As I’ve been reflecting on my theme for 2026, BOOKED & BOUNTIFUL, I have arrived at an important, albeit bittersweet, conclusion: it’s time to focus squarely on stabilizing my core business by making some tough time tradeoffs, including temporarily pausing new posts here on Rolling in Doh.

For paying subscribers: there is nothing you need to do—your payments are already paused.

It pains me to say this! And yet, I know it’s the right move for now.

One of the strange sensations of the last six years is never quite knowing what “right” looks like, beyond the faintest whispers lurking in the corners of my Flop Era. It’s like making decisions in an upside-down world: Is this right? Who knows! It only is. And then, as I say in Pivot, decisions are data. So I make the next set from the next vantage point, experimenting and failing and experimenting again—the life of a stubborn solopreneur sailing the rocky seas of uncertainty.

Rolling in Doh has been an incredibly rewarding, life-giving passion project for the last two-and-a-half years, with nearly 250 posts faithfully published at 11:11 a.m. every Wednesday and Saturday. I love writing here, and I love all of you for reading, enriching my life further with each of your comments and replies.

Alas, as my business approaches its fifteenth (!) birthday in March, I am going to stop stealing my most focused time away to write, refine, and publish Doh posts (for now!), as much as I love it and gravitate toward it. Instead, I will do the Adult Thing™ by redirecting that energy toward rebuilding the core revenue drivers of my business; you know, to aim for rolling in actual dough for a bit.

Time to turn this ol’ balance sheet around:

What does that look like in practice?

My business has two main “skis,” or focus areas: Pivot for anyone navigating what’s next, and Free Time for small business owners optimizing what’s now, setting their time free through smarter systems.

Within those two topic-tracks running in parallel, I aim to:

• Publish both of those newsletters consistently again, hoping to infuse even a modicum of the creativity Doh has inspired!

• Work on building up the Pivot keynote speaking pipeline (I’m grateful to have another thousand-person gig coming up in Las Vegas mid-February)

• Help refer 1:1 coaching clients to our two new wonderful Pivot coaches: Taku Noguchi, former Googler and BetterUp’er, and Laura Sheehan, who also runs career programs at Georgetown University.

• Open up new spots for my own Free Time 1:1 coaching, courses, and VIP days (My team member Faye and I are also piloting a new offering, Borrow My EA for a Day)

• Host free community calls; register to join in January for Pivot & Free Time, and

• Continue creative writing for personal essays in the background, without the pressure to refine and publish publicly (for now).

How long will new Rolling in Doh posts be paused?

I’m not sure . . . as long as it takes to feel confident that every week I am prioritizing action and income that will more comfortably (abundantly!) sustain the household, especially as we look to list our place again in Spring to find a renter. It’s wild to think that, if all goes well, I have no clue where we’ll be living six months from now!

That could mean I’m away for one month or six — I’m not sure yet. If you stay subscribed, you’ll still get surprises sprinkled here from time to time :)

Will I post at all here in the interim?

Maybe! If an essay is bursting out of me and insists on going live, I will hit publish. I just can’t promise the twice-weekly schedule, and I don’t feel right accepting payment for erratic posting while paused.

💌 In the meantime, stay in touch by subscribing to my other two newsletters, depending on your interests, & :

Free Time with Jenny Blake

How can we earn twice as much in half the time, with joy and ease, while serving the highest good? 💸 Set your time free through smarter systems — and get instant access to the Free Time Toolkit.

By ❤️ Jenny Blake

Pivot with Jenny Blake

For high net growth individuals navigating what's next. Subscribe for free access to the Pivot Toolkit—linked in the welcome email :D

By ❤️ Jenny Blake

I look forward to seeing what this new year brings to all of us! Please do keep in touch — I love hearing from you, and I will miss you dearly during this pause :) 🙏1

❤️

Happy New Year’s Eve, Dohnuts! Every December, my friends and I start trading an important bit of information: What is your word or theme for the year ahead? I love hearing about what the people I love are focusing on, what energy they are calling in.

It’s also fun to look back on the year to examine how the previous word or phrase showed up. How did it weave through the events of the year? How did it reveal meaning in surprising or opposite ways than expected?

Some of my past themes have included: harmony, grace, freedom, delight, serendipity, surrender, miracles, magic, abundance, lucky, peace, healthy/wealthy/wise/grateful (yes, all four at once!), thrive, faith, and for 2025: BREAKTHROUGH (with a side of Thy Will Be Done).

For 2026, I’m jumping onto the bandwagon of one of my business besties, Petra Kolber, after she landed on BOOKED & BOUNTIFUL. It bubbled up as we walked along the water in West Virginia, celebrating after speaking at the Women Warriors Summit, both sharing a desire to call in even more ideal clients just like that one.

Booked could mean speaking gigs (joyful for both of us) or coaching clients (for me, as I’ll be opening up spots again in 2026), or making progress on the next books we both want to write. Bountiful is about abundance in all its forms, also expressed through gratitude and service, not just what’s inbound.

I love buying something small I can wear with the word on it—one year it was a beaded bracelet on Etsy that said FAITH in small black letters. For ten years, I have also renamed whatever new Bluetooth devices I set-up that year with my chosen word or theme (and an emoji, of course). So now, for example, I listen to my “FAITH AirPods,” my “ABUNDANCE Bose,” type on my “MIRACLES MacBook Air,” or I put on my “BREAKTHROUGH Manta Sleep Mask.” It’s a way to remind me of earlier years’ themes, layered over time in one big beautiful Bluetooth list. Here’s an incomplete list of examples:

Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments so we can create a collective, combined meaning:1

💬 What is your word or theme for 2026?

• Bonus: Add an emoji :)

• Optional: Share a few sentences about why you chose that one for this year . . .

Note: These are normally for paid subscribers only, so fellow Dohnuts can feel more secure in sharing, knowing the stories and comments aren’t publicly searchable. Today, comments are open, so I would love for you to join us!

Leave a comment

Well, that’s a wrap! After 90 posts this year, as we close out 2025, I’ve pulled together a baker’s dozen of this year’s most popular Doh essays based on reach (views) and engagement (likes, shares, and comments). They are listed below in chronological order; when more than one post in a mini-series was a hit, I’ve included only the first part below so you can start at the beginning.1

🙏 Friendly reminder: If you haven’t already, please take just a few minutes to answer this short 3-question reader survey.

💬 Start the Doh Reader Survey »

🍩 Top 13 Rolling in Doh Posts from 2025

1

2

And the follow-up:

3

4

5

6

7

8

These were the most popular of the year, perhaps because fellow authors were tagged:

9

Plus our most robust discussion prompt of the year:

10

11

12

13

Did you have a favorite from this year that didn’t make the cut? Let me know in the comments if so :)

❤️

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💬 Start the Doh Reader Survey »

Seasons Greetings, Dohnuts! This Christmas Eve letter is inspired by George Starbuck’s “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree.” Wishing you and your loved ones the happiest, sprinkliest holidays this week and next, whatever you celebrate.1 ✨ This is best viewed on desktop or iPad; if you’re on your phone, click here »

❤️🎁🎄🍩

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So far in our Adulting is Easy! series, we’ve studied a simple 100+ item daily checklist, health insurance-induced bureaucracy rage, and codependent time (un)management.

I never get better at spelling the word schadenfreude, the German word for pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune, even though I’ve written about it several times here on Doh. Today, I propose another new phrase and phase, as I strive to act like (become?) the forty-two year-old that I am, with my second made-up German word:1

Fehl-schadenfreuden-reue (n): The sinking moral embarrassment felt upon realizing you took pleasure in someone’s apparent downfall, only to discover you had the facts wrong.

Fehl, means wrong or mistaken, and reue means remorse. AI helped me combine them into a sentiment that could address how I felt reading about the woman still embroiled in the Coldplay “Kiss Cam” scandal, Kristin Cabot.

It is her first interview since a viciously toxic life-as-she-knew-it-ruining debacle, sparked by a viral eight-second TikTok clip that racked up over 100 million views in the first few days. For the first time in five months, against Cabot’s earlier instincts, she explains her side in reporter Lisa Miller’s profile, “The Story of a Ritual Shaming,” spread across two full pages in Thursday’s paper:

I should start by (ashamedly) admitting that when I first encountered the reel, while scrolling through YouTube with my husband in search of something light to watch after dinner, I laughed.

I laughed at the way the camera accidentally landed on them as Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin cooed, “Ooh, look at these two,” before realizing something was awry, then quickly correcting, “Uh-oh, what? Either these two are having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”

The reel automatically played on loop, so we watched it a few more times to better study each element. I laughed at the way their moment of bliss was interrupted, at how the man ducked down out of embarrassment while his paramour clasped her cheeks in red-faced humiliation. When I found out they were both married to other people—all I knew at the time—and that he was a tech CEO, and she the head of HR at the same company—well, then my schadenfreude really kicked in. This moment seemed like aptly dished-out just deserts (doughnut pun intended).

