked my Silicon Valley job with its too-good-to-be-true salary and invested most of it into my own business – until, a couple years later, it could stand on its own two legs and I could focus just on that. Before I knew it, I was 24, and managing a team of nearly twenty people that were all the same age as me, working with global clients like Pepsi, IKEA, Golden Goose. But this isn’t a post about how I built my career – although I did write a book on that if you’re interested. What I want to talk about today, is the notion of success – and how to figure out what that actually looks like to you.
There came a point, mid-burnout, where I realized that I was building a life that stressed me out more than it benefitted me. Sure, it gave me financial freedom and security, things I never had before; but the cost seemed too high if I was constantly anxious and couldn’t sleep at night. I surrounded myself by ambitious people building ambitious careers, with plans to build their own empires; and although I couldn’t really relate to that grand desire, I found myself working towards it nonetheless.
I kind of launched myself into this whole ambitious, entrepreneurial career world, and at just 20 years old, studying art history, it was my first time being exposed to a universe of such high-achievers. I had basically never sat down and asked myself what I actually wanted out of life; I knew I liked challenging myself and that I was good at getting things done, but had never questioned my direction – I just went with it. It was easy for me to get carried away by this energetic ecosystem where everyone was constantly building towards more, more, more. But did I think that was my purpose? Absolutely not; neither did the work fill me with passion and excitement. So, when I found myself so depleted, stressed, and burnt out, it was a good time to ask myself: Whose path am I on? And is there maybe a better one?
I started becoming a lot more intentional about questioning where I was going, and why. It required me to break out of my echo chamber and start seeking stories and people who were ambitious but not aiming to build the next billion-dollar startup empire; people who exemplified a healthier type of ambition that sat somewhere in between, that I could relate more to. I think a big realisation for me was that I didn’t have to always be scaling. I could pause for a bit at a level I was very happy with, and make sure I enjoyed my life outside of work in the process. I remember a time when I was so stressed about a specific client that I ended up crying on the tube in London while talking to my partner about it and trying to problem-solve. I was not having fun – I felt like I was taking on way more responsibility than I actually wanted, because I thought that was just the ambitious people do. I had reached milestones that I felt proud of and that made people take me seriously, checking goals off my vision board like seeing myself on Forbes 30 under 30, which made me think I should naturally just keep doing more of that. It’s so incredibly easy to get caught up in this without stopping to question what YOU want to be working towards, what actually feels good to you, day to day.
I did a whole lot of introspecting and got brutally honest with myself about what I wanted my life to feel like, not what I wanted it to look like. I knew some things for sure: I was the happiest when I could wake up in the morning with no imminent stress on my mind; no sense of rushing, not having to reply to Slack messages over breakfast. I wanted to be able to spend time reading, writing, and being in nature, without having an underlying sense that there’s something I should be doing instead. I wanted to have time freedom and financial freedom, and a stable nervous system – I didn’t want my body to feel like it’s on overdrive all the time, and did not believe that that’s the only way to succeed or make money.
So, I started building towards these things instead. I stopped trying to constantly scale my business all the time just for the sake of it. Instead, I started focusing on increasing our rates and doing fewer projects that are fully aligned. I started saying no to a lot of things that didn’t feel right and knowing that success, to me, includes having the power to choose. I did a lot of things that seemed counterintuitive from the perspective of the usual hustle advice we’re usually fed. But I knew that it didn’t matter, because I was set on the fact that it only had to make sense to me. There was no reason to be building a career I didn’t enjoy being in. So, that became my first priority.
Today, I have a portfolio career that is completely unique to me – as in, it was built exactly based on what feels right, not on what anyone else around me is doing. It’s split between running my company and growing it at a pace that doesn’t constantly push me, my writing work which is my biggest passion (books, Substack), public speaking, and content creation. These are all different streams of income and each meet different needs and goals that matter to me; it’s a very personal ecosystem and it makes me very happy. I spend a lot of time reading under trees in the park at random times of the week… And that makes me happy! I’ve intentionally built everything in a way that gives me the freedom to follow my inspiration most days, to work on what I feel excited by each day, a way that blends structure and working intuitively. This required getting extremely clear about my personal values and shedding all the inherited beliefs of things I thought I “should” be doing.
If you’re in a similar phase where you’re re-evaluating how you’re structuring your life and career, to make sure you build a path that is yours and not anyone else’s, then keep reading for a detailed, guided exercise that helped me massively when I was in the same process. Every decision is like a portal, and this will help you create a system to filter decisions through to make sure you’re consciously designing a life that feels fulfilling to you.
All you’ll need is a notebook and pen (or your Notes app), and ideally a nice big mug with a drink to sip on while you think! ☕️
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