I started baking bread & everyone called me a trad-wife

Famous “trad-wife” influencers are getting some heat this week after Nara Smith went onto the Call Her Daddy podcast and said “I’m not a trad wife, I’m a business owner..”

My wedding was 2 weeks ago and of course I added the infamous Kitchenaid Mixer to my wedding registry. I posted a few stories on my IG experimenting with it: making butter, ice cream, bread.

The number of DM’s I received saying:

truly shocked me…

Let’s get one thing straight - I’m fully a business owner, my business does over half a million a year in revenue, I have multiple employees.

But it got me thinking about how roles, hobbies and industries that are typically associated with women who enjoy a soft-life, they’re fully monetizable business opportunities in 2026 & prove how modern ambition actually works.

When I got my Kitchenaid Mixer I immediately went to social media to look up how to mill my own flour to make bread.

I stumbled on this woman’s IG page who teaches exactly that. I watched a few videos, then I bought her $20 e-book digital product that taught me step-by-step how to mill the flour and bake the bread.

This woman has 62k followers teaching something she’s passionate about, providing value, and earning a good amount of money while she’s doing it.

Maybe the trad wives are onto something.

Not because I think every woman needs to quit her job, move to a farm and start milling her own flour. And definitely not because I think every hobby needs to become a side hustle.

But because I think we’re living through this really interesting moment where the line between thing I enjoy doing and thing I could build a career around has gotten incredibly blurry.

Twenty years ago, if you loved baking bread, your options for turning that interest into meaningful income were pretty limited. You could work in a bakery, open one yourself, or maybe write a cookbook if you really made it.

Today, you can teach 62,000 people on Instagram how to mill their own flour and sell a $20 ebook directly to the tiny percentage of them who want more help.

And I think that changes the way we should think about our careers.

I challenge you this week to start with:

What can I not stop thinking about right now?

Maybe it’s baking bread. Maybe it’s photography. Maybe it’s interior design, fitness, gardening, AI, writing, skincare, investing, fashion, whatever.

You don’t have to know whether it’s going to become your career. You don’t even have to know whether you’ll still care about it five years from now.

You just have to be curious enough to follow it.

Because that’s how so many modern careers actually get built.

A curiosity becomes a skill. A skill becomes something you can help someone else with. Helping someone becomes freelance work, a product, an audience, a business, a completely new career—or simply the experience that points you toward the next thing.

And sometimes it becomes absolutely nothing financially productive and you just learned how to make really good bread. Also a win.

That’s the part of modern ambition I think we underestimate.

You don’t need to have your life’s work figured out before you begin. You can follow one thread, see where it takes you, and change direction when something else pulls you more strongly.

The career doesn’t have to make sense from the beginning.

Just see where it leads..