I didn’t give it another thought for a few weeks, until (ashamedly, again) I laughed, again, at Gwyneth Paltrow cashing in on the moment with a cheeky ad for that same tech company, Astronomer:

But then, when I read the NYT profile two days ago, my heart instantly sank. I scrolled on my phone, in horror, at all the ways I was wrong—we were all wrong.

Cabot summarized her misdeeds as follows:

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss. And it’s not nothing. I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay. I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”

Did you know that Cabot was separated from her husband at the time of the video? I didn’t. Did you know that, at least according to her, nothing romantic occurred before that night, that the inappropriate behavior started and ended at that moment of dancing and a kiss? I didn’t. Does it matter? Does she deserve this level of vitriol and punishment either way?

No.

Heaped on top of more public shaming than one well-meaning person should bear, it saddened me to read about Cabot’s reaction to the Paltrow video, someone she once looked up to:

“Cabot had long admired Paltrow, and goop, the company she built to ‘empower, support and uplift women.’ How could she, who together with her ex-husband Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, popularized the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling,’ be so insensitive to the messy realities of private lives? (Paltrow did not respond to requests for comment.)”

Miller’s article describes what Cabot has been through in the ensuing months, “after the TikTok bomb became the defining disaster of her life,” describing:

“. . . what it feels like to be a punchline and a target. In online comments she has been called a slut, a homewrecker, a gold digger, a side piece — the usual tags for shaming women. Her appearance has been scrutinized, specific body parts evaluated and found insufficiently pretty. Some of the most famous people in the world — Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow — and at least one furry green sports mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, have made her humiliation their material. She was doxxed, and for weeks received 500 or 600 calls a day. Paparazzi camped across the street from her house and cars slowly cruised her block, ‘like a parade,’ she recalled. She received [50 or 60] death threats.”

The consequences have been beyond harsh, even worse than what’s described above. In addition to immediately voluntarily resigning from her job,

“While #coldplaygate, as it came to be called, cycled out of view, she lives with it every day. Her children are reluctant to be seen with her. Just before Thanksgiving, a woman recognized her while she was pumping gas at Cumberland Farms. She called Cabot ‘disgusting’ and said: ‘Adulterers are the lowest form of human. You don’t even deserve to breathe the same air that I breathe.’”

What, really, is her crime? Kissing a married man?

I remember doing that once, while dancing in similar reverie at a Las Vegas daytime pool club in my early twenties (I cannot imagine typing or living any aspect of that sentence now). He was a gorgeous, dark-haired, green-eyed man. I was too selfish to think about his life or wife; wasn’t that his job?

Until later that night one of my closest high school friends would barely speak to me. I asked her what was wrong, and the look of disappointment in her face said it all. She was recently married. “You are better than this,” she said. “What if that was my husband?”

She was right, and I vowed never to do that again—for her, and for myself, for my own integrity. I learned from my mistake; thankfully early, and thankfully in private. I never did it again. But I sure still seem to feel entitled to judge others who do.

Miller ended her profile on Cabot’s “fantasy of redemption,” saying:

Cabot wished for someone with visibility and power to interrupt the spinning, endless, ruthless cycle. She yearned for a rational voice to step in and say, “Wait a minute . . . can we start a conversation where there might be room for a different version of this story?”

But I would have ended the article differently. I would have closed on a quote earlier in the piece from one of Cabot’s closest friends. Taking a page from Jesus, the friend says:

“I hope all these people that are commenting have never made a mistake.”2

❤️

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On Sunday, an art-world VIP—and wonderful person we hope to get to know beyond any professional connections—asked Michael if he would like to be a personal guest for her tour at The Guggenheim. He joyfully said yes.

Enter stage left: my time-(over)management monster. Knowing he’s a night-owl, before heading to bed, I asked, “Did you set an alarm for tomorrow?”

If I’m being generous, maybe I did this because for almost ten years (nine of them living together), we have been learning about his ADHD and what systems ease what researchers call time blindness. Maybe I did it because I grew up following my dad’s mantra, “If you’re on time, you’re late,” noticing how showing up early to meetings was a sign of great respect—how good it felt to see him waiting outside of his car, casually reading the newspaper, whenever I’d step out of the front door to meet up with him.1 Maybe it was because I remember dreading the occasional days when I was the last kid picked up from school, or equally, the way I viscerally hate the feeling of being late.

“Yes,” he said. “Already did.”

The first thing I did when I woke up: wonder what time he set the alarm for. I calculated the distance to The Guggenheim and determined that, to be safe, he would need to leave the house at 10:15 to get there by 11 a.m.

There’s a joke about taking the subway in New York City: if you leave the house five minutes early, you’ll arrive at your destination thirty minutes early. If you leave five minutes late, you’ll arrive thirty minutes late.

When Michael came downstairs after his morning stack of meditation and morning pages, I checked the time: 9:50. He didn’t seem rushed. Except that he needed to leave soon!

“What time are you leaving the house?” I asked, faux-innocently, while starting the second pot of coffee.

“Just let me manage it, I’ve got it,” he replied. He was already onto me. He knew my timeliness obsession had kicked in, that it was already revving into overdrive. I swallowed a lump of anxiety. But what if he’s late?!

At 9:55, he started a twenty-minute Pilates class on the living room TV, something essential for his lower back so he could walk around the museum without pain. But twenty minutes?! It would end when it was time to leave! He won’t have time to get dressed!

I joined him for the class, cycling through as many micro-anxiety circuits as there were reps in The Hundreds. I kept biting my tongue through every next set of moves, trying to honor his request, but whooo-wee was that hard for me! During one side series, I told myself, Listen—stop micro-managing him! Let him be!

After flipping to the other side, I mentally reached for an Al-Anon/CoDA refrain: Your help isn’t helping. Next, I started assuming he would be late without the gift of my unceasing time micro-management: If he’s late, so be it! Let him experience his own consequences. If he’s late and embarrassed by that, he’ll learn for next time. (LOL, like I’m not married to a 40-year-old man who attended Catholic school for thirteen years with nuns so strict they slapped his hands with rulers for even the smallest infractions).

Knowing I couldn’t say anything, I started playing out worst-case timing scenarios in my head. So he’s late, and he holds up the whole tour. It’s not the end of the world. After all, the tour guide is Lebanese, and Lebbos are famous for being fashionably (by a horrifying hour or two) late. It’s a cultural difference. Let’s say you make an appointment with a plumber in Lebanon and at the appointed time, they still have not arrived. Twenty minutes later, you call them: Where are you? “I’m on my way, almost there,” they’ll reply—even when they haven’t yet left the house.

With five minutes of the Pilates class remaining, I started wondering: Why isn’t he checking his phone to note the time?! Where is his phone?! Is it charged?

Once the class ended, I continued sweating on the inside, suppressing my still-intense urge to control his timing. I failed. “How are you getting there, by bus or train?” I asked. Damnit, I had come so close to honoring his request. Me now to my Monday morning self: WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?!

“The 4/5,” he said patiently, knowing I had stepped onto his side of the time street (again) even though he asked me not to. Phew. Maybe he’d juuuust get there on time, if there were no train delays . . .

He left the house at 10:27. Que sera, sera! I reassured my inner time-(over)keeper.

Michael arrived at 11 a.m. on the dot. Later that morning, I checked our group text: the host had written saying there was traffic and she would be seven minutes late.

So, in the end, lo and behold, he was the first one there, waiting casually for the group, not the other way around. See! I said to myself. MY HELP ISN’T HELPING! It’s annoying! And besides, it all worked out! And so what if it hadn’t?!?! This isn’t brain surgery!

If this is what I’m doing to Michael—and he has the ability to kindly ask me to stop—imagine what I’m doing to myself all. damn. day. Imagine all the ways I’m pushing the river of time—and timing—in my own life.2

Two days prior to the museum visit, someone shared a piece of wisdom with me: “God is seldom early, but never late.”

And so, after smirking at the divine timing within the text thread, way smarter than my small strategies, I remembered, a-freaking-gain, not to micro-manage the timing of transition and transformation.

Yesterday, when I asked Michael if I could write about this, mostly about how hard it was for me to manage my over-functioning,3 he said sure; adding, “By the way, I’m never late to important meetings. Only when it’s casual and it doesn’t really matter.”

“And just so you know,” he said, “she ended up being fifteen minutes late.”4

❤️

Continue reading the next post in this series . . .

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4

👉 If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

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198: Book Club ✨ OUTRAGEOUS OPENNESS: Letting the Divine Take the Lead by Tosha Silver

When you catch a wishie, what do you yearn for? Today’s book club episode might shift your “wish” hereafter to just one powerful offering…

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3 years ago · 1 like · ❤️ Jenny Blake

“A [person] whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”

—Chaim Potok, Davita’s Harp

Nothing enrages me more than senseless, time-sucking, soul-eating, KafkOrwellesque bureaucracy. Especially when I’m paying an over two-thousand-dollar-a-month “““premium”””1 for it.

What was my great crime this year? Trying to be a good adult and making my first appointment for an annual physical in years.

My second crime (and I’m sorry if this is TMI, but it’s relevant for our story today): needing a urine test for a possible bacterial infection after a week of daily sweaty summer morning Peloton rides. See also: trying to be a good adult. Again.

