Midlife MavericksThree weeks ago today, I did something I have been telling myself I needed to “get ready” to do.
I started posting on Substack.
For a while, I told myself I needed to:
- Watch tutorials
- Take a Substack course
- Map a content strategy
- Figure out the right positioning
- Decide when to turn on paid subscriptions
I had a long list for Q1. Long essays I wanted to publish on my website, but the site was still being built so I had nowhere to host them. LinkedIn. Substack. More podcasts. Big plans, all of them waiting on something or someone.
Then one Monday morning, coffee in hand, calendar already stacked, I looked at the quarter looming ahead and thought: it is now or never.
So I asked myself one question: which of these can I do today, without needing anyone else, that is completely plug and play?
The answer was Substack.
So I posted. Planned an entire week of content in one sitting, and that was it.
No master plan. No perfectly mapped plan for what this would become.
Three weeks later, I have 942 subscribers and one paid member.
I still do not have answers to half the questions I thought I needed before starting.
I started anyway.
The week I got caught not reading the docs
Last week I was trying to schedule Notes on Substack through an app called WriteStack.
I got stuck, so I reached out to support.
Then something funny happened. The founder jumped in.
His name is Orel.
Suddenly Orel is on Zoom with me and my VA, calmly walking me through the product. He walked me through the features, then asked if I had read the documentation.
I told him I hadn’t. He asked me why.
I told him the truth:
“If I wait until I have time to read everything, I will delay the start. I started two weeks ago and thought I would figure it out. And now I have over 900 subscribers.”
“You what?” he said. “That is insane.”
Then he laughed. In a genuinely surprised way.
In the time I spent not reading the docs, I almost hit a thousand subscribers.
By the end of the call, Orel wanted to do a collaboration. A live session together. He did not want a planner. He wanted someone already in motion.
We are still trying to make diaries work. Between his schedule and mine, he is going on holiday. We may not get to do it until the end of March.
His parting words: “Well, I gotta be careful then, because by then you might just be a Substack bestseller.”
I laughed. But I also wrote it down.
The AMA I had zero preparation for
Around the same time, after a podcast, I had a wave of hedge fund managers reach out asking for one-on-ones.
I had no capacity.
Normally, I would have said no, or I would have disappeared into designing “the perfect offer” before I did anything. Instead, I put a group of them in a room and ran a Q and A. An Ask Me Anything.
No slides, no agenda. I was nervous. I had never done this before.
Halfway through, one manager asked a question I had been turning over for months. Someone else answered it before I could. The room started solving problems together.
Two hours later, it was obvious it worked.
But the part that surprised me most was not the format. It was the questions. A lot of what hedge fund managers worry about when they are launching sounds remarkably similar to what anyone worries about when starting a business. The self-doubt. The second-guessing. The fear of walking into a room and not being taken seriously.
Sometimes, as women, we think these doubts are ours alone. I can tell you, these men walk into investor meetings nervous and anxious and doubting that they have what it takes. Every single one of them.
Now I have an enormous amount of content from that conversation, and it has already made me think differently about a subsegment of the hedge fund market I can serve.
Your move this week
Pick one thing you have been “getting ready” for.
Set a timer for 15 minutes. Do the worst, ugliest, most imperfect version of it.
That is the whole assignment.
Then hit reply and tell me what you started.