God forbid I had actually gotten sick-sick; I don’t know what this post would be. I wouldn’t be able to see through my rage to write it.

At forty-two years old, I am (miraculously, knock on wood) in pretty good health!

• I lost thirty puppy-pandemic-marriage pounds last year, putting me back within “normal” range, whatever that means.

• I haven’t had dessert since February 2024, when I quit refined sugar.2

• I intermittent fast almost every day because I enjoy it, and it gives me energy.

• I exercise four to five times per week. I sauna and steam when I can.

• I walk Ryder for up to three hours each day, playing outside in dirt and grass. I call friends.

• I don’t keep alcohol at home, and I can count the number of cocktails in a month on one hand (or less), imbibing only when out with friends.

• I don’t smoke (never did), and I don’t do drugs (never got into that either). Unless you count my inhaler.

But still, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to stave off senseless medical rage, nor the fear of aging in a predatory system. God forbid I need care at a level greater than next-to-nothing. Do I even need to explain myself, to justify all the ways I try to avoid care?

One thing I have (re)learned this last year: if I miss too many days in a row at the gym, my nerves are strung tighter than a violin.

This is how I found myself, yesterday, sobbing in a coffee shop where I was *trying* to write any new post other than this one to the kind woman who called to inform me that my main hospital in New York City would no longer be covered by the health insurance company that I rage-quit the day prior when completing my other adulting task: picking amongst bottom-of-the-barrel health coverage options that cost nearly $2,000 every month for “bronze” coverage for our family of two.

Yes, I’m aware, I got your letter, I said. But while I have you, there are two outstanding bills on my account that have been there since April and September; I am going in circles with your hospital and my health insurance company, and I cannot resolve either one no matter how hard I try, no matter how many hours I spend. I can’t get any answers. It makes me scared to go to the doctor for anything at all!

For thirty minutes, this angel of a woman stayed with me on the phone—even though she was late for her lunch break—trying to help me get to the bottom of things.

Crime number one: a visit to a new primary care doctor for the most basic “hello” visit you can imagine. A nurse took my vitals, and then the doctor and I spoke for twenty minutes. He refilled my inhaler prescription. This resulted in the following:

Can you believe they billed insurance $3,470 for that?! This whole system is a racket worthy of a mafia movie. But why is my portion of the bill $193? It’s December, and I still cannot tell you.

The second crime: I called to schedule an appointment due to a possible infection. I asked to take a urine test at Quest, the nearby lab, where I know the cost is ~$20. No. The doctor’s office insisted I come in person; however, my Primary Care Physician was on vacation, so would I like to see a nurse? I’d rather not have to come in at all, but okay. Didn’t want things to get worse. I peed in the damn cup. She asked droll, perfunctory questions for ten minutes, then a few days later when the results were in, wrote me a prescription. THAT’S IT. And it resulted in this:

Hey, look, my part is only $343! Plus the over $2,000 I paid that month for the “silver” level health insurance premium for our family of two. If by silver, they mean wanting to gouge your eyes out with silver forks whenever you need anything remotely medical, then yes, their plans are labelled correctly.

So, in my quest not to drown in bills—or spend money I shouldn’t just to “make the problem go away” as I might have in flusher pre-pandemic times, I tried to take The Responsible Route™, calling to fix what must have been two simple errors.

HAH! This is how I’ve spent my year (Mount Sinai hospital call history x 2 on the left, Anthem x 2 on the right):

Every call shorter than fifteen minutes was a failed attempt to reach a human being in their horribly knotted phone trees, or a hold broken by an incoming call. In addition to those, I spent over five combined hours when I did reach someone, to no avail.

Should I keep calling? What could I possibly do or say next? Should I just pay the damn bill, and value my time more highly than this, as many fellow entrepreneurs advise? Would I be less emotionally brittle if those extra dollars didn’t matter to me so much right now? If I wasn’t trying to do the responsible thing by not overpaying?

I might feel better if I just swallowed hard and paid what’s (erroneously) outstanding, except that I can’t stomach the idea of them getting a single dollar more than they deserve. I refuse to reward extortion. I know these bills are wrong. I just don’t know exactly why, or how the f**k to fix them.

My primary care visit is supposed to be free. A simple nurse follow-up should be too, or at maximum, a $30 co-pay. Michael’s in-network therapist hasn’t been paid Anthem’s portion for their weekly sessions since April; same never-ending “pending” story. My TalkSpace therapy was supposed to be free. It wasn’t—surprise-billed in arrears after three sessions at $121 a pop—so I stopped.

Why am I telling you all of this? Surely these criminal enterprises companies can’t be shamed into any meaningful reform. My friend , who lives abroad, told me about cost-sharing collectives like Crowd Health and Christian Healthcare Ministries. (His friend, author , recently took the leap and wrote about it).3 I am still researching alternatives, such as with the Author’s Guild, even though open enrollment closes in two days.

You know what terrifies me? That some freak accident will happen, and I’ll be one of the small percentage of families for whom these alternative solutions don’t work. And then any resulting financial mess will really be my fault—you should’ve known better than to go outside of The System. It’s a risk I don’t feel I can afford to take right now, and yet, staying in The System is obviously no cake walk either.

I look forward to downsizing by finding a renter for our place as soon as we are able—or even selling it, who knows—then moving abroad if/when that’s in the highest good after that. But between now and then, this is the stuff that makes life in America feel so impossible sometimes, at least if you’re not in a corporate job with robust benefits, retired (on Medicare), or in the top 9.9 percent.4

In nearly fifteen years of self-employment, I’ve met many people afraid to leave a golden-handcuffs-type corporate job that is slowly killing them with inexplicable chronic illnesses, but who are afraid to quit and deal with health insurance on their own. I get it.

And I am among the lucky ones. I speak fluent English to make these senseless, circular calls. What if I didn’t? I’d probably assume the bills—and my lack of understanding of the erroneous charges or rote telephone operators—was my fault. I have family support if needed in an emergency, and the ability to earn. My heart breaks for families who have kids with special needs or who are dealing with more serious medical conditions, who have to navigate all the above and much, much worse, all while their family member’s health suffers terribly.

It is a terrifying way to live, knowing this level of criminal bureaucracy is ready designed to prey on us at our weakest, and that only by the grace of God we stay well enough not to truly need them. For now.5

❤️

Continue reading the next post in this series . . .

1

🤬 ALL the scare quotes. I’m that angry. I recommend her often, but that’s because I love her work and what she stands for! Dive into any one of ’s essays from :

“It’s Not Us explores the relationship between personal and systemic challenges. How do we address the difficulties in our lives, and do our best to improve our circumstances, while also understanding the larger forces that often stand in our way? How do we gather communal power in a highly individualistic society? How do we separate what we can control from what we probably can’t?”

It's Not Us

The system is crazy. We don't have to be.

By Sara Eckel

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Here’s ’s post—don’t miss his writing and publishing podcast, Between Drafts.

Nat Eliason's Newsletter

I Canceled My Family's Health Insurance (and joined CrowdHealth)

I never want to be someone who complains about a problem I’m doing nothing to fix…

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7 months ago · 138 likes · 63 comments · Nat Eliason

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😡 I would be remiss not to mention that this is also why there was such an uproar over UnitedHealthcare, despite the egregious crime that precipitated it.

🚙 See also: ’s recent write-up of her 30-day cross-country road trip.

“What became clear almost immediately is that the prosperity is real, it’s just not showing up in the places people actually live. It exists in balance sheets, in stock portfolios, in data centers behind chain-link fences. But in daily life like in commutes, in childcare costs, in housing, in safety, in community, people are feeling decay. I kept running into the same contradiction: a wealthy country where everything visible seems to be slowly breaking while everything invisible keeps getting richer.”

Kyla’s Newsletter

30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

Peter Thiel recently did an interview with the Free Press about his 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg. The title of the piece is “Capitalism isn’t Working for Young People”. He has benefited from capitalism more than almost anyone alive. If he admits something has failed, we need to pay attention to it. It echoes something I’ve heard everywhere this year: p…

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7 months ago · 1065 likes · 171 comments · kyla scanlon

*In this precise order, give or take ten items at a time, or side effects may include: anxiety, irritability, dread, overwhelm, fatigue, guilt, micro-guilt, feelings of defeat and/or numbness. If you have young kids, add ten more items of your choosing—or 20, or 30, or 40—up to you.1

1. Wake up at 4 a.m., even if you are not a morning person. It’s what adults do. But make sure you’ve gotten at least eight hours of sleep.

2. Note your sleep score, not how you actually feel. Does it say you are rested? THEN YOU ARE.

3. Post on IG to clock in for the 4:30am / 5am Club.

4. WAIT NO! STOP DOOM SCROLLING! Put your phone down until you’ve completed your Miracle Morning Stack.™

5. Make the bed. Partner still asleep? Quietly make your half.

6. Meditate for twenty minutes.

7. Morning Page for another twenty minutes. Hey, stop typing/voice narrating! Handwritten only, JC says.

8. HEY! I saw you pick up your phone to check your email. Put it back down.

9. Say the Serenity Prayer and/or any other go-to prayers from your faith.

10. Repeat a few positive affirmations, such as: I am a successful, responsible adult. I am powerful. I am enough, I have enough. I am destined for greatness. Ignore the critic in your head, smirking as you do this.

11. Step outside and Wim Hof for at least fifteen minutes.

12. Make sure you also see the sun for twenty minutes.

13. Did you put on sunscreen first? If not, dock ten points.

14. Note the new sunspot on your forearm. Set a reminder for later to make a dermatologist appointment. Google what time their office opens.

15. Hit that sweet, sweet, glorious “start” button on the coffee maker (or hot water kettle if tea is more your cup of—)

16. While waiting, finish washing the dirty dishes from last night and/or run the dishwasher. If nothing else, make sure your favorite mug is clean.

17. Wipe the counter.

18. Take your morning meds and/or any supplements. Question if the vitamins are all money-leeching placebos. Even if they are, recall the data showing placebos work too. Cease questioning—for now.

19. Pour that first, perfect, piping hot cup of Survival Serum.™

20. Stare into space. Worry about what’s due today. Oh wait, you meditated so you wouldn’t have such overwhelming anxiety. Write down what’s due today.

21. While you’re there, make your first gratitude list. Five things. Bonus if you text it to a gratitude group. Don’t have one? Start one.

22. Read a book while charging your devices.

23. Brush your teeth. Make sure you have an electric toothbrush, but not one that’s too aggressive on your gums.

24. Wash your face. Examine your wrinkles and/or any new blemishes and/or the dramatically increased quantity of grey hairs. Vow to make an appointment with the hair stylist. Eventually.

25. Do not pop anything. I said DON’T POP ANYTHING!!! Now look what you did.

26. Take your self/dog for a walk. And/or kids if they still live at home. WEAR YOUR WEIGHTED VEST, it’s not doing any good collecting dust!!

27. While out, make small talk with the neighbors about the weather. If it’s rainy, complain. If it’s snowing, rejoice. If it’s warmer than expected, be cheerful. If it’s too warm/humid, complain.

28. Listen to a walking meditation if/as the new day’s anxiety returns.

29. Listen to a podcast to better yourself in some way. Or at least imagine yourself improving by osmosis.

30. Call a friend; recalling that connection is essential for happiness and longevity.

31. Return home; wipe the dog’s paws and/or wash your and/or the kids’ hands.

32. If needed, replace the dwindling roll of poop bags in your jacket pocket. Order more and/or pause the subscription if your entryway shelf is already overflowing with said rolls.

33. Work on a creative project for at least thirty minutes before miscellaneous client obligations. Don’t have one? FIND ONE! The world needs your art!!!

34. When the three staccato audio dots sound, unload the dishwasher; but first stick your head into it, pretending the steam has transported you to a spa where you are now having a free facial.

35. Clear the dregs of the now-lukewarm coffee. Prepare the coffee maker again for your spouse / partner / roommate. Remind yourself to drink less coffee tomorrow.

36. Live alone? Place or schedule a second phone call. CONNECT!

37. Pack your bag to work outside of the house. Don’t forget anything. Bring a tote bag or two for the grocery store, since you’ll need to stop there on your way home.

38. Prepare breakfast for the cat/dog and/or yourself and/or any children.

39. Now you may check your email.

40. F**k. The dread and guilt have boiled over; you see several things you’ve dropped the ball on. Exercise—ideally vigorous cardio—will be mandatory medicine today.

41. Juggle a to-go coffee while taking out the trash/recycling/compost as you leave the house (bonus points if you grab all three) .

42. Practice “box breathing” during your commute/work transition. Lose count. Start over. Lose count again. If you have them, drop the kids off at school.

43. Skim the news. BIG MISTAKE. Shove the generalized world-is-on-fire anxiety back down from whence it came.

44. Answer the five most pressing emails.

45. If you’re not already working at a standing desk (SHAME! Resolve to buy one!) stand up every thirty minutes. Bonus points if you’re on a walking treadmill while at your standing desk. Extra bonus if it’s actually on and moving.

46. Check your posture. Roll your shoulders back. Engage your core. Neutral spine. Relaxed jaw. STOP CLENCHING!

47. Tackle the next big item on your work to-do list. It takes three times as long as you intended. Where does the time go?

48. Answer the next five most pressing emails. Note how incredibly you’re falling short across all inboxes. Suppress the guilt rising like bile from your stomach.

49. Respond to that LinkedIn message from a recruiter/former colleague/person you don’t remember. Maintain at least the facade of professional networking.

50. “Like” a few others’ posts you catch on the home feed while heading back to your main inbox. Smirk at the inverse relationship between performative humility (#humbled to win this #award) to actual humility.

51. Scramble to your next scheduled client call. Take notes. Send proper follow-up message afterward.

52. Check Slack. Respond to your team member’s questions (late, again).

53. Write and send the overdue thank-you note.

54. Attend your final meeting of the day.

55. After you hang up, while you have phone momentum, call to make the dermatologist appointment. Realize that you are dealing entirely with an AI bot voice, and there is no way out of its phone tree from hell. “You are confirmed!” she/it says. “But you don’t even have my contact information!” you reply. “Oh, you are correct,” she/it corrects. Rage boils.

56. Check your bank accounts. Note the ones on fumes.

57. Snooze phone reminder that screams, “HEALTH INSURANCE DAMNIT!!!” re: open enrollment closing soon.

58. Scan the outstanding business invoices. Do the math about what arrives when.

59. Resolve to follow up with the corporate client ghosting you.

60. Note by how much—and for how long—you’ll fall short and/or your savings will stretch if they don’t reply. Remind yourself they are not your Source. God/Cosmo/The Universe/Your Higher Power is your Source.

61. Send the bookkeeper your monthly statements. If already in, reconcile the books to correct any items erroneously categorized.

62. Ensure that every account set to auto-debit monthly household recurring bills has enough not to overdraft (again).

63. When you notice there isn’t enough to shuffle around today, panic mildly.

64. Make a note of all your financial neuroses to discuss with your therapist. This is actually a “spiritual” problem. Right? Right.

65. Make sure you have a therapist.

66. Call the health insurance company to dispute the $500 charge for the mediocre therapy sessions their app previously told you were free.

67. Time for a workout to burn off the bureaucracy rage. Run through a mental checklist of Peter Attia’s Centenarian Decathlon. You have one hour, but you are overdue to work on grip strength, VO2 max, Zone 2 cardio, flexibility, mobility, lifting heavy weights, core stability, free hangs, etc etc etc. Pick two.

68. Spend at least fifteen minutes in the sauna. What sauna? FIND ONE! BUILD ONE! Live in a city? Get a collapsible $109 steam room tent for your living room! They’re essential for cardiovascular and circulatory health, for reducing the stress induced by this very checklist!

69. Shower like the adult you are. Exfoliate, moisturize, shave.

70. Was it a cold shower? No? Dock ten adulting-for-longevity points.

71. Get dressed. Notice the holes in your socks and the growing chasm on the elbow of your cashmere sweater. Shrug. You’ll send the sweater to the dry cleaner for repair next time you accumulate a big enough pile. Who knows how long that will be? If you were a better adult, you’d sew a damn patch on yourself.

72. Take yourself and/or your dog for an afternoon walk before the sun sets.

73. Call another friend and/or a family member. Manage guilt pangs if you don’t, or for the ones you missed. Consider dropping this guilt when you realize the phone works both ways, and it hasn’t exactly been ringing off the hook for you, either.

74. On the way home from wherever you went for work, buy groceries. With or without the kids. Did you get them from school, or was someone else doing that? Assume all following activities involve kids if you have them. If so, give yourself one hundred bonus adulting points.

75. Buy a bottle of wine and/or flowers for the house party you’re invited to later this week. Debate catching a cold so you don’t have to go.

76. Berate yourself for the bill at self-checkout, even though intellectually you know that groceries seem absurdly high for a lot of people right now (up 30% in five years, you discover). This is still somehow your fault. You should have traveled farther, to the discount grocery store, but you didn’t.

77. When you get home, with hands still full of groceries, sort the mail for your neighbors. Carry yours upstairs with the groceries.

78. You missed a UPS/FedEx package. Fill out the paper and stick it on the front door.

79. Once inside, process your mail expediently. Recycle the junk. Open the bills. Make a note to call the health insurance company AGAIN to dispute the other outstanding $550 charge for a simple urine test.

80. Maybe it’s time to meditate again.

81. On second thought, reality TV beckons.

82. Change into sweats. If you live with a spouse, ideally these would be sexy sweats. Fail.

83. Upon noticing the only “clean” clothes are ratty ones that do not pass the sniff test, start the laundry.

84. Set up dinner in the Instant Pot and/or Air Fryer and/or microwave. Stop standing in front of the microwave while you wait! Slap together a pre-made salad. “Eat the rainbow!” Feel minor guilt over the beige/yellow foods. Enjoy them anyway.

85. Add whatever household supply running low to your Amazon account. Impulse add a few more things you don’t need. Schedule it for your consolidated Amazon Prime Delivery Day™ to accrue $3 in digital rewards. Feel smug about this until you realize you just overspent what you intended upon opening the app by $300. On an oligarchic monopoly crushing small businesses, no less. SHAME!

86. Text back the friends you’ve been meaning to respond to for weeks. Feel horrible, yet totally inadequate at the alternative: actually keeping up with inbound pings.

87. Clip and/or file nails for yourself and/or kids and/or dog/cat. Is that bacteria in their ear again?

88. Make vet appointment. Check on the pet insurance claim from the last one.

89. Feed the dog and/or yourself and/or the kids.

90. Make sure you get enough protein; it’s good for your bones. Speaking of which, did you lift heavy weights today? No? You forgot? Tomorrow, must do. MUST DO.

91. Change the clothes in the washer to the dryer.

92. Note the need for an enriching hobby in your day. Does Reality TV count?

93. Note the need for “quality time” with a real-life person beyond the coterie of podcast hosts you parasocially hang out with interstitially throughout your day.

94. Binge a show or ten instead.

95. When ads interrupt your programming, notice and vacuum errant pet hair and/or general dust bunnies accumulating in the corner. Clock the grime embedded in the floorboard for another time and/or the next time your cleaning person comes. Make a note to schedule that appointment. Someday.

96. Make sure your devices are charged. If you have an Apple Watch, make sure it has at least 30% or you won’t get a sleep score. AND THEN YOUR ENTIRE DAY TOMORROW WILL BE OFF IF YOU CANNOT BIOHACK YOUR DATA™.

97. Dim all lights at least two hours before bed. Bonus: wear those dorky indoor orange “blue light blocker” glasses.

98. Skim the news again. BIG MISTAKE. AGAIN. When will you learn?!

99. Make your third gratitude list of the day.

100. Clean out the lint trap in the dryer. Run it a second time so you don’t end up with moldy, half-dried clothes and towels in the morning.

101. Take your evening supplements and/or meds.

102. Stretch for fifteen minutes. Bonus: foam roll. Double bonus: torture yourself with a fascia ball while you writhe in pain on the ground.

103. Brush your teeth (this better be at least your second time today).

104. Floss. Properly, not just haphazardly poking your gums with a plastic toothpick.

105. Pull out the threader and floss under the permanent wire on the bottom row of your teeth. I AM WATCHING YOU. Don’t you dare skip this.

106. Put on your retainer / Invisalign if you have one. If it’s fuzzy, make a note-to-self to drop it in a bowl with a cleaner tablet tomorrow morning.

107. Check the clothes in the dryer one last time. Are they actually dry? Don’t bother folding them, or even removing them from the machine. But if you were a real adult, you would. You’d put them away, too.

108. Say the Serenity Prayer and/or any other go-to evening prayers. Recall this morning’s meditation, “Peace isn’t something you find at the end of your journey, it’s something you choose, right here, right now, in the midst of it all.” Resolve to do better / be more peaceful tomorrow.2

109. Put on a podcast to help you fall asleep. If you were a better adult, you would meditate yourself to bed instead. Barring that, make sure the host and/or guest has a soothing voice, not too many ads. DEFINITELY nothing true-crimey. Do you want nightmares?! Any more than the already guaranteed adulting-related ones?

110. Wake in the middle of the night. Stumble to the bathroom. Pee. Oh no, the sleep state is slipping, don’t lose it! Don’t lose it or you’ll be up for the next two hours!!! STAY GROGGY!!

111. You lost it. Head to the living room. Read your book for the next two hours until you are tired enough to sleep again. Comfort yourself with an article on segmented sleep.

112. Wake up at 7:30 a.m., waaaay past the 4 a.m. club. Oh well. Repeat steps 2-111 above. Replace “dermatologist” with any other doctor or dentist, for you or for a family member. Forever. We haven’t even talked about taxes . . .

❤️

P.S. What did I forget? What else is on your list today?3 Continue reading:

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🧘🏻‍♀️No, BE PEACE now! Are you even listening?! Have you learned nothing?!

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Counter-Intuition with Julie Clow

The Tyranny of Morningness

I have never in my life been mistaken as a morning person. Even as a child, despite chronotypes leaning towards morningness in early life, I remember relishing Saturday mornings for the luxury of sleeping in until 9am or 10am, and there might have been more than one occasion in which my parents left me behind to go to church because I just couldn’t get …

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2 years ago · 6 likes · 10 comments · Julie Clow

Save Your Seat »

I did that weird thing again. I woke up earlier this week with a Case of the Mondays, magnified by a Case of the First Day of the Monthies, knowing I was barely scraping by on the mortgage by the skin of my teeth (again), while neglecting much of the credit card bills (again).

I was nervous about a small handful of corporate clients with contracts hanging in the balance, knowing the holidays are fast approaching and that it’s the slowest time of year for new work.

I was disappointed after accepting the reality that the broker we hired in September said we should pull our apartment listing for now, and wait until peak season returns in April to re-list and find a renter. I counted on my fingers: at a minimum, that’s five more months of paying this mortgage. No immediate relief in sight, the only answer for now (again) would be to out-earn it. And to try (again) to surrender and have faith that it is all unfolding in perfect, divine timing.

I felt a flash of annoyance at a young guy I’d met over the weekend, with a fancy corporate job, who made money stuff sound so easy when he spoke. Really, I was annoyed at myself: that, from the time I was eight years old until my mid-thirties, I was incredibly fastidious and disciplined about personal finances. Key word: was. Now I am in over my head, still working toward finding a way out and through.

But when I had a chance to share all of this—or even a sliver of it—during a group call on Monday, a different part of my brain took over. An old familiar Cope,1 as the kids say, slipping backward into well-worn mental grooves.

Read more

🪣 Learn more and enroll »

Rolling in Doh wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for two essential events in the summer of 2023: losing my Favorite Corporate Client (as longtime readers know all too well by now), and having brunch a few days later with my friend Brooke, author of the book and blog .1

Brooke embodied a creative courage I had lost along the way of building my business, writing boldly about her story of antidepressant withdrawal after fifteen years of hazy memories and harrowing side effects while on them. We hadn’t caught up in years, but I always appreciated the depth and breadth of her pursuits: writing, cooking, lifting, speaking, business-building, traveling, and art-making.

Brooke was already on Substack. When I mentioned I was tiptoeing around starting one, she offered enthusiastic encouragement. She pulled out her phone, and together we brainstormed breadwinner puns for the title. Once she suggested spelling “Dough” as “Doh,” I knew the idea was too fun not to pursue.

She gave me the gift of naming what I was experiencing, cracking a new door open even as I was still seeing cartoon stars, face stinging, while standing shocked in the old slammed door’s threshold. Brooke was my courage surrogate that day, my “trail angel,” as Dr. Lisa Miller, author of The Awakened Brain, put it in a recent episode of ’s podcast.

In the episode, Lisa walks Elise through a reflection exercise called “Red Door, Yellow Door.” With the gift of hindsight, recall a moment that hinged on an unanswered prayer, one later revealed to be a life-changing blessing-in-disguise (emphasis mine):

“I invite you to locate a moment when you wanted something so badly. A plus B plus C, you did your homework, you researched it, tactically strategized that red door was yours. It could have been that job, that school for you or your kid, an internship, for them to say yes.

You go for your red door, A plus B plus C. But it’s stuck; you can’t believe it’s stuck because you’ve done everything right, A plus B plus C. You might be angry, shocked, even depressed. You did not get what you wanted. So you have no choice. You pivot. You pivot 60, 140 degrees, and over there is a wide-open yellow door, a splendid yellow door.

You might have said yellow doors don’t exist. What’s a yellow door? On the other side of the yellow door is a job where you see a skill, a capacity you didn’t even know you had; someone who adores you and makes you feel worthy and alive; a community where you finally feel that you belong.

That yellow door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today, that splendid yellow door with a new landscape, that was not what you had wanted. It was better and better for you. And as you sit back now, [you can see a] stuck red door [versus the] hairpin turn [leading to a] wide open yellow door.”

Was there anyone at that hairpin turn—a counselor, a grandparent, a friend—who told you a story for the first time, who gave you information? Someone you met for two minutes at a coffee shop? A trail angel pointing you to the wide-open yellow door?”

Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

💬 What is one of your biggest yellow-door life moments?

• What was the red door you thought you wanted?

• How did the yellow door end up expanding you even more?

• Was there a trail angel who showed up at the perfect time?

• Do you think it gets any easier to choose the yellow door, or does it always require a cold-shower-like shock to the system? (Or to stick with the door metaphor, a proverbial slam in the face?)2

❤️

Leave a comment

Hi Dohnuts—if you are in the States, I am wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I am so grateful for you. This project has been healing in ways I cannot fully describe, and it wouldn’t be possible without you here—witnessing, reading, reflecting, and making every post better by sharing your warmth, wisdom, and experiences in the comments.

Short and sweet today; I just wanted to let you know that this is the last week to register for the upcoming Create Your Idea Collection Bucket course.1

If you have big ideas bubbling for 2026, but your notes are scattered across various apps, browser tabs, voice memos, notebooks, and forgotten fragments you thought you’d remember but don’t—it would be my greatest joy to help get organized, and to help you release more of your brilliant ideas into the world next year!

Important note: Right now, the course is $49, and you’ll get the recordings and resources even if you can’t make it live. After that, the workshop will be posted on my website for $97.

🪣 Learn more and enroll »

I hope to see you there! Happiest Thanksgiving to you and yours :)2

❤️

🪣 Learn more and enroll »

Catch up on part one first:

This summer, six years into a New York City mortgage, one that became an albatross as I struggled to rebuild my business to the pre-pandemic levels when I purchased it in 2019, we finally made the call: it was time to downsize.

Time to rent the place out, aided by the fact that it was also the first time we wouldn’t be underwater if we did, as rents had finally caught up to our monthly carrying costs. (Even now, selling would still be for less than we paid, and our mortgage rate alone is an asset, a now-unimaginable 3.5%.)

This was a domino decision, one that instantly unfurled one hundred next steps: packing our things, finding storage units (one of two is dedicated entirely to books), repainting the walls, fixing holes and broken light bulbs, repairing the boiler, dry cleaning drapes, installing new blinds, taking photographs, and posting the listing.

Even through overwhelm, just making the call was a huge relief; hope re-entered. We could see a way forward and through. Ever since that moment, as sure as the second side of an Oreo cookie, if we say we’re moving, everyone asks the same follow-up question: Where to?

Or they offer a location suggestion/financial advice embedded within a question: Have you considered moving to a place like X, that’s calmer / closer to nature / has a lower cost of living?

Many people share suggestions for the city they love; all are welcome—why not entertain them all? Some project their impressions of how we can live our best lives: I’m so glad you’re moving, I’m so happy for you, I’ve been wondering when you’d finally do this. (Implied: I’ve been wondering when you would come to your senses, based on my outside opinion of your life choices.)

The suggestions all bounce like pennies into a fountain,1 pooling at the bottom until we have a better system to sort through them. The thing is, when we lift our gaze from those pennies, we encounter something unexpected, a portal in the limbo: incredible opportunities materializing not in spite of the uncertainty, but because of it.

Read more

🪣 Learn more and enroll »

It is a cool, overcast Fall day, and I am waiting to pick up a fifteen-pound ochre Dutch oven that my friend Ann set aside after an estate sale in New Jersey, her weekend side hustle when not working as senior corporate counsel at a multinational pharmaceutical company. She sent it home with a friend who lives close to me in Manhattan, as she always knows exactly what my kitchen is missing. (Those of you who’ve read Free Time will recognize her as my inspiration for healthy cooking systems; her family meals are fully prepped for the day by 7 a.m. :)1

As I stand outside waiting for her friend to come downstairs, a thought flashes across my mind: I have outgrown old income streams, and I don’t want to chase after them.

Immediately, a gremlin claps back: That’s a pathetic excuse.

Just as I start to believe it, my eyes cast downward, and I notice a weathered metal sign on the drainage pipe hugging the building:

You just can’t make this stuff up. Perfect flow! Hah! The website listed at the bottom: www.aperfectflow.com. If you follow it, there’s a friendly bearded man ready to help:

Just as quickly as the thought gremlin entered my mind, here was a bit of serendipity signage that I just happened to notice one second later, washing the sewage right out, clearing (draining!) the energy-draining lie before it seeped into my psyche.

The previous night, in one of my frequent two a.m. segmented sleep wake-ups,2 I played an episode of Elin Hilderbrand’s Books, Beach, & Beyond, noting an interesting section from guest Fredrik Backman, author of Anxious People (emphasis mine):

“I started writing Anxious People coming out of therapy, after I had a breakdown in 2017. I just had the classic breakdown where everything just fell apart within me.

And the first thing [my therapist] told me was, ‘You don’t suffer from stress. Stress is what the nurse at the ER has at 2 o’clock on a Saturday morning. That’s stress. What you suffer from is pressure. And we treat it differently.’

Then that was a long journey for me. And my therapist now has a very nice summer home and a boat.”

In an instant, the “Perfect Flow” sign helped me reframe my problem statement. Almost as soon as I spotted it, Backman’s podcast clue bubbled back up to the surface:3 there is a different between stress and pressure.

While under business, breadwinner, and financial pressure, I didn’t have to let the stress seep in. I would figure things out, eventually. In contrast to Instant Pot rapidity, sometimes a slow-cooked meal, simmered Dutch oven-style, is more delicious anyway. Sometimes (all the time?!) there is wisdom in the waiting.

One week prior to spotting the sign, I noted the Chekhov quote from the opening epigraph while reading ’ book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. In the explanatory text surrounding it, George writes (emphasis mine):

“The true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way. Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” ‘Formulate them correctly’ might be taken to mean: ‘make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.’”

That also flashed back into memory when I saw the sign.

I didn’t have all the answers (or any). Not yet, anyway.

But I could at least formulate the questions thoughtfully. I could describe the problem fully while draining the sewage, relaxing into the perfect flow of it all.4

❤️

Continue reading part two . . .

P.S. This all happened last October (2024) . . . how do I remember the weather, the gremlin, the plumbing company’s name, the podcast episode, and the Chekhov quote? Perfect flow plus my Idea Collection Bucket, of course!

Join us on December 4 and 5 to build yours »

4

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286: Slow-Cooked vs. Pressure Cooker

Are you living in a pressure cooker? One of my all-time favorite meals is two-day slow-cooked ribs from a fancy restaurant, where the meat is so soft it falls right off the bone. (Sorry to my vegetarian and vegan friends who might not appreciate today's metaphor…

Listen now

4 years ago · ❤️ Jenny Blake

If you have a big idea bubbling for 2026, but your “ragbag” notes are scattered across various apps, notebooks, browser tabs, voice memos, and forgotten fragments you thought you’d remember but don’t—I see you! And I’ve been there.

If your idea-capturing systems are disorganized (or nonexistent), it would be my greatest joy to help organize your mind and get more of your best ideas into the world. I’m teaching a two-day workshop during the first week of December.

Skip straight to securing your seat:

🪣 Learn more and enroll »

Or keep reading . . .

I set up my first proper digital collection bucket in September 2021 (also referred to as a commonplace book), after reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

Setting up this system sparked new creative magic for me, as I started connecting disparate stories and snippets in unique ways. I’m only going to toot my own horn here for a brief moment, to show you what is possible when you have a home for the random, serendipitous idea-scraps that fly across your day (that’s just one metaphor, several more to follow since I can’t help myself 😂).

With the help of this idea collection bucket . . .

• I wrote and published my third book, Free Time, in one year; my two previous books took three years each.1

• After launching Rolling in Doh in July 2023 as a “super secret summer pop-up,” I’ve gone on to publish 232 posts (two every week); that’s nearly 350,000 words, the equivalent of five non-fiction book-sized drafts.

• Doh is one of the projects I am proudest of in my career; my collection bucket system and practices have helped me re-embrace my writer identity, recovering creative expression that had gone dormant when I was busy serving corporate clients’ needs pre-pandemic.

• Before pausing my two podcasts in February 2024, for two years I produced fourteen episodes a month, aided by this system (alongside an incredible production team), including: weekly Pivot episodes, twice weekly for Free Time (one solo, one guest), and two private episodes for the BFF community.

I think of my best writing output as a chopped salad (new metaphor alert!): a little bit of everything, including quotes, questions, research, personal stories, photos, memes, books, and podcast references. I enjoy mixing all these elements together when exploring a topic, and I couldn’t do it without my collection bucket ready and easily searchable (and cross-reference-able) at my fingertips.

But the work doesn’t start when I sit down to draft: I save these idea ingredients multiple times a day, throughout every day, so that when it’s time to write, I’m synthesizing as much as I am thinking from scratch (that’s a recipe for writer’s block).

What do squirrels, acorns, and compost piles have in common with your creative process?

💡🪣✨ Create Your Idea Collection Bucket is a two-day workshop that will give you the tools and practices to build a rich, intuitive system for generating ideas and accelerating creativity; one that saves time, enhances your thinking, feeds your curiosity, and provides abundant material to work with when you’re ready to create.

From one of our earliest Doh discussion posts, as novelist Ann Patchett says:

“I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know, and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”

Together, we will build the container for all your rich idea compost. You will learn to move through the world like a squirrel, pocketing away quotes, questions, stories, facts, photos, writing samples, snippets of overheard dialogue, and other miscellaneous acorns that pique your curiosity throughout the day.

You’ll learn how to tuck these treasures into your digital collection bucket, connecting new acorns to similar, related older ones—with everything readily available when it’s time to synthesize your experiences and thinking into new work.

Once a rough draft takes shape, intuition and serendipity also work their magic, dropping just-right acorns into your awareness (often at the last minute) to round out the final version.

🌱🐿️ This class will provide ready-made templates and teach you practical daily creative habits to use them, so that you, too, can become an expert idea composter and acorn-collector :)

Over two 90-minute sessions together, we will cover:

• Setting up your own idea collection system in Notion

• Building a collection habit—expanding the range of what you collect as you move throughout your day

• Labeling systems to help create connections between ideas

• Curating from your collection when it’s time to write or create (i.e. for a book, essay, newsletter, course, etc.)

• Leaning into your intuition and serendipity in the process

If you’re working on something big in 2026, and you have scattered notes everywhere but no system for making sense of them, this class is for you.

Additional details:

• What it costs: $49

• Who it’s best for: Anyone working on a project that requires your original thinking and/or writing (such as newsletters, essays, books, courses, etc.)

• Prerequisite: You are already using Notion, or curious about how to use it and willing to experiment with it during our time together.

• You will get: Two 90-minute sessions (plus recordings), five done-for-you templates so you’re not setting up your Idea Collection system from scratch, and detailed follow-up notes.

• Format: Within each session, we’ll have a mix of instruction and a handful of quick 5-10 minute creative practices to accelerate what you collect every day.

• Timing: We will meet live on Thursday, December 4, and Friday, December 5, from 12 p.m. ET to 1:30 p.m. ET. (After you book here, you will get another link in the confirmation email to add the second session to your calendar.)

• Recording: Sessions will be recorded if you can’t make it live, or if you need to step out at any point.

  🪣 Save Your Seat »

Here’s to making 2026 your most prolific and creative year yet!2

❤️

1

📘 It also helped that I worked with a very entrepreneurial independent publisher, Ideapress, who was game to follow my accelerated timeline!

🏆 Free Time went on to win seven publishing awards:

2

👉 If you want to learn more about how this practice has changed my life, check out these related posts and podcast episodes:

Free Time with Jenny Blake

095: ✍️ The Writing Practice That Changed My Life

“I’ve learned that I do not know anything until I write it down. I’m forced to consider, annotate, reflect, learn…

Listen now

3 years ago · ❤️ Jenny Blake

Free Time with Jenny Blake

✍️ Tools to leverage AI as a writing partner (not a crutch)

Happy Friday, Free Timers! 🎉…

Read more

a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · ❤️ Jenny Blake

Free Time with Jenny Blake

189:💡Jay Acunzo’s IP Development OS — Courtesy of Creator Kitchen

In episode 181: Be Irreplaceable, you heard from my creative coach, Jay Acunzo about how to prioritize resonanceover reach. I’ve been working with Jay for about six months now, and it has transformed the way I think about creating content…

Listen now

3 years ago · ❤️ Jenny Blake

💬 Start Survey »

Catch up on part one and part two first:

Where we left off . . .

By the time I stepped off the plane, I felt that peace and presence, just as Jim Murphy promised. I reminded myself: there’s only ever one wish. I recited my usual prayer for the days leading up to a keynote: Make me a messenger. Help me deliver what this room of beautiful people most needs to hear right now.

But adrenaline in the body can do funny things when stepping onto an arena-sized stage. Scott Berkun captures it perfectly in his book, Confessions of a Public Speaker:

“Our brains, for all their wonders, identify the following four things as being very bad for survival:

—Standing alone
—In open territory with no place to hide
—Without a weapon
—In front of a large crowd of creatures staring at you

In the long history of all living things, any situation where all the above were true was very bad for you. It meant the odds were high that you would soon be attacked and eaten alive. Many predators hunt in packs, and their easiest prey are those who stand alone, without a weapon, on a flat area of land where there is little cover (e.g., a stage). Our ancestors, the ones who survived, developed a fear response to these situations.”

“Expect nothing” helped me overcome my self-centeredness en route to the event. But would it help when I needed it most? Would it work once I stepped onto that big stage, under the bright lights and with two thousand eyeballs pointed expectantly in my direction?

When I first met one of my besties, , over a decade ago, he often repeated his favorite mantra, one strengthened after spending a month meditating in a Thai monastery: “Keep your head in the clouds, and your feet on the ground.”

I still smile when he says it. Adam is a visionary—a powerful dreamer—and it’s easy for both of us to live in the clouds sometimes.1 But it’s hard to make a home or a solid business there, and besides, midlife challenges certainly have a way of humbling those boots right back down into the dirt. It reminds me of the now-cliché Thoreau-ism (that I’ve admittedly quoted in my books):

That’s what resonates within Jim Murphy’s message: striving for excellence isn’t about tearing down those visions of castles in the air; what gets us in trouble is becoming attached to what they look like or what they’ll do for us once we build them. The crux of Jim’s work is inner excellence, aiming for what he posits we really want, “beyond our tangible goals and pursuits,” which is “to feel totally alive.”

Fear takes us farther from that feeling. It puts the focus back on the me-me-me of attachment. Jim describes the experience of resonance as being “fully engaged in the moment, with a clear mind and unburdened heart.” Emphasis mine:

Extraordinary performance is merely a subset of extraordinary experience; great results are the byproduct of resonance. The key to extraordinary performance, then, is to build on a foundation that creates the conditions for resonance.”

For Jim, that foundation comes from four daily process goals:2

1. Give my best (100% of what I have today)

2. Be present

3. Be grateful

4. Focus on my routines and only what I can control

I cannot control the outcome of a speech, nor the impact. I can only ever do my best. When I focus on the outcome, worrying in advance about whether people will like me or not, I enter a state of fear, anxiety, and self-obsession. When I shift my focus to service, to how grateful I am to get to do something so meaningful at all, I am present.

I have been speaking in front of groups of varying sizes for almost twenty years; twenty-five if you count high school graduation. Still, to this day, I cannot totally control what my nerves do when I step on stage. Sometimes my heart palpitates and my voice quakes just introducing myself in front of a room of ten people—even when I’m not the one facilitating, just participating. Something as casual as saying my name and background at a business meet-up might send my heart rate spiking.

Sometimes my leg shakes. Sometimes my neck and chest break out in hives. I never quite know what I’m going to get. I remind myself that these speaking fears are natural, even primal (as per Berkun, quoted above). That alone helps calm the adrenaline; believing it’s bad, noticeable, or unnatural only creates a vicious cycle, accelerating its production and physical impact further.

So, alongside these years of practice, I chalk it up to pure grace when I step in front of a group of any size without losing my cool, without forgetting my words, and while remembering to have fun. This peace comes from somewhere bigger than me, something that transcends the clouds.

The day before the keynote, we did a five-hour tech test at the arena. Nothing worked as planned: not the teleprompter, not the media in my slides, not the confidence monitors, not the interactive elements (via a tool called Menti).

I did not feel good about anything, really, by the time I went to bed that night. I was not confident whatsoever. I was the kick-off speaker, so if anything did go wrong, I’d be the first to know—and the first to flub.

Read more

💬 Start Survey »

Catch up on part one here first:

Where we left off . . .

The stack of index cards sitting in my lap taunted me, reminding me how many of the new additions to my keynote I had yet to memorize, with just two days remaining. This flight meant crossing a threshold; the event no longer an abstraction six months away, but now imminent.

Every time I flubbed a flashcard, my nerves soured. I wasn’t ready.

After boarding, in that quick last-minute window before take-off, I scanned for new podcast episodes to download. One leapt from the queue. Could this episode change the outcome of the event? Could it change my life?

I tired of “peak performance” as a topic of interest many years ago. Something about the way podcast bros saturated the listening market with this notion by interviewing—let’s be honest—mostly men about how to constantly be better (the best!) wore me out.

At a certain point, I stopped striving for constant peak—obsessed with measuring good, better, best—I just wanted to do the best I could do, surrendering at every step to whatever was in the highest good for all involved. I was not obsessed with winning everything, or even being the best at anything; I just wanted peace and equanimity while being of service to others, whatever that looked like.

So it surprised even me that, on the morning of this nerve-wracking flight, the episode I chose to download from ’ 10% Happier podcast was called, “How to Perform Under Pressure—with Both Peace and Confidence,” featuring Jim Murphy, whose remarkable viral book sales story I shared in part one.1 The only word missing was peak, but it sure seemed implied.

It was the peace and confidence part that got me; that’s what I was craving going into the event. I’d been planning with the organizers for six months, bringing in three Pivot facilitators and working with them on their slides, stories and handouts; and writing a whole new post-pandemic portion for mine to bring it current.

Just one day earlier, in a not-unusual case of last-minute nerves, I sobbed to my husband that I was a fraud, set to give a Pivot keynote while failing to pivot my way out of our financial mess. I had lost my confidence, and I’m not someone who can conjure it out of thin air. Although I did do well at my last two in-person speaking gigs, I hadn’t spoken to this many people IRL in almost a decade.

I needed a shift, and I needed it badly. I did not want to step onto that stage feeling needy, nervous, or unprepared—aka the way I was already feeling on this flight. But I was only allowing those things in because I had forgotten something crucial:

This event was not about me.

Duh. This event was about them, the attendees who were traveling far and wide, many across state lines, to be there.

That’s when Jim shared eight words that washed the worries right out of my body.

Read more

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A view that never fails to make my heart flutter: the city skyline taking off from LaGuardia:

Sometimes magical thinking works. The stack of index cards sitting in my lap was taunting me, reminding me how many of the new additions to my keynote speech I had yet to memorize, with just two short days remaining. This flight meant crossing a threshold; the event no longer an abstraction six months away, but now imminent.

My nerves soured. I wasn’t ready.

After boarding, in that quick last-minute window before take-off, I remembered to scan for new podcast episodes to download. One leapt from the queue. Could this episode change the outcome of the event? Could it change my life?

Indeed, it could. But I didn’t know that yet. I hit Spotify’s little green down arrow and prayed the circle closed in time, indicating I could listen from the clouds as my reward for completing another speech run-through, after mumbling to myself for the next thirty minutes.

I felt a twinge of hope upon seeing the title. You could even call it magical thinking.1

Jim was deeply in debt after finishing five years of full-time writing and research for the first version of his book. A former athlete and coach, he became obsessed with answering one question:

How can an Olympic athlete train for four years for an event that may last less than a minute, and have peace and confidence in that situation?

The more experts he called to help answer, the more questions unspooled before him.

Finally, in 2009, he published the results with McGraw-Hill. Less than a decade later, they moved on, as often happens once sales trickle to a crawl. Sometimes the publisher calls about the “remainder” of their most recent print run, offering the author a chance to buy back some stock before they incinerate the rest.

Fortunately, McGraw-Hill also gave the copyright back, so Jim’s next move was making a few updates and self-publishing on Amazon in 2020. Was that magical thinking, practical thinking, or faith in his message and a higher power to help the book continue to reach all who needed it?

He wasn’t waiting on a miracle—certainly not expecting one—but one happened anyway, just as he teaches within the book.

Five years later, in a moment he could never have planned for, one that would be any author’s wildest delulu dream, the book spontaneously hit the big leagues.

In January 2025, an NFL player—one of the team’s stars—was spotted reading on the sidelines of a playoff game after leaving the field, a moment projected on the arena’s big screens (and on televisions in living rooms across the country) for all to see:

Fifteen years after first hitting the shelves, five after being left for (literary) dead by its former publisher, thanks to Eagles receiver A.J. Brown, Jim Murphy’s book, Inner Excellence, “hit the list.” It catapulted into the number one spot after selling over 100,000 copies within that momentous week, whereas ninety-nine percent of books are lucky to sell 1,000 in their lifetime (not to mention the fact that self-published books almost never make the New York Times’ subjective, highly editorialized list).

What does Jim’s story have to do with mine?

Continue reading part two to find out . . .2

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P.S. 🦄 I highly recommend spending Halloween as a unicorn next year: What could possibly be more comfortable than dispensing candy in a cozy, crazy-soft adult onesie?! I’m wearing it now a I write this post, and plan to every morning hereafter, including while picking up the Saturday paper from the stoop. Now I’m just trying to find a good reason not to continue wearing it while taking Ryder to the park . . . 😂

And why is it so fun to see this ridiculous costume on a grown man?! In case you need to see the head-to-toe, unicorn-threw-up-a-rainbow lewk to decide for next year 🤩

✨ 🦄 ✨

I did it.

We did it.

I rose—we flew—in service of the room, even for a day yesterday—and then hopefully, another day someday soon, and another one after that.

It was my first time sharing the arc of my pandemic story from the stage—the biggest one I’ve been on in the last ten years—and for some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to do that in front of nearly one thousand women. Actually, I know the reason: because they deserve to hear the truth.

It didn’t matter that I was sidelined by a nasty stomach bug a week ago, into the wee hours of Sunday morning, losing two days of critical practice, worrying that I wouldn’t even make the plane on Wednesday. I didn’t matter that, in my recovery dip on Tuesday night, I threw a pity party and said to my husband through sobs that I’m a fraud and I shouldn’t even be on stage giving a pivot keynote, because look at me, I don’t even have my own figured out.

It didn’t matter.

“The audience needs you to shine,” told us at his Make a Scene book launch party at an intimate Soho loft in January. “When you go to a Broadway show, you don’t want to see the performers hemming and hawing, embarrassed to be there, apologizing for being on stage. You want them to be larger than life!”

I have been planning for this event since May, and every step of it has been a blessing. Getting the job after the organizers found me from a Google search looking for a Pivot-related keynote speaker, swinging a huge door open for my career this year. Then, being asked to bring in Pivot facilitators to animate follow-up sessions after my kick-off keynote, enabling me to hold the door open for three dear friends just as the Women Warriors Summit founder, Alys Smith, did by inviting me.

I didn’t even tell you it was happening, dear Dohnuts, because I didn’t want to jinx anything. But the four of us have been planning for this day on the stage for months, treating it almost as a full-time job for these last two.

It paid off. We rocked the first half of the day yesterday—an hour for the kick-off Pivot keynote (me), then thirty minutes each from the fabulous trio of Petra Kolber, Selena Soo, and Laura Garnett, followed by a twenty-five-minute fireside chat-style Q&A with all of us to close out before lunch. Be as vulnerable as you can, I guided the team for that last segment—this is our chance to get real, to imagine we are sitting at coffee one-on-one with every member of the audience.

We laughed, we cried, and we told the truth about picking outfits and the wrong men. We shared our current struggles, but when one audience member asked a question about a favorite failure, I was the only panelist who didn’t answer that one—I didn’t quite know what to say. Then, another submitted, “Jenny, I must know. How did you make it financially when you lost 80%+ of your income in 2020?!?!”

“Well . . . I am still struggling,” I said, choking back unexpected tears. “I am still figuring it out. I feel like I am failing in my role as a breadwinner and business owner. I wasn’t going to say anything, but the organizers can’t fire me now! I’ve been referring to these last few years as my Flop Era.”

A laugh rippled through the arena as I felt the pressure release from my chest, airing out the hidden parts I had been holding inside, but unsure whether to reveal or not. Make me a messenger is the prayer I say every morning before I speak. I ask to be a channel for whatever the room needs to hear that day.

In my experience, shining isn’t just about fake-it-‘til-you-make-it bravado—maybe for some—it’s also a gift to shine the light of truth, even if that truth is messier than I’d like it to be, or than others think it should be.

One school of thought would’ve been to pretend I’m a hugely successful keynote speaker and let that sole impression help build momentum. But it just doesn’t work for me at a soul level. It interferes with my even bigger intention to be a messenger, to help the women in the room feel seen and to feel less alone in their struggles. My school: tell the truth, as long as its in service of the room, and let the follow-up cards fall where they may.

It felt so good to tell those women what was real and true, how grateful I was just to be up there on stage at all after the rollercoaster of these last five years. I knew that any one of them could’ve been on that stage, sharing their stories of resilience, too.

Petra closed us out before lunch with a beautiful poem, “She Let Go.”

In Wednesday’s community prompt, I asked what “F” phase might follow Phoenixing:

• of Energy-First Writing said, “Flourishing and flowering. The Phoenix doesn’t just rise from the ashes, she MAKES them. Once the dust settles, the ground transmutes the burned material into flourishing flowers. 💐”

• of said, “Floating, which is taking stock of what was lost, finding balance and equilibrium, as you figure out what’s next.”

• Jenna, a licensed therapist, Pivot coach, and dear friend suggested, “Forging: building something new and stronger from the ashes.”

Yesterday’s event was magic. We phoenixed. We flourished, flowered, floated, and forged our way through an incredible event, and getting to do it with friends made it even sweeter. It went off even more brilliantly than my wildest dreams, beyond what I would have dared to dream—made possible by the fastidious crew and the three incredible women who also gave it their all alongside me, making a combined impact far greater than what any one of us would have achieved alone. Next stop, world tour ;-)

As I said in part five, I’m not back where I started pre-pandemic; I am somewhere new. More aligned, more creative, more vulnerable, more honest, and more humble. Maybe some of these gifts of grace have been given to you, too.

Sure enough, by far the most frequent piece of feedback we received for the rest of the afternoon, milling about once the four of us could kick back and relax with the pressure off: “Thank you for being so vulnerable. I really needed to hear that today.”

When emcee Soledad O’Brien asked a group of high schoolers over lunch what their favorite takeaway of the day was so far, they replied, “Knowing that even the adults don’t have it all figured out.”1

❤️

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1

🛫 One more fun highlight: Petra and I both separately get auto-upgraded to First Class for the first leg of our flight home, and by total coincidence, assigned to adjacent seats 😍

👉 If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

So far, we’ve covered the five F’s of trauma response: fight, freeze, flight, fawn, and flop, followed by an honorary sixth F (by phoneme at least): phoenix.

Once you’ve risen from the proverbial ashes of change, what phase might follow?

Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments:1

💬 What “F” stage could follow Phoenixing?

Optional: Share a few sentences about why you chose that word/phase :)

Note: These are normally for paid subscribers only, so fellow Dohnuts can feel more secure in sharing, knowing the stories and comments aren’t publicly searchable. Today, comments are open, so I would love for you to join us!

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P.S. After weighing in, continue reading the post-script to this series: