Hello stars,

Ever since I was a little girl, I just knew I wanted to dress cute and talk for a living.

“How’d you get so good at public speaking? Did you take a class or something?” Big eyes stared across the table — a 30-something executive at LinkedIn, with a sliiightly skeptical curiosity.

“Oh, well, I always say it’s just my God-given gift! I don’t know. I’m never nervous, it just kinda flows out of me.” My default answer. I fired it back and relaxed into my lawn chair outside the Waldorf Astoria Dana Point, where 300 of the company’s top product leaders had gathered to decide the future of the platform and its 1.3 billion users. I’d just stepped off stage from delivering creator-led insights about how to design the product for the future of work. Which obviously, I can predict perfectly.

As I was whisked off the stage to interview the CEO (????), the 17th person complimented my skills, (YES I lowkey felt like a celebrity… but remember, engineers are not known for their communication no shade!!!), and this guy was the 20th. Flattery, I thought, but then I actually sat with the question. How did I get so comfortable on stage — so comfortable I’ve bet on making it a main focus in my career?

“Well,” I sheepishly reflected live to the table, “I guess…I’ve done 200 podcast episodes, had to take speaking and pitching classes at Wharton, have made, like, thousands of videos—”

“You’ve done your 10,000 hours.”

Oh.

Crystal clear the second she said it, though completely invisible to me until then.

Maybe not TEN THOUSAND hours, but I’d successfully trekked up a mountain without realizing how far up I’d gotten.

For years I treated speaking like something I’d be allowed to do eventually. Once I had the credentials. Once I had a million followers (or maybe 10!) and made Forbes 30 Under 30, of course. Once someone Official tapped me on the shoulder and said, “okay, now you’re a speaker!”

This week’s episode is a live chat with you about how I stopped waiting for that tap. Listen on the Substack app if you have it or just press play on this post’s LIVE recording.

Desire = Destiny

Let me be honest about the wanting, because we’re very much trained to shrink it.

I shrugged off being a good speaker like it was nothing, never sitting with what it actually does for people. For something that comes so naturally to me, it’s almost comical that I couldn’t see it was a gift.

When I let myself believe I could be a big speaker — the real deal — that’s when the desire to actually dig in started to grow.

I didn’t want to “try out speaking.” I wanted to be a speaker. Real stages, paid like it. When I was a kid, I aspired to be a journalist like Oprah or Mary Jane Paul (lol) because sure, I’d get to talk all day, but also because I REALLY want people to appreciate my outfits! DAILY!

The single shift was saying that out loud instead of diminishing it as some random “God-given talent.” (Yeah, doing the Artist’s Way 3x helps with this!)

Because the way you talk about your work tells everyone exactly how seriously to take it.

If I walk in as “just an influencer trying out a panel,” people undercharge me and underestimate me and like, why wouldn’t they? But when I show up as an Expert Who’s Doing The Reps (200 episodes, 50-plus events, otw to the 10,000 hours), people fall in line.

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Building the Proof

First, I stopped waiting for stages altogether and built my own. I started running The Alignment Edit workshops for high-achieving women who are brilliant but can’t name their lane, which is where I saw the magic. I was moved — truly — by facilitating brilliant women who’d previously felt alone in their hunger as they soothed each other through the sacrifices we share in and emerged stronger.

I knew a) we needed to do more of them, bigger, longer, intimate but scaled and b) I had to dream bigger if I was going to keep preaching about it.

In addition to my own workshops, I did a lot of panels for free, but PLEASE notice I didn’t say yes to every stage, I said yes to the ones whose audiences were already aligned with mine. Clarity on your brand helps which rooms to walk into. I used to be Associated with brands that are simply not aligned, and now I’m careful about while I work on growing my skills and exposure.

Last month I spoke at Million Dollar Personal Brand on the same lineup as industry leaders Jaclyn Johnson and Jen Sincero, and the exposure was so meaningful I was glad to show up.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not ecstatic about how I’m consistently getting PAID for it, and no Agency or Official tap needed.

On Wednesday, I moderated a panel with Phia’s founder and Coach’s former CEO because I’d made it obvious this is what I do: on LinkedIn, on Substack, in every interview. Now I introduce myself as a speaker (in addition to Entrepreneur & Author). It’s allllwayyyysss funny how opportunities find the woman who just won’t shut up about what she wants.

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LinkedIn’s CEO interviewed me about my portfolio career. Not because I have the biggest audience in the world (though my Ambitious Material Girls are LOYAL) — but because I have a point of view you simply can’t get anywhere else. A sharp lane beats a big audience every single time!

Over fifty women have now trusted me to help build their personal brand without losing the credibility they worked so hard for. Now that there’s traction, I’m ready for more, and I know I‘m not the only one.

The method, since you’re going to ask: I didn’t pitch a single one of those rooms. I got loud and clear about what I wanted, built my own table, and then said yes to aligned opportunities — sometimes the lowball ones — and delivered every time like it was already my job. Next, I’m expanding my table!

Now, For You

If you’ve met me in real life, you know how IRRITATED I get when I meet a woman who isn’t aware of her full potential.

Whether you’re my high school best friend or the SUPER cute and talented sales associate I met at Alice + Olivia last weekend (shoutout kirstin for showing me those show-stopping capris) — I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU TO BUILD YOUR BRAND!!!!!!! There’s so much money out there. Freedom. Opportunity! And, I’ve come to realize, real connection — the girls with the fire that no one around you can quite mirror — is possible, too!

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I’m baffled at the women with real credentials and a genuinely important skill set, sitting under-positioned and scattered online, waiting for a permission slip that is never, ever coming. And I now know how to fix it, mostly because I just did it for myself, in real time, in front of you (not for the first time, mind you, so you get to learn from my mistakes too).

For my girls who have some traction and are looking to turn this into a credible personal brand, I’m creating a small advisory to help you scale. Respond to this email with what you’re building for more information.

Anyway, you already have the authority.

You’re just still waiting for someone to hand it to you instead of architecting it yourself.

See ya next time! Inbox is open if this is something that resonated <3

Alexis

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Things I’m disgusted by:

• men dancing on tables

• the color orange (sorry knicks/this excludes hermès)

• leftovers

• warm white wine

• slow walkers

• boring people

• and my own mediocrity.

This is just a start, of course. Visceral disgust — the kind that makes you shudder on the street, trying to physically fling the feeling off your body — has been following me around lately. Yes, the Knicks are in the finals and orange is everywhere and the men are back on the tables, but that’s not the main offender. I read disgust as a signal now, for another self-imposed ceiling I’m about to outgrow. This time, it’s frustration with the consequences of years of selling myself short.

In April and May, I went through some amazing stuff and some awful stuff, as one does. Many of my dreams began to materialize — speaking engagements, brand deals, a growing client list — but I kept getting feedback from people I respected (only kind that matters) that I was undercharging for my services, underinvesting in my production, and not asking for enough. Oh!!!! Oops!!!

It’s kinda like finding out everybody actually hates your new boyfriend: I felt exposed and embarrassed for the version of me who had downplayed herself, her success, and her worth for so long. That, plus fear about how I’d realize my dreams of helping more people, scaling, and making it in NYC without some Serious Miracle, materialized into disgust.

It’s this disgust we have with ourselves for ‘failing’ that sometimes feels like the price of ambition. Avoiding the sting of sounding stupid works as fuel in our desperation to learn, consume, and do more, but only to a point.

Dodging pain is not the same thing as intentional creation, even if they both feel productive. And when you start to identify with the pain a bit too much, it shames you into thinking you’re alone in this, that you’re the only one who’s EVER struggled. No, my dear, you are not.

We all have, we all will, we all do, and that pain is not a call to contract. It’s a call to connect.

Everyone has the day where they’ve been holding too much and it finally breaks.

A few weeks ago, the pressure boiled over. I broke down after a WTHN acupuncture session (Fiona warned me it was going to be intense!) and a long week, so the only thing left to do was call my mom and hysterically itemize every burden I was carrying.

The list: doing it all alone. The pitching, the expanding, the content, the offers, the real money I’m pouring into projects I’m passionate about, the next book — on what felt like no time and no energy. Over the course of 1h & :03 mins, she reminded me of two things: you can’t be helped if you don’t ask for help, and I am really f**king bad at asking for help. And that this is a serious (!) problem.

I’d been carrying my burdens on my own, down to tasks I could have outsourced ages ago, mostly because it never occurred to me I could ask. For help. For more. I agreed to call her daily, make a list of everyone that could help me, all of my resources, and everything I truly needed (all the stuff I literally teach in my Alignment Edit workshops — guess I learned it somewhere!)

In the weeks since my surrender, a series of Small but Serious Miracles have woven through my life, most of them through people I didn’t have to chase. One-on-one conversations with women I’ve admired for decades. Investor intros. Paid opportunities I didn’t pitch for, including speaking at Cannes this year alongside some dream brands.

The exact people I needed to help with the book and expand what I'm building for you. None of it came from a perfect deep-work block or a polished pitch session. It came from a decade of compounding community, of showing up and letting people in: people who want to help me, love me, have fun with me. It was available the whole time.

Who knew that support would amplify my impact rather than diminish it?

And just so you know, when I was breaking down, it wasn’t because I hate my life. It’s because I genuinely love my job(S), I’m living in alignment, which is exactly why this is so easy to get wrong. When the thing you love is also the thing you live on, you stop protecting it. It reads as work, so you treat it like work, and you grind the joy right out of it. Sometimes you can’t see your own blocks until you break, and then it’s up to you what you do with them.

The reason I wasn’t taking myself seriously is that being small was comfortable.

I could be the rookie, the underdog, the young one still figuring it out, and no one expects much of the underdog. But I’m not the rookie anymore. I have power now, and a point of view, and the only way to actually use either one is to take them seriously.

For me that looks like investing in myself for real: the production quality, the team, the look, the mindset. And it looks like enjoying the work instead of running it on survival mode, because work made from love is the only kind that creates real value. Confidence in your own worth comes with a bill attached. If I believe I’m good enough to take this to the next level, I also have to take responsibility for getting it there.

PLUS, a genuinely fun life takes just as much responsibility as a serious career. You have to sit down and plan it. Decide which relationships to nurture, what you actually want to do with your time, how you want to enjoy it, and then build the space to make it happen.

If we’re not serious about enjoying our lives and our work, what exactly was the point? You didn’t get this ambitious just to grind every day and stack up sacrifices you’re too overwhelmed to enjoy.

I don’t want the survival-mode version for you, and the antidote isn’t another one of my productivity lists. It’s getting more present and more serious about your own happiness.

When avoidance has been your fuel for so long, you can’t even recognize what it feels like when service, creativity, and joy are the fuel instead, and that none of it has to hurt. The striving starts to feel like stretching, not suffering.

This is me deciding I get to have a life I love. It’s hard, sure. Challenging, often. But it’s worth it because I actually love it, and reminding myself of that is how I get through the day.

You have to take your enjoyment and connection as seriously as you’ve trained yourself to take the pain, because if you can’t take your fun seriously, you’ll never really take your work seriously either.

I won’t beat myself up. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It’s hard to think big when you’ve never known you could have more. Thinking big is a muscle, and you start to lose it when you stay stagnant (more on that in a forthcoming essay).

So this summer, I want you focused on building real substance. Not the kind that comes from a flawless side project or the grit of finishing a marathon. The kind that comes from living. You get it from going out, meeting people, trying, messing up, cringing, spilling on yourself mid-sentence as you say the wrong thing, and realizing you made someone smile anyway. I want you to try and fail and do new things badly and wince at yourself, because that is the recipe for growth. The time will come. But you have to take the joy as seriously as you take the work.

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A few ways Ambitious Material Girls can invite more susbtance in this summer:

1. Believe you’ve already earned it

The trap I lived in for years: I’ll enjoy this once I’ve earned it. Once I feel ready. Ready never showed up, and neither did the permission, because I’d built a finish line that moved every time I got close.

So let’s retire the word. There is no objective moment where enjoyment unlocks. “Earned” is a story you’re telling yourself, and you’re allowed to rewrite it. If you want to keep the word, then you have to do three things with it:

• Define it. Write down what success actually looks like for you. Start with the feeling. Not “more,” not “bigger.” The real picture, detailed enough that you could describe it to a stranger.

• Decide it’s possible for you. Look at that picture and find one honest path to it. You need to believe a path exists, and you need to be okay with it being available to someone like you. A lot of us flinch right here, because if the dream is actually reachable, we have to go get it.

• Permit it now. You enjoy the work on the way there. That enjoyment is the fuel for the climb, and it’s available today, not at the summit.

2. Change the words before they change you

Listen to how you talk about the things you’re excited about. “Oh, it’s just a little side project.” “It’s nothing.” “It’s not that hard.” “Thank you, but really, it’s not a big deal.”

We downplay the good stuff to stay in control of it. The logic, somewhere underneath, is that if you never fully let yourself want it, it can never fully disappoint you. We try to stop ourselves from enjoying things even when they feel good, just to preserve the feeling and stay in charge. Cute theory!!! It doesn’t work. You just end up too guarded to enjoy the life you’re actively building.

So say the real thing out loud. “Oh my god, I know, I’m so excited about this.” “I think this could be huge.” “I worked really hard on it and I’m proud.” Let it be a big deal. You become the size of your sentences, so stop making yourself small in casual conversation and then wondering why you feel small.

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3. Schedule joy like it’s a deliverable

My work is my fun, which means turning off is something I have to engineer on purpose. For me, fun doesn’t just happen. It gets planned with the same seriousness as a launch, or it loses every time to something that feels more productive.

Some ways I’m actually doing this:

• Make a summer fun list. Sit down and plan your joy the way you’d plan a quarter. What are the things that would make this summer feel full? Write them down where you’ll see them. Check out ’s lists if you need some inspo.

• Take yourself on artist dates. I learned this from The Artist’s Way: a standing solo date, no productive reason, just delight! Lately, I’ve taken myself to the history museum and Michaels to get some craft materials. Each time I’ve stumbled upon something amazing!

• Set an intention before you walk out the door. Tonight I’m here to be present. On this walk, I’m going to focus on regulating my energy. Tonight I’m not talking about work. “I’m going out to have fun with my friends tonight.” Naming it out loud, before you leave, puts you there on purpose instead of half-checking email at the table.

You did not come this far to not have any fun. You want to be scaling the joy alongside everything else, because a life you’ve grinded the joy out of is not a life of substance. It’s just a long to-do list.

4. Subtract on purpose

Taking yourself seriously is not a license to do everything, and this is where most ambitious women blow it. They hear “be serious about your work and your fun” and build a longer list, which is just the old disease in a sundress.

Being serious REQUIRES subtraction. “I’m not doing that right now, and that’s a decision” is a full sentence, and it beats letting six half-dead projects rot in the background while you promise yourself you’ll get to them. Pick the thing you’ve been dragging from week to week, pretending it’s still alive, and either kill it or schedule it. Limbo is the only wrong answer.

This is what taking your life seriously actually looks like. Take your work seriously and you get great at it, instead of just surviving it and calling yourself an entrepreneur. Take your fun seriously and you build a life you’re genuinely excited to pour into. That life is the substance, and it’s what you get to build your brand and your work from.

Sit with the vision a little longer

I know I talk about intention a lot, but the truth is that chaos is where the quantum leaps live. The cringe, the failing, the trying things you’re bad at, the spring that breaks you open on a sidewalk after acupuncture. That’s where the real growth hides, so I’m not going to tell you to avoid it.

But chaos with no intention just spins, it never converts into anything. The assignment for the whole summer is to hold both: keep the boldness, add the intention. Be reckless about what you attempt and ruthless about why.

Sitting with your vision is uncomfortable, and I finally understand why. It’s the moment you see how much power you had the entire time, and that the only thing rationing it was you. That exact discomfort, the one that makes you want to look away, is the feeling of becoming free.

So this summer, take your ambition seriously, take your fun seriously, and let the rest go. The time will come. Just be there to enjoy it when it does.

I took a few months mostly off, and I’ve been building the entire time. The rebrand you’re starting to see is just the beginning, with a lot more rolling out this way soon.

The biggest piece: I’m opening the Authority Edit, my eight-week intensive for becoming the real deal, online and offline.

After running three cohorts of Creator Essentials, I know exactly what I can do for the right people. I’ve watched women walk in undercharging, overdelivering, and quietly unsure they belonged, and walk out with real offers, real rates, and the confidence to actually use their point of view. I know how to help you grow a business that holds up, not just an audience that performs.

This is the next level of that work. Eight weeks to sharpen what you do, what you charge, and how you show up, so the work, the look, and the authority finally match the ambition. The goal is for you to stop being the underdog still figuring it out and become the woman people seek out, refer, and pay accordingly. It’s everything I talked about above, done on purpose, together, with structure and accountability.

There are only 14 spots. Apply here for our mid-July kickoff: The Authority Edit.

All season I’m sharing how I’m building a life with real substance in it: the strategy and the joy, the work and the turning off. Subscribe and meet me back here for the rest of the syllabus.

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it’s officially been a year since i walked across the wharton stage, and i can honestly say i had no clue what life would look like today. LEGIT couldn’t think about anything past May 18 this time last year! and of course the question everyone loves to ask is:

was it worth it?

who knows? what’s for certain is that everything has changed: i never saw myself in a media-focused portfolio career, and neither did my Wharton friends and , both of whom are also building brands completely outside the path we were sold.

we technically went to b-school to learn how to build empires. a year out (two for Hannah!) none of us are doing it the way we were taught.

on Sunday, the three of us went live here on substack to talk about what it looks like now. over a hundred of you came (!!!!) and stayed the whole hour. THANK YOUUU! It was so fun. I’ll be going live again soon, so stay tuned!

a few things we got into:

• why you need to budget for double what you think you will spend

• the best moments and the worst moments (HONESTLY)

• whether entrepreneurship is actually useful in business school

• who should get an mba, and who absolutely shouldn’t

• the univesal flaw all MBA students have

we don’t actually get to the classes until about minute 51, which should tell you a lot about what we think matters from those two years.

consider every question you’ve sent me about wharton, the mba, the timing, the roi, answered in this one.

make sure you check out Simi’s incredible work with and follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

if you’re looking for tangible tips on navigating your nonlinear career, you’ll love Hannah’s and her content on Instagram and Linkedin.

my reflections right after graduation live here — interesting if you want to compare :)

a programming note before you go. this thursday, may 21st, i’m in brooklyn at jess williamson’s million dollar personal brand workshop, sitting on the empire builders panel at 1pm to talk about the marketing, sales, and socials behind seven-figure brands. if you’ve been thinking about how to actually turn a personal brand into a business, this is the room. ticket link is here. come find me after!

xx, alexis

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The spring I moved to New York, a girl I may or may not still be friends with was blowing up my phone with a Partiful for a skincare brand’s launch party. But this one wasn’t squeezed into a 6 to 8pm slot at a Soho boutique like the rest of them. The company was already in Vogue, the party was at a nightclub, and the brand was 4AM Skin.

I didn’t go. At the time I was still cosplaying as a homebody, mostly because COVID had robbed me of my early twenties and I hadn’t yet discovered the joy of a few tequila sodas and a table to dance on (quite familiar today, thank you very much).

That didn’t stop the founder, Jade Beguelin, and me from meeting on TikTok a few months later and becoming fast friends. (As you know, once you meet another Ambitious Material Girl, you don’t let her go). Whether we were dissecting consumer brands in the red room at Silencio in Paris or trading gossip at influencer events, we watched each other become the women we’d promised ourselves we’d be, even though it’s been messier than we’d plotted. Back in my Too Collective days, we showcased their eye patches in every shoot, Jade shared our robes on TikTok shop, and my best friends were always texting me, hey, do you have any more of that 4AM serum?

When I crossed paths with her at the Parke x Target launch last month, I caught a new side of Jade. This week, as I’m sure you’ve seen, they announced a $4MM raise and a rollout into 1,800 Target doors. Clean Sheets, their new hero product, hit shelves everywhere.

This is the type of founder story that’s about to flood your feed. From the outside, it will read like an overnight success. From the inside, I’ve watched Sab and Jade survive five years of declining the wrong opportunities and holding the line when nothing was landing yet.

But this is also a story of ambition that reveals a universal truth: alignment doesn’t arrive on the timeline you’d negotiate for it. It compounds quietly, usually while you’re still wondering if any of it is working.

Jade lit up telling me the news, and I felt serious chills watching her step into it. Composed, clear, in full command of where she’s headed. That’s the part no press release captures: what five years of alignment actually looks like when it finally pays out in public.

I pulled up to their new office last week to ask Sab and Jade about the road here, and where they’re going next.

Here’s what they had to say on saying no, building toward a moment that might never come, and what it actually takes to be ready when it does.

What’s the difference between what you thought 4AM would be in 2021 and where you see it now?

Sabrina: The brand is both very much the same and really different. When we launched, we wanted it to be a celebration that life is more than your skincare routine. If you go back to articles from the beginning or our launch party, it was about having a rager in the club. We’re not drinking green juice. We’re drinking tequila shots at 4AM. That has always been the throughline for the brand.

What’s different is the product expression of it. Clean Sheets is the perfect marriage between brand and product. Makeup wipes have consistently been the easiest thing for someone to wash their face or feel more refreshed, and they’ve always been demonized. For good reason — many of them are not ideal.

We wanted to make something you could feel good about, where your skin feels good afterwards, and have it be something you’re proud to have in your bathroom or in your wallet, instead of the thing tucked away in the back.

Why is this woman, the 4AM woman, aspirational right now?

Sabrina: People are just tired of the bullshit. There’s so much consumerism. You have to do this. You have to be perfect. People are overwhelmed by it.

Jade: We’ve had girls reach out and say, I’m so depressed and overwhelmed I can’t literally do my skincare routine. So that’s why I use Clean Sheets. I love the brand because it’s accepting of that.

We’re breaking through the noise of the overwhelm. You don’t have to be perfect. People are over the BS.

Alexis: It’s interesting because what you just said is kind of the opposite of what people think. You have an aspirational woman, but you’re letting people normalize the mess.

A brand for everyone is a brand for no one. Walk me through that.

Sabrina: A brand for everyone is a brand for no one. You have to have a point of view as a brand, and we’re not afraid of having that even as we launch into way more retail doors in a more mass way.

The niche we’re appealing to is also an aspirational person, which makes it easier for the brand to go very wide. Through Clean Sheets, so many people have seen there’s a 4AM girl inside of them, even if they’re a Midwestern mom. They want to relate to the brand in some way. We’re still going to maintain the tightness of the very editorial downtown thing, because that’s also how we’ve always built brand.

Why wipes, specifically?

Jade: Every skincare brand, if they launched a makeup wipe, would lose trust with their consumer. They’re pushing a cleanser and a moisturizer. How are they going to launch a makeup wipe? And then if a makeup brand launches one, they don’t have much trust with a skincare consumer. We weren’t constrained by either of those things.

Sabrina: It’s a market and a category that hasn’t been innovated on in decades. From my dermatology background, it was always, don’t even touch it, it’s so bad. I was like, but people are going to keep using the thing that’s quote-unquote so bad. Why is there not someone making it at least better? Isn’t 50% better than nothing?

That’s been our throughline. We’re never going to say, this is better than you washing your face at the sink and doing the 10-step routine. But I almost feel like that’s refreshing to our consumers, because we’re saying, if you’re doing this, you’re good. Be 1% better than doing nothing and enjoy life.

You launched a serum first. Then under-eye masks. Then Clean Sheets. What were those years teaching you?

Jade: With every product launch, we learned something. The serums, we had really good retention. But a $69 serum is really hard to sell on TikTok. It’s actually the average cost of a serum at Sephora, but you’re competing with the marketing budgets of every other Sephora brand to get that customer. It’s really hard to sell, especially online.

Then we launched the Under Eye Masks. I remember telling Sabrina, we need something that is visual on social. Under Eye Masks are literally the most visual. Everyone likes taking selfies in them.

Sabrina: And it was the idea of progressing the brand forward of, hey, you can wear these outside of your bathroom!

Jade: The issue with those was they were reusable. There was no repeat rate. I could get a very low customer acquisition cost, but it’s very hard to scale that in a meaningful way. To make it replenishable, we could maybe do an eye serum with it, but we already had our face serum. We’re all about minimalism as a brand, so it felt wrong.

I know you documented how hard it was to create the wipes. Why did you bet everything on wipes if it was so difficult to make them?

Sabrina: It was the only product that felt true to the brand. If we launched a moisturizer, what makes it different than a Summer Fridays moisturizer? What makes it different than Dieux Skin? (editors note: we love both btw!)

Jade: And I would be sleeping with micellar water and cotton pads next to my bed.

Sabrina: Same. Travelling with micellar water? It’s really annoying. This was the perfect product. Highly replenishable.

You can also see the difference in use on camera, especially on camera, but also on your skin after you use it. You feel hydrated. We wanted to price it sub-$30 so it could be an impulse buy. You can share it with friends.

We made sure the sachets were Instagrammable. We have the only credit card-sized wipe on the market. It fits in your card case. It’s something that feels almost like a moisturizer.

Jade: I couldn’t think of anything that would be a better launch. I said to myself at the time, if this doesn’t work, I don’t know that a skincare brand is what I’m supposed to be doing.

Was there a moment when you almost stopped?

Sabrina: It was a moment where we had to invest everything we had. It wasn’t a ton of money, but it was everything.

Jade: It was the pivotal moment. I’d been working on it full-time for almost two years. And I was at the point in medical school where I could apply to residency, basically in practice.

Sabrina: I remember Jade looking at me and saying, if this doesn’t work out, maybe we just weren’t meant to be founders.

Jade: I had fairly high conviction on what worked at that point. We’d seen what worked through every previous launch.

When did Clean Sheets actually click?

Jade: It wasn’t immediately. We launched in July 2025.

Sabrina: I was studying for medical boards at that point. I remember Jade calling and being like, it’s sort of working.

And I was like, what do you mean it’s sort of working? Maybe we should think about what we talked about (scaling back…)!

Jade was like, I’ve sent you a script. It’s in your inbox. Can you just make this video and put together the B-roll? I think this might be good. I don’t know.

I was a week out from taking my boards — the worst part of medical school. And I sat there making the video over two days, because it’s very time-consuming the way we used to make our videos. You’d have to split B-roll to 0.9 seconds, 1 second, and this long voiceover for three minutes.

We posted it and it didn’t blow up on my feed. I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck. Two days before my boards, we posted it on the 4AM account, and it was the first video that hit a million views. (it’s really cute — watch here!)

Sabrina: And that wasn’t a result of one perfect idea popping off and saving the company. It was the result of five years of systems. You’ve put five years into this. This is the system. We’re doing it this way. And it happened to work this way.

The Target story! Walk me through the DMs.

Jade: So, two Target buyers reached out to me via DM on TikTok within 10 days. I sent Sab a screenshot being like, probably not a fit, but we should probably just take the call, right?

Sabrina: I was finishing a rotation. I was literally taking the call from a patient room on my lunch break. I have just from 12 to 1 to take this random call. I’ll be on mute for it!

Jade: We were coming off a time when some beauty brands had shut down because they were in too many doors.

On the call, they asked, how many doors do you guys want? What do you think?

We were like, I don’t know, maybe coastal, New York, LA, our audience. They said, how about nationwide? And, how about we also put you guys in the minis? Can you make these in five-packs?

Sabrina: I literally have a text between me and Jade on that call: Did I hear that correctly? Is your AI note taker on? Are you sure?

Hitting your stride is one thing. Scaling is a different sport. Once you knew Clean Sheets was working, how did you decide what to do next?

Sabrina: I knew when Target reached out that it was nationwide and that obviously requires a huge amount of capital. It was really helpful because the constant advice you get around fundraising is ask for advice and you’ll get money. Ask for money and you’ll get advice. We were actually genuinely asking for advice.

Jade: We knew we couldn’t raise in November and December because investors aren’t working. So we said, we’ll raise in January. We wanted to get credit for our sales. We had a lot of out-of-stocks, and we wanted to prove we could do really big months when we were fully in stock. I wanted to prove Black Friday numbers could be good.

Sabrina: They were good.

Jade: Investors wanted in without the sales, actually.

For the woman who’s been building her version of this for a long time and is wondering if it will ever land, what would you say?

Sabrina: You don’t earn a job as a founder. Anyone can be a founder. When I realized that, I was like, well, if anyone can be a founder, I could probably be a founder. The only thing stopping me is me. If you’re just constantly curious and willing to figure it out, you can be a founder too.

Jade: Don’t quit your job until you literally can’t do both. I worked at JP Morgan, then I worked at a growth marketing startup. The last six months I was there, I’d negotiated to a 10% pay cut to only work three days a week. I still had benefits. I was on call on Mondays and Fridays, but it allowed me to fully focus on 4AM on Mondays and Fridays. You have a lot more leverage when you are a good employee.

Sabrina: Find someone who’s literally one or two steps ahead of you. People say find these great mentors who are amazing in the space. I tell people find someone who is one or two steps ahead of you, because they’ll have just done it.

What does it feel like to actually be here, at the beginning of something even bigger?

Sabrina: And there were little signs along the way from the universe. You need that when you’re delusional. Every day I’m like, oh, it’s 11:11? That’s a good sign. The eye masks had a moment in the sun. We were like, these are great, we just need to make them replenishable. It always felt like there was something where we were almost there. It just needed a little bit of iteration.

The version of this story most people are going to write is that two girls got lucky and went viral. The version I see is that two girls spent five years getting ready, balancing their brand with their demanding lives against all odds, and iterating fast so the moment wouldn’t end them when it arrived. The throughline? Conviction, clarity, trying, and trust. Now, Sabrina and Jade are walking through the door exactly on time.

xx

Alexis

Clean Sheets are at Target now. $4.99 for the five-pack minis. $19.99 for the full size in July. Shop them here!

For the operator's playbook on how Jade built the marketing machine, read icon ’s interview with her here. It’s excellent!

If it hasn’t become increasingly obvious over the past few years, let this be your reminder: You can buy spectacle, but you cannot buy substance.

So do you have any?

I’ve been pondering this for the better part of a few months, and have started to notice it everywhere I go. Not just in Lauren Sanchez’s mid Met Gala look and overall trashy aura, but in my own strategy and client work, too. Last fall, you may have seen me go viral for declaring that I’m “not relatable and don’t want to be” on the She’s So Lucky podcast. While I had that mental realization around a year ago, I realized something painful: my business model hadn’t caught up.

For five years, I held myself to the standard of the “lifestyle influencer:” build trust by baring your soul and crying on the internet, sell out Amazon workout sets, and go on beauty brand trips. Strong link clicks + LTK conversions + Aesthetic feed + millions of impressions = SUCCESS!!!!

While I was actively creating while working in corporate and getting my MBA, I felt it was a hindrance — sure, something I could talk about lifestyle-wise, but the topics I explored in my content were not what I learned in Corporate Finance, but what I wore to class. I never thought that my business insights, my intelligence, or my credibility would be what made me popular after I’d spent years trying to tell the right GRWM storytime to go viral and get sponsored by NARS.

It’s hard to let go of a dream, but as a powerful marketer I spoke with recently on a panel said, “the Instagram girl is dead.” And this is nothing new: trend forecasters have been predicting the “rise of the bookish influencer” and the “thought daughter” for the past two years or more.

Meanwhile, the mainstream has been marinating in fifteen years of trusting that looking good is enough, and we can finally see through it: impressions don’t drive trust, the attention economy has subsided, and the mass Kardashian model is lifeless.

The implications? We’re reckoning with a generation of women with beautiful feeds and nothing underneath them. Stacks of books in the photo, but no actual reading is taking place!!! The aesthetic of credibility (putting on a blazer in a photo studio) without the work (building a functioning business).

Audiences are saying: We’re saturated, we’re tired, and we’re starting to ask different questions. What do you actually think? What do you actually know? Why should I trust you with my attention, my money, my time????

Enter the Credibility Economy. (Y’all better reference me when you bring this up at work drinks, btw.) The metric that used to matter (how many people clapped) is being replaced by the metric that’s about to matter (whether anyone can be trusted with what they’re saying). Follower count is becoming background noise. Point of view is becoming the asset.

If you want to survive what’s coming, you have to have one. And you have to know how to package it so it actually travels.

In my last group coaching call, one star put it perfectly: “I realized, I don’t want to be an influencer, I want to be a thought leader.”

Your range is not a branding problem.

Smart women especially get told they’re “all over the place” because they care about the career stuff and the culture stuff and whatever other chaotic content is living in your saved folder. Then someone at a marketing conference convinced us we needed to pick a niche and shrink ourselves into it.

And that’s not untrue — clarity and a niche are certainly necessary to get ahead today — but it’s not enough to just be a hair influencer. The reason people trust this hair influencer is that he’s dressed like and sounds like a southern mechanic??? but is CLEANING UP these blonde ladies’ highlights like no other. That confusion makes watchers trust him more!

The contradiction is the texture that makes someone feel like a real woman with a worldview instead of a content category. The paradox is the personality (as I talked about when the CEO of LinkedIn interviewed me (!!!) last week about my career! check it out here, and read my full take here:)

Too Online with Alexis Barber

The paradox IS the personality.

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3 months ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · Alexis Barber

What you actually need to find is the values through-line underneath all of it. The reason you care about the things you care about, and the lens that connects them. Once you have that, the platforms and pillars and posting schedules stop feeling like a puzzle. They become expressions of one clear point of view.

Your through-line is already there. You just haven’t named it yet.

The women who are winning right now are the ones whose through-line is so clear you can feel it before they ever explain it.

Take Emma Grede. She’s a ruthless operator, billion-dollar businesswoman, on every panel that matters, sitting on Skims and Good American and Safely. She also grew up in East London with a single mom on benefits and three sisters in a council flat. Her through-line isn’t I’m a girlboss who built an empire. That’s a category. Her through-line is I came from nothing and I built this on purpose, and I’m going to teach other women how to build like operators instead of dreamers. That’s why every interview she does feels heavier than the next woman’s. The career and the upbringing and the toughness aren’t three different content pillars. They’re one woman with one worldview, and you can feel it the second she opens her mouth.

Take Morgan Stewart. Born rich, married rich, currently very rich, and she will tell you herself with no apology and a very good handbag. What makes her interesting isn’t the money. It’s that she’s playful about it in a culture that demands rich women either hide it or weaponize it for a brand deal. She’s funny about her privilege! She’s into fashion and she’s not pushing a capsule collection at you in the next slide (except for when she is, and you want it because it’s just….too good.) The honesty is the whole product, plus the fact that she isn’t actively selling you something every five seconds is what makes you trust her when she does. Her through-line is something like I’m not pretending to be relatable and I’m not pretending to be deep, I’m just a stylish woman who’s been through a lot, with opinions and a real life. You’d be shocked how rare that combination actually is online (lol)

Too Online with Alexis Barber

Stop trying to “find your niche." Just answer these two questions.

Hey, stars. Too Online is where I break down how money, power, and identity move through the creator economy from someone who lives it from the inside. I’m Alexis Barber— a lifestyle creator since 2020, author of Too Smart For This, former YouTube strategist, and Wharton MBA…

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3 months ago · 93 likes · 4 comments · Alexis Barber

The pattern: none of these people are on brand in the marketing-deck sense. They’re aligned in the values sense. There’s a single belief running underneath everything they put out, and that belief is doing the work the algorithm can’t. Oh, and this isn’t about a resume-level credibility, it’s about your STORY. That’s all you’ve really got, sister.

This is the work we do inside Creator Essentials.

The first week is entirely your values, your through-line, and the worldview underneath everything you’ll ever publish. We don’t touch content strategy until that foundation is locked in. Because posting more without it just gets you a prettier feed running the same flattened script.

Then we build on top of it the editorial muscle to ship work that builds a body of evidence instead of feeding the feed (Mark Zuckerberg hates us, we will never win that battle!)

Natalie, a solo founder building alongside a full-time job, told me she’d been confident telling stories for other companies her whole career. Telling her own was the hard part. By the end of five weeks, she’d doubled her TikTok following and had her most important video go viral. Her words: “If you’re building something and you need people to care about it, this program will help you show up in the smartest, most intentional way.”

A creator who’d been pivoting her brand for months and falling off her own posting schedule pushed through to a viral Reel that did 200K views during the cohort. The first time, she said, she’d ever been consistent every single day.

Jasmine left with what she called the end of her analysis paralysis: “Alexis gives you real frameworks and resources you can apply immediately, not just high-level advice. I left with more clarity, more confidence, and a stronger sense of direction.”

These were not women who learned how to game Zuck’s algorithm; they were women who got clear on their own worldview and discovered the audience had been waiting for it the whole time.

The details:

5-Week Live Creator Essentials | Cohort 3 → [enroll here, $800]

Enrollment closes May 10. We start May 11.

If you’ve been reading these essays thinking I know I have something to say, I just haven’t figured out what it is yet, that’s exactly the work we do in a small group of fabulous high achievers.

xx Alexis

P.S. If a cohort doesn’t work for your schedule but you want one focused hour with me, office hours are open, and I have 1 available 1:1 coaching opportunity for Summer 2026. Email me!

Hello stars!

Last Thursday, I emceed the AI for Social Good Hackathon with HearstLab and Ruth.AI, expecting it to be a classic speaking engagement. I left rearranged, with the kind of bubbling, full-body urgency that shows up when you realize you’ve been falling behind on something that’s bigger than you thought.

Some noticings:

• In eight hours, a team of young women built a full database to help people actually participate in local politics. It scraped government websites, let users track bills, find polling centers, and show up for the civic stuff most of us have quietly written off as too annoying to bother with. Everything that usually makes civic participation impossible (the logistics, the information buried on terrible government websites, the sheer friction of it) they dismantled. In eight hours.

• Another woman built an AI-powered platform to help people with ADHD run their daily lives. Hello! Real solutions to real problems, focused on helping our communities. Useful. Fundable. Built by women, in a single day, with tools that are already accessible to all of us.

• On the hackathon: of the 100+ women in the room, there wasn’t a single Black woman on a hackathon team, and there were fewer than three in the audience.

AI’s sheer power is dumbfounding, sure. But watching it be used for GOOD in real time is what put a battery in my back: our world is fundamentally shifting, and it is not waiting for us to feel ready.

The wealth transfer nobody’s warning you about

There is a wealth transfer taking place right now, and it looks nothing like the Boomer/millennial one you’ve heard about. This one is technological, and the stakes for women, specifically for Black women, are genuinely alarming.

McKinsey ran the numbers: by 2045, the racially disparate distribution of new wealth created by AI could widen the wealth gap between Black and White households by $43 billion annually.

Makes me SICK to my stomach to think about!!! We know why that number exists: access and fluency with new technology always follow existing power. The people closest to the tools accumulate the advantage. Everyone else watches it happen until it’s too late.

And right now, women are watching it happen.

The numbers back this up. Women make up less than a third of AI professionals and only 18% of AI researchers globally. In the same job, women are 16 percentage points less likely than men to even use the tools. And here is the part that should make you furious: when women do push past the initial hesitation, they frequently outperform their male counterparts. The barrier was always access, training, and the confidence to start.

AI is set to bring an estimated $70B in wealth to the US in the next 20 years. That’s a HUGE opportunity for women and people of color to actually close our wealth gap…nothing to be scoffed at!

I understand why!!! I was in the same place: to AI or not to AI. The concerns are legitimate: what this means for jobs, for creativity, intelligence, for the communities we care about. I get the hesitation around something that feels like it was built by and for a very specific kind of person, in a very specific kind of room, with a very specific agenda.

The wake up call for me was that if men run this, massive power gets concentrated in rooms that have historically excluded us and have no intention to reduce bias against us, potentially destroying our society in ways we don’t really fathom at this point.

The women I watched build at that hackathon understood that. They didn’t wait until they felt fluent or until it felt safe or fully vetted or ideologically clean. They got in the room and built something that could change people’s lives.

I say this with so much love, and I say it because I am challenging myself to look at this, too: we have to stop getting caught up. The discourse, the debates, the moral purity olympics around who is allowed to use what tool and when. We can care deeply about the ethics and still build our wealth. We can hold real concerns and still show up to learn. We have to. Because the alternative is watching another generation of tools, platforms, and industries get built without us and then wondering, again, why the gap got wider.

What I was actually afraid of

The environmental critique was the respectable version of my fear. But for a few years there, I was just repeating what I’d heard other people say, not really researching AI for myself.

The real fear was scrutiny. Being the Black woman on the internet who publicly endorsed a technology that some people are going to look back very unfavorably. Ending up on the wrong side of an argument I hadn’t fully worked out yet. I still consider myself a novice, I feel behind every day, but I can see the economics of the situation and that’s enough to get me to take a second look.

Here’s what I worked through:

1. The environmental concern is real, and it is more complicated than that

I read a piece in Undark that reframed this entirely for me. The water and energy footprint of AI data centers is real and it varies wildly by location, technology, and season. In water-stressed areas, a single facility can strain an entire region’s supply. That deserves anger, and the lack of transparency from tech companies about their actual consumption is a legitimate scandal.

And then there’s context. A single burger takes more than 400 gallons of water to produce. A cotton T-shirt takes more than 700. The country’s 16,000 golf courses each use between 100,000 and 2 million gallons of water per day. Nobody interrogates those daily decisions with the same intensity.

But here’s what the article nailed: “A societal mass value judgement on AI is, fairly or unfairly, playing out in real time in the uproar around data centers. Part of the visceral environmental shame that folks like Masley feel from others about their AI use is probably less about the specific water footprint of a ChatGPT search than about the acceptance of a culture where AI is woven into everyday life, regardless of its environmental impact.”

AI deserves scrutiny. It is not going to be solved by the women who opted out. And practically speaking, it is here. The “should this exist” debate is closed. We are in the “who builds it, who profits, and who pays” phase now, and those questions are answered by the people in the room.

2. The threats to art, creativity, and politics are the actual thing I’m scared of.

This amazing carousel from Steph The Founder directs us to recent research about the real concerns of AI and how it is primed to do massive damage to our society. Creative jobs disappearing. Election manipulation. Deepfakes of real women. The hollowing out of entire industries that generations of women fought their way into. I am not rolling my eyes at any of it.

What I am saying is that every single one of those threats gets worse if the women who care about ethics, art, culture, politics, and the next generation of girls are not fluent enough to see the damage coming, call it out with precision, or build the alternative.

“I refuse to engage” is not a protective stance. It is a quiet one. And quiet has never saved any of us!

3. Scrutiny is the point. You cannot scrutinize what you do not understand.

The most useful critics of AI right now are the people who use it every day. They’ve seen what it can and cannot do. They know where the teeth are. The vague, outside-in criticism is losing to the specific, hands-on building, because you cannot meaningfully push back on a system you’ve never actually touched. If we want the critique to land, the critique has to come from women who’ve been inside the thing.

I get it. I also don’t know everything, and maybe this will blow up the world, but we can’t change that it’s here, so the smart thing to do is to learn how to engage with discernment and critical thinking!

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I was you.

For two years I was “using AI” the same way most people are. Copy-pasting into ChatGPT, getting things maybe 20% faster, feeling vaguely ahead of the curve.

I was NOT ahead of the curve! I was dabbling. And dabbling is a sophisticated way of procrastinating!

About two months ago, I got sick of pushing this off and set a timer for 90 minutes to dive into Claude.

Since, my productivity and therefore impact have grown tremendously. What actually changed for me was building a real system around how my brain actually works instead of how I keep pretending it should: my ADHD, my creative energy patterns, my very specific and complicated business. Once the scaffolding was there, the part of my brain I actually want to be using (the creative, visionary, strategic part) finally had time to…think!

The shame spiral of not being able to perform got quieter, and my scattered, frantic energy has begun to subside.

That’s what’s available to you, and it starts with one 90-minute session!

Here is what I know. All of this is scary and confusing and I am not pretending otherwise. But I watched women at that hackathon build things that could genuinely change people’s lives, in a single day, and I cannot unsee that. AI can be used for good. If we let ourselves believe that, even cautiously, even with one eye on the risks, think about what we could actually do with it. So I am choosing to focus. Here is how I am doing that in my own life.

You don’t need to become an AI expert. You don’t need to build an app or learn to vibe code. You need to get familiar. Try something real. Stop waiting until it feels perfectly safe to engage with the thing that is already shaping your world whether you engage with it or not.

Ninety intentional minutes beats three years of passive skepticism. Every single time.

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What’s coming this month

AI April is a three-part series for paid subscribers of TSFT. Here’s exactly what we’re covering:

This week (paid): The setup. How to audit your workflow, and the three things to take off your plate first.

Week 2: How I run my entire content business with Claude. The real system, the actual tools, what it replaced, and what it didn’t.

Week 3: Using AI to build and protect your personal brand. The frameworks I use to stay on voice, on brand, and on track without outsourcing my brain.

The machine is already here. The question is whether you’re going to understand it, or be understood by it.

I’ll see you on the other side!

Subscribe now

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Hello stars!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It feels like just yesterday we were bracing for winter, and now New York teases us by drawing out Fool’s Spring every day... I’m dreaming about putting my Superpuffs in storage, but I don’t want to jinx any sunny days!

The seasons are changing. Now, as an eldest daughter, of course, my favorite season is fall. Back-to-school nostalgia will never, ever get old. I enjoy the summer, LOVE the fall, endure the winter, but Spring never really stood out to me???

I hate the rain and despise the morning gamble of which jacket to wear. However, after surrendering to winter’s heads-down energy this year, I’m determined to make the most of the blossoming energy all around and spring forward. Why the hell not!

Winter was LONG and COLD. I launched a LOT: podcast resurgence, group coaching, one-on-one consulting, the Alignment Edit workshops — all things I’m genuinely proud of, all things that required a lot of energy to get off the ground.

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And building is one thing, scaling is another.

Ever since graduating from Wharton, I’ve been dedicated to treating my portfolio career like a startup instead of the side hustle it’s been for years.

That means I’ve gotta make decisions based on returns on investment, future vision, and track towards real metrics, not ever-changing goalposts.

AKA: looking at numbers, auditing where my time is actually going and what it’s returning.

While Q1 was full of delightful opportunities and exciting events, one of the less glamorous realities of business is that the faster you cut dead weight, the faster you can float to the top.

There’s a version of our ambition that wants to expand endlessly — more projects, more opportunities, more visibility, more everything. And I understand the impulse. I actually love that version of ambition, and I feel it bubbling in me now!!! But I know from experience that failing to intentionally channel my drive will inevitably cause another Crash and Burn.

staying grounded with my goals

So I forced myself into a ruthless Q1 audit, and as a solo founder, I turned to my virtual Business Partners (aka my multiple AI subscriptions) to help me cut through some blind spots.

Were my intentions aligned with my actions, output, and systems? Do they serve my long term goals? What didn’t work????? What DID?

If you’re capable, you can do a lot (Curse of Competence!). So you do. Suddenly, you’re spread across ten different projects, all of which are good, none of which are truly great. We’re prone to spending too much time in the zone of excellence rather than in the places we truly shine.

My intention with this process was to get very clear on the trade-offs I was making and the goals I was truly moving towards, using data and analytics to help me anchor my future decisions.

Avoiding your tradeoffs doesn’t make them go away — it just makes your growth slower and more confusing than it needs to be. That’s why I wanted to see my blind spots so I can get closer to fully utilizing my zone of genius!

exactly what I did to get clear

If you want to do this for yourself, here’s exactly how I approached it.

It took around 90 minutes to reflect, 90 minutes and 2 sessions of Claude Cowork, and then I spent some time integrating and building systems with the technology, which I’ll be covering in the paid portion of this letter all April!

You can check out all the exact prompts I used here. This is a preview of what the future AI letters will be like!

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1. In a long walk to Prospect Park, I voice-noted everything I wanted out of this audit — my social media metrics, projects, calendar, revenue, etc. I brain dumped had worked on, everything that felt unclear, everything I thought was working, and everything I had been avoiding.

2. Then I turned that into something structured: I used Claude Cowork to review all of my insights across the five platforms I post on consistently, and had it pull my actual outputs so I could see, in one place, what was happening vs what I thought was happening.

3. After I manually reviewed my insights, revenue, and data, I spent some time thinking about what I noticed was off and my intuition on what to do, and had the system conduct an audit.

4. Right now, I’m looking to double my revenue in Q2 (BOLD, yes, but everything’s corrupt, girl), so I had the prompt orient towards that.

5. Then, I had the system make me get even more specific and look out for the energetic shifts that happen where I overload myself and know that my cycle really affects my creativity, and also to hold space for the amount of health-related things I need to deal with this quarter, so that I could better prepare myself and anchor my goals.

6. Over three different versions, we had clear insights into the past that translated into new action for the future, and then I got started working on my content strategy (will cover in AI April!)

7. To get even deeper, I used the 3 Bucket Framework in the Open to Work book from LinkedIn to have Copilot review my tasks and see where in my career AI could take over vs where I needed to show up — turns out 60% of my workflow can be automated, which would give me 30+ hours a week BACK to focus on creating. Bridging this gap is my MAIN priority!

And then I asked the only question that really matters: Given what I SAY I want, what actually deserves to come with me into Q2?

A few actual decisions that came out of this:

I’m folding Too Online into Too Smart For This.

Originally, I thought that separating TSFT and Too Online (my creator economy newsletter on Substack) was the smart thing to do, but it turns out that a lot of the TSFT audience is also interested in my creator / business / tech insights.

So as the paid tier of TSFT formally kicks off this week, you can expect all of the content to toggle between my lifestyle/self improvement/personal branding/personal essays AND a sharper business/tech/creator economy focus.

I’m pulling back on beauty — for now.

Not because I don’t enjoy it, but because the time I invested there this quarter (going to tons of beauty events and editing videos that flopped) didn’t translate into revenue. Most of my brand deals come from wellness and tech/b2b brands.

That’s data, and I’m treating it as such. I’d rather double down on the areas where I know I’m strongest than try to break into a concentrated niche that I’m not as passionate or knowledgeable about.

Tactically, it’s less RSVPs to beauty launch events!!! Not stressing about posting gifting or beauty PR!!! Not forcing myself into beauty deals that I’m not obsessed with, etc etc.

And I’m once again reworking the podcast production.

I have amazing content — I know that. But I don’t currently have the resources, time, or money to scale the production the way I need to (nor have I ever asked for them), and at this point, that’s the bottleneck.

So I have to get creative and find a new way of funding the show that doesn’t rely on me bootstrapping everything — today, podcasts are basically high quality TV shows, costing thousands to produce. Since my guests are lowkey top tier, too, I need to raise the standard if I want to compete and amplify my message.

I’m actually really excited about this, because it feels like the next level — but it also means I have to raise my standards around quality in a real way.

And honestly… it’s a little embarrassing that it took me almost 200 episodes to make that a non-negotiable. But here we are. Call it building in public!

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Remember, chaotic ambition is building everything… intentional ambition is building the right things.

In the spirit of spring, my challenge to you is to use this season to commit to blossoming in just a few ways, instead of expecting your life to drastically change overnight.

And because I don’t believe in doing all of this reflection just to… change nothing, April is going to be very focused for me on building better systems and cutting the BS.

I’m calling it AI April — and this is what I’ll be diving into in the paid tier of this letter.

Honestly, I’m trying to make sense of the noise right now too. I don’t want to spiral into the whole “AI is taking over the world” thing, but I also don’t want to be the girl who ignored it and got left behind. I also need a LOT of help to get where I want to go and need to take advantage of every resource.

So this is going to be something we do together.

Less “expert teaches you everything,” more… we’re all smart, we’re all paying attention, and we’re going to figure out how to use this well.

How can I use this to think better, move faster, and get my time back?

We’re going to get into three things:

• how to actually audit your life (without spiraling)

• how to use it in your career and work (what you should be doing vs what you absolutely should not be spending time on)

• and how to use it for personal development (patterns, habits, decisions, all the things we pretend we’ll “figure out later”)

Because the goal is not to become some hyper-optimized robot.

The goal is to create more space to be creative, read more paperback books again, cook dinner more often, make spontaneous plans and get back into my body.

So part of the challenge — for both of us — is that if AI gives you time back… you don’t just give it right back to your to-do list.

You actually keep some of it.

I’ll show you exactly how I’m doing that next week.

See you then!

xx

Alexis

Is anyone else having the craziest month?? I know mercury was retrograde (or “in microbraids,” as my friends say) but it’s just been… wild.

The best kind of crazy, though! I’ve spoken at Airbnb and SERHANT, interviewed two major CEOs, been on two other podcasts — opportunities have been coming in, the foundation I’m building is actually starting to look like something. I truly feel like we are gearing up for the most incredible Q2.

This time a year ago I was a HOT MESS, so it’s special to look back at that very lost girl and say: hey, we are doing it. I am so happy. I am also very, very busy.

Which means I completely dropped the ball on promoting this Sunday’s Alignment Edit workshop. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That’s a gap — and part of expansion is seeing your gaps clearly instead of spiraling about them.

So here I am. Telling you. On a Friday. To come hang out with me and have a life-changing workshop. Very different from the 8 planned posts I wanted to share…

But this is actually the whole point of everything I want to say to you today — I’m not freaking out about it.

And that is NEW for me.

For a long time, I only associated being “busy” with frantic energy: survival mode. Chaos. Difficulty. How am I going to get it all done? When things were hectic, my nervous system treated it like a threat. I was spinning, stressed, wearing the overwhelm like a badge of honor because at least it meant I was working hard. That frantic energy was just... the tax I thought I had to pay to be ambitious.

This month, as things have genuinely started to pick up — more visibility, more opportunities, more rooms — I had to make a conscious choice not to go back to that place.

When I wake up with a long to-do list, instead of lunging at it, I’ve started to center myself and be grateful for the work. Because I know that if I do it in frantic energy, the outcome will ALWAYS be worse.

The setbacks this month were also... sizeable. But I’ve been learning to stay calm anyway — not because everything is easy or figured out, but because frantic energy doesn’t make you more powerful. It makes you less. The work suffers. The joy suffers. You suffer!

So sisters, calm down.

Not trying to invalidate you…but if you are freaking out 24/7 at your current level, you’re basically signaling to the universe that you can’t handle what you’ve asked for, so how will you ever be able to handle more?

Calm is not the opposite of ambition. Calm is the condition for it. The most magnetic women I know may be a little chaotic and fun — but when it’s time to execute, they trust themselves. They move like they’ve already decided. They’re not performing urgency to prove they care. They have so much clarity about what’s theirs that the noise just falls away.

That shift — from frantic energy to calm, centered execution — has completely changed my life. I work just as much as I did two years ago, but I wake up every day loving what I do. That is not something I take for granted. And it didn’t happen because I did more…It happened because I stopped letting busyness run me and started choosing on purpose — and saying no to a lot more.

This didn't happen by accident. It happened because I did the work of getting aligned — really aligned. Not just "I have a vision board" aligned. I mean getting ruthlessly clear on what's actually mine, what I'm actually called to, and what I need to let go of so I can show up fully for the things that matter. When you're operating in alignment, busy doesn't feel like drowning anymore, it feels like momentum. And it's exactly what I want for you too — which is why I cannot wait for Sunday.

Okay. Now let me tell you about the Alignment Edit. ↓

I was honestly reluctant to start running workshops. I kept asking myself, what am I actually going to say to these women? And then I got in the room — and I watched women who had been grinding in silence finally feel seen by people with dreams just as big as theirs. They left with real clarity, excited about their lives again.

I knew immediately I had to keep doing it. It’s genuinely one of my favorite things I get to do.

This Sunday, March 22nd at 10:30am in NYC, we’re doing The Alignment Edit. We get clear on your goals, your zone of genius, and what needs to go so the right things finally have room to grow. Vision boarding, goodie bags from Bloom and Summer Fridays, and a room full of women who are done building lives that look good but feel off.

The women from the last one said it best (check out the full reviews here):

“I left with a ton of clarity on where to focus my energy.” — Megan

“My heart left this experience feeling full.” — Jasmine

“You get so much more out of it than the cost of a ticket.” — Christina

“I honestly haven’t felt this way in a while.” — Adjoa

Think of this as is your Sunday reset…the perfect setup for Q2! Intentional, not frantic! I cannot wait to see you there. Bring your besties!!!

→ Grab your spot: The Alignment Edit on Airbnb Experiences

See you there 🖤

— Alexis

When I first came up with the identity around this show — the ambitious material girl — she was largely fictional. She was the woman I consumed on screen and in the pages of every book I could get my hands on. Olivia Pope running the country, armed with a Prada tote and white coat. The women of Sex and the City who treated New York City like their personal playground and their careers like their greatest love stories. Women with this specific combination of taste, intellect, drive, and unapologetic desire for a beautiful life. I was constructing an archetype from imagination because I hadn’t met enough of her in real life yet.

Over time, I started to recognize her spark in the wild. She never looks like her problems. She’s serious about her work and silly with her friends. She’s always drawn to the most expensive thing in the room — but swears by some hyper-niche $3 hack to stay chic. She knows meaning comes from the life she builds, not just the man she dates.

I’ve interviewed a lot of remarkable women on this show. And every now and then, I sit across from someone and feel that spark — that unmistakable quality that tells me: she is one of us. But I have never, in all the years I’ve been building this show, sat across from someone who is the full, final, completely realized version of everything the ambitious material girl was always reaching toward.

I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing Pauline Brown at her home last month. And yes — it is exactly what you would expect from a woman who has spent her career studying and practicing taste as a discipline. Beauty, life, intention in every corner (her pink Smeg collection was a material girl giveaway!)

Ambitious barely does her justice. Few people in business—men or women—have a résumé like hers: former Chairman of LVMH North America, partner at The Carlyle Group, senior executive at Estée Lauder where she worked on the acquisitions of brands like Jo Malone and Bobbi Brown, earlier leadership roles at Bain & Company, and a graduate of Wharton. Today, Pauline leads Aesthetic Intelligence, hosts the show Aesthetic Intelligence on SiriusXM, and advises some of the world’s most influential companies and founders.

Sitting across from her didn’t feel as stuffy or intimidating as you’d expect when talking to a billion-dollar leader: she was forthcoming, generous, funny, and most of all, centered. A first-generation American raised by strong women with flair, she developed an appreciation for beauty and growth early on. She didn’t decode other people’s standards. She decided her own. And as she says in this episode: “The only thing I can do better than anyone else is be myself.”

Pauline and I both went to Wharton — thirty years apart. And sitting across from her, I kept thinking: this is what it looks like when an ambitious material girl builds it all the way out. No gatekeeping, no vagueness, no performing. Just razor-sharp intelligence and a genuine desire to hand over everything she knows so you can take it somewhere.

Here is what we cover:

— What it was actually like to be an ambitious woman at Wharton in the 90s (chaotic)

— The 100 cards exercise she used 30 years ago to get ruthlessly clear on her non-negotiables

— Why she walked away from millions in private equity to work entirely on her own terms

— Her honest takes on the brands getting taste right right now, including The Row, Jacquemus, and why Rhode is her current favorite beauty brand

— What she believes every ambitious woman needs to understand about aesthetics before AI makes it non-negotiable

You’ll be smarter if you follow Pauline’s work, so check out her riveting Substack here and pick up her book Aesthetic Intelligence if you want to cultivate your relationship with your own taste and values!

One of my favorite things about this community is that you love to learn.

Getting to sit with someone like Pauline, who has actually built a magical, impactful life and is genuinely willing to pass the map back? That is a treat. And she gives us so much in these 90 minutes, though it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface!

The ambitious material girl finds the women who already built what she’s dreaming about — and she listens. This is the kind of conversation I want to keep having. Consider this the first installment!

And speaking of conversations worth showing up for — if this episode lit something up in you, I want you at The Alignment Edit on March 22nd. We are spending the day doing exactly what Pauline would approve of: getting ruthlessly clear on your Q2 goals and what it actually looks like to spring forward in your career with intention. No vague vision boarding. Past attendees said:

• “From the moment I arrived, the room was filled with diverse, high-vibration women who were open, welcoming, and deeply present. I found myself wishing we had more time together—I would have loved to connect more deeply with each of them. We all felt it. We wanted more: more joy, more fulfillment, more life. My heart left this experience feeling full”

• “This was a group of amazing ambitious women and it was such an inspiration to hear what everyone was doing and how we were able to be vulnerable but also realize that we were not alone in our experiences. I hope Alexis realizes what she did today. She made an impact and I can't wait to see where this goes!”

Grab your spot here — I would love to see you there.

With love,

Alexis 🖤

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🎧 Listen to the episode here → YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Hey superstars,

It’s no secret I live a charmed life. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Do I crash out weekly on Tuesdays around 3:30 pm? Yes. But I’m starting to look around and notice that things are actually different — and mostly that’s because I got fed up.

In December, I finished The Artist’s Way and made a decision: 27 was going to be the best year of my life. January was about starting fresh — relaunching the podcast, new business initiatives, new energy.

February was about being shown every single gap. Every place I’d been coasting, every area where I’d been waiting for something outside of me to change first.

Through my office hours, coaching, and 1:1 consults, I noticed how blatantly many of us are using the phrase “if only…” If only I had the right camera, I’d start; If only I had more money, I’d feel okay; If only I had a partner….etc. It’s easy to recognize the assumptions that hold others back, but to do so for ourselves? Excruciating.

For a long time, I’d also been outsourcing my energy — to circumstances, to timing, to the idea that the right version of me would just show up one day fully formed and ready. I kept telling myself I needed more time, more resources, more certainty. February made it clear that I’d been holding more power than I realized, and I’d just been leaving it on the table. Ew. Stops now.

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⭐️ LEXICON: February 2026 ⭐️

A roundup of the month’s loves and learnings (get it, lexicon, aLEXIs?)

I got fed up and started moving before I was ready.

I kicked off the month with the first Alignment Edit IRL, and almost cried in the middle of the workshop because I felt the weight of cultivating connection between women who are often alienated for being “too much.” When the only feedback was that it should be longer, I beamed and felt like I could see a future vision for the work beyond the spreadsheets and Canva files that make up my day-to-day. It was a time of mental expansion. I wanted to crawl out of my old identity and mesh with this confident version of myself that helps women see their power. Makes me mushy!

It started with my space: I forced myself to finally upgrade the grad school furniture in my apartment and bit the bullet on a new rug, coffee table, bed and couch (!), resulting in a very pleasing new feeling. It’s really starting to look like the home of a fun fab NYC 20-something, and to feel like my truest center in this world. It’s really my little safe haven <3 AND WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO. Need new dishes, bedding, art, accessories, backsplash, oh MY! Stay tuned. And send recs.

Next, I forced myself to show up strong in my relationships. I went to so many girls’ dinners and coffee dates with women I genuinely admire and let myself be in the room instead of my default just grateful to be invited (habits of a lonely pre-teen at boarding school die hard). I forced myself to be the woman I’d been waiting to just magically become — and when old flings surfaced and work drama tried to pull me back into old patterns, I stood ON BUSINESS. I refused to freak out, didn’t shame myself for having emotions, and believed in myself anyway. Constraints came up. I kept going, but without the frantic energy that’s been in the background my whole life.

I also had to reckon with something I’d been outsourcing for too long — my own authority in my work. I’ve spent years hiding behind being “so young” and “not knowing enough yet.” February made it clear: I’m an authority in my space. It’s time to act like it.

There’s still a lot to learn about being me, being in business, and making things work. It’s hard, honestly. But something shifted in February that I don’t think is going back.

who what when where why how

where I ate: had my first ramen ever and it was a 10/10. Sukh Thai in Fort Greene is my new takeout go-to (12.5/10, I don’t make the rules). Sartiano’s saw me a few times for a pre-date cocktail and girls dinner. Crosby Bar for drinks AND tea — reliable every time. Entre Nous, where I’m pretty sure the waiter and I had a vibe (unless he does that with everybody? Report back.) Bagel World on my hungover days ( 2 this month), always get the hungry man.

what I worked on: brand deals with NatureMade and Adobe x Girl Scouts (c’mon…how cute???) and getting the podcast kinks worked out with my team — promotion, guests, all of it.

Finished my first personal branding group coaching cohort, and opening another one this month. Onboarded some new 1:1 clients that I’m obsessed with. The business is becoming real in a way that requires me to show up differently — with way more systems that I’m enjoying building. [if you wanna work w me, reply to this or view my offers here]

what I wore: fleece tights and compression socks daily because it was four degrees outside and I refuse to suffer unnecessarily. Animal print. Navy and black, a lot. Blue French nails. Slick backs. My new Jimmy Fairly glasses. Levi’s 501 90s Love jeans that I got on sale.

material girl moment: feb holy grails included Summer Fridays lip pencils & stains; and the Rhode Barrier Butter that kept my skin moisturized and breakout-free this cycle. miss bieber is really doing somethingggggg over there!

on rotation: Don Toliver, obsessively. Been certified my whole life, come check my registration.

wellness: went to acupuncture at WTHN weekly!!! Got back on my workout grind towards the end of the month with Form. Had an underlying sickness the whole month (NYC winter, as mentioned), and drank a lot of bone broth to survive. Decided to cut out gluten, which I remembered halfway through a Belgian waffle at Clark’s this past Sunday.

what I read: Psychocybernetics (recommended by our last TWO TSFT guests) and Aesthetic Intelligence — both extremely relevant to where my head is right now. Taste is more important than ever & also we have control over our thoughts. PLEASE!

what I was learning: Sigh, so like… AI is a major MAJOR conversation I’m having with all my smart friends IRL and I’m done sleeping on it publicly to avoid pushback. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s here, and if women don’t get on this wave, we will miss out on a lot of wealth, opportunity, and a lot of policy formation.

I posted one video about setting up Claude and apparently I’m an AI influencer now, which was not the plan but I’m not arguing with it (or the 5,000 followers that I gained). More seriously though: I had dinner with a friend who survived layoffs at a very profitable, very popular company, and we sat there and accepted the truth — the era of solopreneurship fueled by AI is here and it’s not going anywhere.

I decided to stop being curious about it from a distance and actually get familiar. I’ve been using Claude and it’s been kind of amazing. More on this soon because I have thoughts. For now, some resources I’ve been loving here.

this month on too smart for this:

March’s theme is POWER.

This week I kicked things off with the places you’re giving your power away without realizing it. It’s one of those episodes that will make you want to immediately audit your entire life. Go listen!!!

Monday, we have the incredibly brilliant Pauline Brown — author, professor, former Chairwoman of LVMH North America — and the conversation is everything I hoped it would be and more.

And after that... a very special haircare CEO is joining us. Can you guess who? 👀

before you go —

The Alignment Edit is BACK on March 22nd, and tickets are live. Book before Sunday and it’s $60 — that’s 20% off. It’s a live in-person experience for the woman who’s done feeling like she’s doing everything and still somehow off. You’ll leave changed!

Grab your ticket here →

Love ya.

xx

Alexis

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⭐️ Hello STARS! ⭐️

There is something both serendipitous and deeply unsettling about the fact that you genuinely never know how your life is going to change.

The random introduction that led to meeting your best friend. The DM you didn’t send that cost you an investment opportunity. The run-in at Trader Joe’s that turned into a new job, a new city, a new chapter.

And if you’re a smart girl (which… you are), that lack of certainty can be magical, sure, but it’s also mildly offensive to our egos.

We like formulas! We like to believe that if we do X, we will receive Y! If we work harder, organize better, become so good we’re everywhere — the outcome must follow!

So we overwork. We refine. We perfect. We aim to be exceptional enough that opportunity has no choice but to find us, because being undeniable feels safer than being visible.

Smart women often put networking on the back burner because visibility requires us to be…exposed. It means people can see what you want. It means you might not get it. It means you have to take responsibility for being seen.

But if I’ve learned anything in business, it’s that it’s rarely about how much good work you do in isolation. It’s about who knows your name.

I sat down with Phoebe Dodds, who is not a corporate “networking expert” in a navy sheath dress telling you to memorize an elevator pitch, but rather a hilarious, interesting, curious AMG who has worked for herself for over seven years, lived all over the world building her freelance career, and intentionally designed a life she actually controls.

Like….she’s bopped between Paris. Berlin. Amsterdam. Sydney. Now, New York! Freelance contract work in different countries! Consulting clients like Apple and Airbnb! Complete agency over her life!

And she argues that her opportunities have all been built through people.

The way Phoebe approaches networking won’t make you sigh with overwhelm and reluctantly open LinkedIn. She’s so bullish on networking because it’s actually the laziest, lowest lift way to build your dream life: It’s about integrating connection into your actual life, making it a habit instead of a hustle: Checking in. Following up. Introducing friends. Staying in conversation.

She breaks down exactly how she does it — what to say, how to reach out, how to deepen the relationships you already have — and she shares the most intelligent jealousy reframe that made me pause mid-recording like… oh. Oh that’s good.

If life is inherently unpredictable (and it is), the smartest move isn’t to overwork yourself into exhaustion trying to control every variable. It’s to put yourself in circulation.

You never know which message changes everything.

You never know who mentions your name in a room you’re not in.

You never know which small act of visibility becomes a pivot point.

Phoebe talks about how two intentional messages a week becomes 100 new connections in a year.

One hundred people who know what you care about. One hundred possible inflection points.

You cannot control exactly how your life will change, but you can make sure you’re visible when it does.

Social Currency

The 100 Connections Challenge: how to change your life in 2026

Ever feel like you’re mooching through life, doing okay and feeling pretty fine, but not thriving? You’re likely languishing. Popularised by Adam Grant in The New York Times in 2021, the term refers to “a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” For me, this fe…

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8 months ago · 1430 likes · 88 comments · Phoebe Dodds

✏️ Your homework from this episode (it’ll take 10 minutes, max):

• Open your notes app. Write down 3 goals for the next 1-2 years. Under each one, list every person — even loosely — who might help you get there. You have no idea who people know.

Before you start DMing, here are the three mistakes Phoebe says people make:

• Reaching out to the most senior person possible. Don’t. Cool people doing cool things now will be doing more interesting things in 5 years — start there. (P.S. — from our last episode, don’t reach out to anyone until you’re at least 70-80% of the way to where they are.)

• Reaching out with nothing to offer. You don’t need a lot, but you need genuine curiosity and a clear reason why them, specifically.

• Being vague. “Pick your brain” is a no. “15 minutes at a time that works for you” is a yes.

Plus, she gave us some conversation starters that actually work: How do you know the host? How did you find out about this event? What are you working on right now? Low lift. Impossible to say no to. Go.

You can have it all, angels. Just not all at the same time — and definitely not alone.

Enjoy the episode, and find Phoebe here: Substack | Instagram | LinkedIn. She’s simply a JOY!

All my love, Alexis 🖤

Alexis Barber is the host of the Too Smart For This podcast, author of Too Smart For This (Tarcher), and a Brooklyn-based lifestyle creator who writes for ambitious material girls who care about business, wellness, culture, and building real personal power. A former YouTube strategist and Wharton MBA, she uses strategic intelligence to help smart women build intentional lives and magnetic, profitable personal brands through content, consulting, and community. Subscribe to support her work, purchase the journal, follow along on socials, or inquire about brand strategy at hello@alexisbarber.com.

🎧 Listen to the episode here → YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, my perfect, fabulous friends!!!! 💌

If you love this holiday, amazing. If you hate it, also valid. Either way, February has a way of turning the volume up on everything: who you’re dating, who you’re not dating, what you’re tolerating, and what you’re pretending doesn’t bother you.

Today’s episode is a dating reset for smart, successful women — with my first returning guest ever, Jodie Taylor. And let me say this clearly: Jodie is an expander in my life. We’re both Northwestern girls (go ’Cats), we both know what it’s like to be the creative one in a room full of Very Serious Professionals™, and watching her scale her career and her platform with confidence has been such a “wait… I can do this too” mirror for me.

Now yes, we talk about dating (because it’s Valentine’s season and I’m not going to pretend we don’t all have thoughts). But — it’s not just all about boys, obviously, ladies. Jodie has so much more to her, and we get into the bigger picture of power, friendships, and building a life that can actually hold you.

Here are the lines that snapped my brain back into place:

• You can’t date a man in his loser era. Not because we’re mean — because partnership requires capacity. He should view you as a winner and you should view him as a winner.

• Watch out for “resume daters.” Men who love the optics of you (where you went, what you do) but can’t hold space for the actual you — the career, the drive, the schedule, the standards.

• Boundaries are a love-bomber repellent. If you can calmly say, “That made me feel ___ — was that your intention? Moving forward I’d prefer ___,” you learn everything you need to know by how they respond.

But we also talked about something just as important: your relationships with women. Specifically, you cannot build a big life while keeping people around you who are quietly rooting against you. We talked about why you can’t be friends with anyone who is jealous of you, how success reveals who actually has the capacity to love you out loud, and how to be discerning without becoming paranoid.

One of the reasons I admire Jodie so much is that she’s built an incredible network of women in her professional life — mentors, sponsors, peers, real friends — and she’s intentional about it. Not in a fake “networking event” way, but in a sophisticated, “I create proximity, I show up with value, I invest in relationships that invest back” way. It’s a masterclass in building a supportive ecosystem instead of trying to do everything alone.

If you’re dating right now, let this episode be your permission slip to raise the bar without getting bitter or closed off.

🎧 Listen to the episode here → YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

And reply and tell me: what’s your one relationship non-negotiable this year — in dating or in friendship?

If you want to keep up with Jodie, her Substack is a wealth of knowledge, and you can stalk her amazing content on @jodiektayl (IG) & @jodiektay (TikTok).

Hope you are feeling some love this weekend <3

xx

Alexis

P.S. If you’re in NYC and you want to take your life offline for a real reset, tickets for The Alignment Edit are linked here. I can’t wait to meet you!

Alexis Barber is the host of the Too Smart For This podcast, author of Too Smart For This (Tarcher), and a Brooklyn-based lifestyle creator who writes for ambitious material girls who care about business, wellness, culture, and building real personal power. A former YouTube strategist and Wharton MBA, she uses strategic intelligence to help smart women build intentional lives and magnetic, profitable personal brands through content, consulting, and community. Subscribe to support her work, purchase the journal, follow along on socials, or inquire about brand strategy at hello@alexisbarber.com.

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You know how it sneaks in. For a couple of days, you’re just… off. A low buzz hums under the surface, you snap when the coffee shop line is too long, blame it on hormones, sleep, work.

Then something slows you down long enough to notice — for me, while filling out the date on an Urgent Care intake form — exactly what day it is.

February 12th.

She would have been 73 today, texting me prayers signed with the 😘 emoji from her big blue reclining chair in the condo we shared until she moved to a nursing home and I moved to New York City.

It’s safe (though definitely rude) to say no one in our family was closer than we were, as the eldest grandkid born to her sixteen-year-old daughter when she was just in her forties.

That is, until the Great Rift of 2020 (you can imagine the topic…), after which our relationship was never quite the same. I thank Jesus — the center of her life — every day that we reconciled and I could hold her hand again before she left us in July 2022.

I’m an absolute wreck today. I’ve spent the morning blasting the Beach Boys and sobbing on my couch, journaling in purple ink (her favorite color) and letting myself unravel about this for the first time in a while, maybe ever. We used to swing dance to “California Girls” across her trailer’s living room, one of the only traces of whimsy she carried from her short childhood. I don’t know what else to do with this delayed grief (likely intensified by day five of a mysterious winter cold that Urgent Care was no help in battling), but to write. So I will do my best to pay homage to the woman who raised me, if only so that I can breathe a little easier.

Naturally, I was the favorite grandchild. Sometimes it felt like the favorite child, too. When you’re born to a teenager and raised by her mother, the lines tend to blur.

When I wasn’t shuffling between my mom’s numerous college apartments, I slept in her bed until I was five (maybe seven, if I’m honest) and woke up to the sound of her walking at an incline on her treadmill every morning. “Good morning, precious!”

At night, she popped fresh popcorn on the stove in an old black pot while the kettle whistled and she poured us cups of Calm magnesium. When we moved to St. Louis, the alarm clock switched to her unloading the dishwasher as loudly as she possibly could to lure me into having breakfast with her. “Hi, honey!” she’d chirp, as I angrily stood in the doorway.

She always took care of me, taking me to work with her as a receptionist, singing songs to calm down my tears over the phone, maxing out her only credit card to move me into Northwestern.

I guess her namesake was a bit too apt, because like the Bible’s Ruth, she overcame countless tragedies throughout her life. A disabled woman whose abusive husband left her for another woman — jobless with full custody of five children — she easily could’ve become cynical, particularly when her teenager got pregnant (with a Black baby, oh my!). Sometimes, she was. But there was no one more dedicated to optimism.

She kept her small trailer immaculate, decorated with the Lord’s prayer and purple curtains.“Count Your Blessings!!!!” was her default response to everything. It’s how she survived: take care of what you have if you ever want to get more. Give your struggles up to God. Like her namesake, she was loyal, generous, and willing to do anything for the sake of righteousness. She’d pray for miracles — and get them. She told me I was one, helping to ease the shame I felt for just existing as a kid.

She told me to soar. To leave Missouri. To get educated. To stop worrying so much about my siblings. To try everything once. Go abroad. Fall in love. Grow as much as I could. She told me I was beautiful, intelligent, kind, and most importantly, loved beyond measure by Jesus Christ himself. Even in the most gut-wrenching life situations, the core she built keeps me strong.

I’m a smart girl, but grief defies logic, making it an Emotion I Don’t Want To Feel Because I Can’t Explain It. If I can’t justify a feeling, I tend to disqualify it.

We live in a time where the dominant moral logic equates being flawed with being completely unworthy — of love, of sympathy, of even mourning. We reduce people to their worst moments, confusing disagreement with exile.

So when she died, I think part of me decided I wasn’t allowed to be devastated. And as I write that, I realize how ruthless (no uncanny pun intended) we’ve become.

Now I see that if her life wasn’t worthy of love and honor — the complicated, flawed, stubborn, faithful woman she was — then what would that say about everyone else?

That we’d have to be perfect to be worthy of anything? That just can’t be true.

I believe in accountability and consequences, and there were significant consequences to my grandmother’s political beliefs that strained our otherwise sacred relationship at the end of her life. Somewhere between fake news segments and Facebook comment sections, we lost each other for a while.

While I was busy trying to intellectualize it all, my therapist asked me: “What do you need from her?”

“I need her to understand. To apologize. To renounce it. To fix it.” I pleaded.

“Do you think you can realistically get that from her in her current state?”

The healing started there.

It was an important lesson in unconditional love, in empathy, in meeting people where they’re at, and in what it means to be family.

Ultimately, her mistakes taught me just as much as her teachings: never solely rely on a man (lol), always take care of your health, and always believe in love. (She always believed she’d find her Boaz.) And never stop questioning things — especially the internet.

During a particularly difficult time in her divorce, an older churchwoman counseled her to write something grounding on a smooth rock: the Lord has blessed me this far. She carried it with her for decades as an anchor between homes and tragedies, before sending it off with me during a rather depressing senior year of college. In what I’d describe as the hardest week of my life to date, she serendipitously sent me this text:

Today, every time it works out, I get a glimpse of her — when a Ford Edge drives by, a purple orchid sits in the waiting room, during my Calm magnesium ritual every night. Every time it’s not working out, she’s there, too.

We grieve because of loss, but I’m starting to see it differently.

I didn’t lose her love. I am her love.

Without the life she spoke into me, I wouldn’t have left Missouri. I wouldn’t have dared to get two degrees. I wouldn’t be building a life alone in New York City at 27 — single, self-employed, and still able to dream.

I’m the embodiment of a scorned, joyful, savvy, faithful woman’s raw hope. Her brave vision for me to be more than the statistic I was positioned to be been was the seed for the beautiful life that I’m still just at the beginning of. It would be a dishonor to the sacrifices she made for me to stay stagnant when she coaxed me out of our family’s small Missouri world to go after the biggest possible life I could.

I’ve always been focused on the now, the me, the future. The past feels irrelevant to the hustle — look ahead to where you’re going, not at what’s behind you!! But we cannot forget that grandmothers’ prayers hold up entire communities. Our paths are paved by their bravery to dream for us. You’re a walking testimony, and you matter.

Appreciating my ancestors in their flaws and their fullness allows me to feel compassion for myself — and a responsibility toward their sacrifices.

My job now is to be ruthlessly faithful as I carry out the dreams she planted in me.

The Lord has blessed me this far.

I intend to honor that.

—

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I hope you can reflect on people in your life whose unconditional love you may have minimized. Can you accept their love as valuable and true, even if your relationship is imperfect? That paradox is what makes us human.

Sending you lots of love — and a grandmother’s prayer.

xx

Alexis

Alexis Barber is the host of the Too Smart For This podcast, author of Too Smart For This (Tarcher), and a Brooklyn-based lifestyle creator who writes for ambitious material girls who care about business, wellness, culture, and building real personal power. A former YouTube strategist and Wharton MBA, she uses strategic intelligence to help smart women build intentional lives and magnetic, profitable personal brands through content, consulting, and community. Subscribe to support her work, purchase the journal, follow along on socials, or inquire about brand strategy at hello@alexisbarber.com.

⭐️ HELLO STARS ⭐️

I’m over six years into my windy career now, and I still think about a moment from my first day at Google. My manager asked me a question that should’ve been easy:

“So, what do you want out of this?”

What do you mean what do I want??? I’ve spent my entire life preparing to get HERE. This is the dream job. I assumed YOU would hand me the roadmap, the five-year plan, and the next promotion timeline?? I’m just grateful to be in the room!!!

And that is the trap.

Women are taught to be “happy to be here.” But in today’s job market, that passive mindset will get you left behind. I learned very quickly that I had to step into the driver’s seat, so I got clear on my career vision, through role pivots, career plot twists, and a lot of very lucky-but-not-accidental moments, here we are!

Thank GOD that question got me together, because the truth is that following my own vision is the only reason I now have a career I fully control.

And the more rooms I’ve been in — Google, Northwestern, Wharton — the clearer it’s become: the people with the most enviable careers aren’t the ones who followed the rules perfectly. They’re the ones who stayed true to their vision.

Which brings me to the staggering part.

I was invited to LinkedIn’s career fair last week, and I share the data in this episode because…we are very clearly not playing the same career game we were even a year ago.

The market is shifting fast, and ambitious women can’t afford to respond by trying to be perfect. We have to respond by getting strategic and taking action.

In todays episode, we cover the two keys to surviving and thriving this chaotic moment in career history: becoming HIGH AGENCY and strong PERSONAL BRANDING.

In the second half of this episode, I’m joined by Julia Cabral (Senior Director of Product Marketing at LinkedIn & a fabulous LinkedIn creator) — a corporate girl who transitioned from finance → marketing — and she gives the most helpful, low-pressure ideas for building a personal brand on LinkedIn (even if you do not consider yourself “a creator”).

🎧 Listen to the episode here → YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

⭐️Join Ambitious Material Girl World⭐️

⭐️Your 7-Day High Agency Career Roadmap⭐️

You’re a grown woman, so let’s make a grown woman roadmap to cultivate the career of your dreams. Here’s the plan…

Day 1: Name what you actually want (30 min)

Write 10 sentences starting with:

“If I could design my career like a lifestyle, it would feel like…”

(energy, pace, environment, autonomy, money, meaning)

Day 2: Audit your real skills (20 min)

List:

• 5 things people always come to you for

• 5 things you do better than most

• 3 things that feel weirdly effortless

Circle the ones that create results (not just traits).

Day 3: Pick ONE skill to build this quarter (15 min)

Not “fix everything.” One skill that creates leverage.

Day 4: Build a proof artifact (45 min)

Proof > potential. You need to demonstrate that you create value for the people that you work with and for. Create one:

• mini case study

• side project

• before/after

• “here’s what I tried + what happened”

Day 5: LinkedIn glow-up (30 min)

Make your profile your digital front door:

• verify your profile

• add skills + (where possible) verification

• update your Experience section to show impact

Day 6: Upskilling plan

First, pick 4 skills you want to improve on this year and dedicate 1 quarter to learning more about them. (Mine are: AI, Selling, Public Speaking, and People Management.) You can research some courses on LinkedIn Learning and schedule some time to commit to them.

If a course is too overwhelming, to easily get started, pick one book that teaches the skill you’re interested in and commit to finishing it in 7 days. Some ideas:

• one book on selling better

• or communication

• or negotiation / leadership

A single audiobook in a week is a major upgrade and will signal to you that you’re ready to start learning more.

Day 7: Share one thing (10 min)

Post one small nugget on LinkedIn:

• something you learned this week

• something you’d tell your past self (Julia gives great prompts at the 30 min mark of the episode!)

• a perspective shift from this week

It’s not about going viral. It’s about owning your narrative!

Journal prompts to make this personal

1. When do I feel most energized at work, and what am I doing in those moments?

2. What drains me weekly that I’ve been treating like “normal”?

3. What am I currently measuring that’s the wrong metric for my real value?

4. What skill would make me feel 20% more powerful in my career right now?

5. What does “agency” look like in my actual life (not in theory)?

6. If I stopped trying to look perfect, what would I build instead?

If you do all of these and post on LinkedIn, I’ll connect with you and repost. Just DM me on LinkedIn here!!

Remember, you’re too smart to not love yourself.

xo,

Alexis

Get tickets to the Alignment Edit on 2/22.

⭐️ HELLO ANGELS! ⭐️

This week’s Alignment Edit is about your look — and yes, as a proud material girl and recovering shopaholic, I promise this isn’t just me enabling you (well…not entirely). It’s about the mental energy we lose every day when getting dressed feels harder than it should, when we don’t quite feel like ourselves, or when we quietly opt out because we haven’t figured out what actually works. This episode is about closing that gap so you can feel fabulous in your own skin faster, with less effort! I hope you love it.

FOMO Warning: Recap of the VERY FIRST Alignment Edit Workshop 🖤

WOW. OK. Taking the Alignment Edit offline and into real life was even more magical than I could have imagined.

A stunning and diverse group of women came together in the cutest studio — a mother–daughter duo, recent college grads, law students, women at totally different stages of life — all instantly bonded by this shared, slightly unhinged ambition that runs through us. Thoughtful conversations, big dreams spoken out loud, and that rare feeling of being deeply understood without having to explain yourself.

I’ll be honest — there was a moment during preparation where I questioned everything. We put so much work into planning it, had to reschedule due to the snowstorm, and I definitely had that “am I doing too much?” spiral.

But seeing women walk into the room, soften, open up, and feel genuinely empowered and connected in their ambition lit a spark in me like nothing else. Since I spend most of my time staring at a screen solo, to actually be with you, talk, laugh, and hang in real life was the best feeling in the world <3

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s what we actually do: 20-30 ambitious material girls gather for a 90-minute guided workshop focused on reflection, clarity, and goal-setting — and then we slow things down with wine, vision boards, and space to connect.

We’re doing it again on 2/22 (yes, the angel numbers are very intentional). If this kind of space has been calling to you — keep scrolling to see what a few of the women who came had to say… and I really hope you’ll join us next time 🖤

And of course, a huge thank you to the brands who helped make this first Alignment Edit so special. We’re so grateful to FiveTwoNine, Airbnb, e.l.f. Cosmetics, IAM8, and Brick for supporting this experience and believing in creating beautiful, intentional spaces for ambitious women to come together. Truly couldn’t have done it without you 🖤

Get tickets to the Alignment Edit on 2/22.

xx

Alexis

Alexis Barber is a lifestyle creator and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s the author of Too Smart For This, a guided journal for ambitious women. Support her work by following along on socials, subscribing, purchasing the book here, or reaching out for consulting on the creator economy and consumer brands at hello@alexisbarber.com.

As a reluctantly grown woman, I’ve come to accept a simple truth: there’s a tax on every privilege.

And if you’re smart, charismatic, hyper-competent? Sorry, sister, you might be cursed!

(If you’re gorgeous and well-dressed, too, I’m praying for you. Empathetic, even? Oh honey. The tears you’ve surely shed!!!)

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why. Most people are not working very hard (no shade), don’t really know what they want, and somehow aren’t embarrassed by mediocrity — a concept ambitious material girls like us could simply never relate to.

So when you do have the traits — intelligence, competence, taste, a point of view, follow-through — you fall into a very specific trap: succeeding your way into five jobs outside your genius, social obligations that leave you thinking is this really it?, and a low-grade dullness about life even your astrologer can’t explain (I need a personal reading from Chani ASAP.)

Ambitious women are taught to be grateful just to be in the room. So once we’re there, we overextend. And because our lives are “good enough,” we feel guilty for secretly wanting more.

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So we stagnate. To try to justify what we want, but when we don’t have the capacity to welcome a new reality where we could be actually fulfilled, the slump usually gets summarized as:

“I’m just in a weird time right now.”

Which is funny, because nothing has actually collapsed — likeeeee, you’re still showing up. Emails get answered. Outfits get put together. You make it to the gym or the party most of the time. Of course you do. Ambitious material girls never look like their problems.

But underneath the polish, something starts to come undone.

Your days quietly turn into a cycle of:

• waking up tired no matter how early you went to bed

• snapping at small things, then immediately feeling guilty

• letting texts sit unanswered because you “just can’t”

• crying. a. lot. then pulling yourself together like nothing happened

• fantasizing about disappearing for a month — not to relax, just to think

On paper, things still work. Internally, you’re strained.

These are the later-stage symptoms of what I call the curse of competence.

When you’re smart, capable, and charismatic, people rely on you. Suddenly you’re the head of the fundraising committee when you only opted into an email. You’re managing multiple projects, multiple roles, multiple versions of yourself — all for genuinely solid opportunities.

And at first, it feels good. Little old me? Chosen? Trusted? Rewarded?

You did what you were good at. You said yes. You kept going.

Now you’re holding a life that looks successful — but feels like an overstuffed Bloomingdale’s bag that’s going to rip open the second you step outside.

Crash out? HELLO!!!!

Your brain presents you with two dramatic options:

1. I need to OVERHAUL. REBRAND. RESET. Optimize harder. Fix my mindset. Oprah. Shera Seven. Andrew Huberman??

Become my “higher self.”

(Who is she, by the way? And why does she have no emotions?)

2. I need to blow everything up. Quit the job. Move cities. End the relationship. Start over.

Surely if this life is IMPERFECT, it must be entirely wrong.

Extreme, no? Exhausting, yes?

Neither works….because what’s falling apart isn’t your life — it’s the story you’ve been using to frame it.

Most smart women already know the strategy. If you had to enter a Y Combinator pitch tomorrow, take on your firm’s biggest client overnight, or pull off an event in half the originally allocated time, you’d kill it. The how has never been your problem.

The problem is authorship. You can’t quite see yourself as the woman who actually does the thing you secretly want, because you’ve been living off momentum and external approval instead of following desire with intention.

Chaotic = nothing has been consciously edited.

You’re operating with outdated programming about who you’re allowed to be, what counts as success, and which desires are “realistic.”

As long as that story stays the same, even good options feel impossible to move toward. The good news? It doesn’t take a dramatic reinvention. It takes a light edit.

One shift in how you see yourself, one release of something that no longer fits, one decision to stop auditioning for a life you’ve already outgrown.

Once that happens, everything gets easier — and a lot more FUNNN!

You start saying no without guilt, because what does work feels so good.

You stop forcing yourself through things that drain you, AND choose with pleasure instead of obligation.

Let’s Edit Together ⭐️

The Alignment Edit workshops are for women in this exact moment: capable, accomplished, and quietly ready for more of what feels good.

On Sunday afternoons in Brooklyn, an intimate group of ~30 ambitious material girls gather for a 90-minute, guided edit of their lives — auditing the story they’ve been living inside, clarifying what no longer belongs, and deciding what truly deserves their energy now.

Then we zoom out, dream a little, and make STUNNING vision boards together to close out the evening. There’s wine, pastries, jazz, sharp conversation, and beautifully curated wellness gift bags waiting on your way out.

If your life is good, but you know it could feel more like yours… this is for you.

Get tickets here to The Alignment Edit

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If you’re not local, you can start with the latest Alignment Edit podcast episodes on money,

your space,

and your health.

a new episode drops Monday, with a bonus one before that :)

You’re too smart to not love yourself <3

— Alexis

I heard James Clear say something on Emma Grede’s podcast this week that made me actually laugh out loud. While freezing my face off on a walk in Brooklyn Heights, I heard him explain:

“Every habit has an environment. There are no habits without environments. Therefore, curating yours is the most important thing you can do.”

Or something along those lines, I’m recalling from memory, OK?? Either way, it got me: THAT’S WHY I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT MY SPACE! Lmao. Of course! Every habit I want is within a container, and I actually tend to…control that container?

I take my environment so seriously. It’s kinda ADHD, and kinda that Beholderism (aesthetics) is one of my most important values.

Because of my brain’s unique inability to be productive amongst ugliness or disorder, I have learned a few tips on how to feel in control of my space, and in turn, my life, which I’m sharing in this week’s Alignment Edit. The thesis is simple: as within, so without.

If your space is cluttered, loud, chaotic, unfinished, or built for an older version of you — no amount of discipline or even vision is going to save you. Your environment is training you every day: how focused you are, what you tolerate, how calm you feel, and how much energy you actually have access to.

This doesn’t mean I can’t get DOWNNNN in an uninspiring environment — QUITE the contrary. But the point is…you don’t have to. You can have a home that makes you feel safe and supported JUST by switching one or two little things. AND YOU DESERVE IT!

This episode is about redesigning your space to support you — subtly, effortlessly, without turning it into a whole “project.” NOT meant to be a DIY overhaul, but moreso quiet upgrades that change how your days feel.

If these ideas hit for you, I’d love for you to listen to the episode and share it with a friend who’s been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like life is harder than it needs to be…we all deserve some inspo!

And if you want to take this work offline and do it together, this is exactly what we explore inside The Alignment Edit workshops — slowing down, looking honestly at what’s supporting you (and what isn’t), and making intentional edits across your life. If you’re in Brooklyn on 2/1 or 2/22, join ambitious material girl world and let’s have some fun! Sign Up Here

If you want to play with this after listening, here are the full prompts I use when I’m doing a Space Alignment Edit. Save them. Come back when you’re in the mood!

🏠 The Space Alignment Edit: Reflections

1. Where in my day am I settling for something that mildly stresses me out?

2. What have I decided is “fine,” even though it quietly drains me?

3. Is there a cabinet, drawer, bag, etc I reach for every day that annoys me?

4. What part of my environment have I normalized that I wouldn’t choose again?

5. Where am I relying on willpower instead of design?

6. What feels harder than it should in my daily routines?

7. If someone I admired walked into my space, what would I suddenly notice?

8. If I had an extra $100, what would I upgrade immediately — and how would it make my life feel smoother?

9. If I had an extra $1,000, what would I invest in to make my space feel more supportive?

10. If my environment fully supported the woman I’m becoming, what would look different?

✨ Little things I swear by

Because I always get asked — I’ve linked my favorite closet upgrades, hangers, drawer organizers, steamers, herb sachets that make everything smell good, plus my go-to kitchen and bathroom basics. All saved on my ShopMy so you don’t have to think about it right now.

Remember, you don’t need a perfect space. You just need one that works with your rhythms, that you give all the gratitude you can right now on your way to the one that supports you the most.

Once your environment is aligned, so much gets easier! I can’t wait for you all to feel more empowered at home after this episode.

With love,

Alexis 🖤

Thank you for the casual Sunday chit chat — this was honestly such a nice way to ease into the week together. Whether you were actively chatting or just listening while doing your thing, I loved the energy and I’m officially obsessed with doing more lives like this!

We talked a lot about intentionally planning the week — not in a hustle-y way, but in a “how do I want my life to actually feel?” way.

Some things we covered

• Planning the week without anxiety driving the bus

• Dating as an ambitious woman

• Closing mental loops before opening new ones

• Thinking about energy > time (because calendars lie) when you’re planning the week

• Your energetic minimums/maximums

• How to get up early/on time when it’s legit FREEZING OUT

• Balancing content creation with a full-time job

• My future business ideas…

Basically: less chaotic ambition, more intentional momentum.

Stuff I mentioned that people asked about:

• My journaling / Sunday reset favorites — shared my absolute favorite inspiring journaling resources (might f around and do the Artist’s Way again)

• Superhuman AI — for inbox sanity + less mental clutter

• Recent podcast episodes on burnout, alignment, urgency, and redefining success

I’m really excited to keep going live like this — low pressure, thoughtful, and actually useful. If there are things you want to talk through on future Sunday resets (planning, money, work, dating, routines, whatever), tell me. This is very much a we build this together situation.

And if you wanna hang and get your life together IRL…there’s still tickets for The Alignment EDIT IRL next Sunday in Brooklyn! You won’t wanna miss it <3

Hope you’re staying warm, sisters…tonight, light a candle (I have 7 lit atm), and pick one gentle promise to yourself for the week.

See you tomorrow AM for a fun episode 🕯️💌

xx

Alexis

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I’ve been bitterly softening into someone who can welcome the grief of getting older without immediately succumbing to the urgency it awakens.

I’ve always been in a rush. Out of the house I was born into, back from the grocery store faster, towards a graduation. Whenever I reminisce, my instinct is never to reflect on what’s been built — it’s to inventory what hasn’t. The mountain I haven’t scaled. The elusive, goddess-like version of myself I still haven’t become (Perfect Alexis). I tend to stop there, tally the distance between me and flawlessness, and use that as fuel for the next thing. Forward motion has always felt safer than looking back.

That’s why the sudden fixation on 2016 caught me off guard — I surprisingly loved that time. Now if it were a 2014 deep dive (my awkward era), I wouldn’t have so gleefully scrolled through my old pictures, 500+ finsta posts, or my immaculate Tumblr blog. But even a gorgeous Instagram grid couldn’t stop my 27-year-old ego from zooming in on the sobering magnitude of a decade between me and the girl obsessed with NYX matte lip liner. Youth — Perfect Alexis reminds me — is fleeting. You have got to get your shit together !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, I journaled the morning after the trend peaked.

At the time, I was somehow convinced I was the coolest girl alive — I’d just beaten 99% of society’s odds to get into Northwestern early decision and started wearing contacts — even though I was deeply lonely. I’ve always cringed a little at my high school self, mostly because she didn’t know so many things I now feel embarrassed not to have known earlier. Perfect Alexis is omniscient, of course.

Getting into Northwestern felt miraculous for a girl like me. It was the first moment I truly believed I might make it out of chaos and poverty. That belief — fragile but electric — became something I ran with for the next decade. And yet, looking around at 17, I still didn’t feel like anything was meaningful enough to make the hard part worth it. Surprisingly, that’s what makes me feel so close to that version of myself: we’re both desperately hungry to be seen.

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Ambition is just another word for hungry, and I was ravenous. I’d get that meaning if I just kept hustling for it. It became a habit to pounce on every opportunity that would take me somewhere else. That hunger took me on an extraordinary journey through five cities, two businesses, countless jobs and apartments, and it brought me here. And, I’m pretty happy, here. At least this week ;)

But over the past ten years, I’ve also done a remarkable job of accumulating logic for why I’m not good enough — instead of collecting proof that I’ve simply been remembering the woman I desired to be.

Scrolling through my Tumblr (I wish we still had Polyvore — I was going ham on there, too!!!!!), I giggled at how similar my 17-year-old aesthetic was to the Pinterest boards that soothe me today. With a chip on her shoulder and the promise of a new environment at college, Young Alexis was crafting her identity from scratch. She believed in herself intrinsically, without external evidence. She didn’t need permission, but when she got it, she was unstoppable.

She craved structure, though, and she couldn’t resist all the external benchmarks — the numbers, the timelines, the validation. The gap between Perfect Alexis and me remained just loud enough to keep me moving forward without requiring me to listen to myself. If I wasn’t perfect, who was I to direct this movie? Might as well let Societal Norms do that part!

But running from something is not how you arrive anywhere.

In preparation for my live Alignment Edit workshops kicking off this Sunday, I went back through my old journals to see what was occupying my mind exactly a year ago, in the wake of what felt like my entire world (yes, the one I’d built in survival mode) shattering. I wanted to understand what the depressed, aimless version of me actually needed to hear — so I could offer that clarity to the women walking into the room now.

I filled fifteen Mnemosyne B5 journals in twelve months. The early pages were raw and frantic — Will I ever heal? Why is this happening to me? — before slowly giving way to something steadier: months spent deliberately retraining my identity, teaching myself how to believe in my own creative authority.

The entries still looped, still spiraled. Every few weeks I’d return to the same declarations — I am powerful. I am deserving. — forgetting and remembering my worth in shorter and shorter increments.

And yet, even seeing the progress, I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of frustration that I hadn’t fully closed this worthiness wound once and for all — or earned the accolades I’d furiously prayed for on the page.

But I’ve done enough remembering to recognize the flaw in my judgment. The accolades, the being “done” or “finished,” wouldn’t fix me — because they aren’t me. They were tools that a younger version of me used to feel safe.

The real magic, your real ravenousness, is meant to be channeled toward creating. Creating isn’t running away from something; it’s stopping long enough to listen to what wants to come through you. The secret weapon is you. It’s not the sprint.

I know so many ambitious women who are here too. You’re driven, capable, intelligent — and inexplicably stalled. You’ve been running on something sharp and volatile, something rooted in frustration or anger you can’t fully explain. And when you can’t find logic for what you’re feeling, your entire worldview starts to crack. Because the only option left is to sit with it.

What no one tells you is that sitting with it isn’t failure. It’s the first step towards authorship.

The thing you’re avoiding — the grief, the discomfort, the quiet knowing — is what’s shaping your unique perception. It’s what informs your creativity, your taste, the particular life you want to build and projects you’re meant to bring to life. Our desires aren’t random. They’re data. They’re gifts!!!!

That’s why scrolling through my old Tumblr and journals felt so clarifying. The aesthetic I idolized then is strikingly similar to the world I’m living in now. The interests, the longings, the vision — all there, just no longer desperate to be validated by a number or resume bullet point.

Back then, I mistook pursuit for alignment, motion for meaning. Now I understand the paradox: what was keeping me stuck wasn’t a lack of effort. It was proximity without presence. I was running so close to what I thought I wanted that I never stopped to ask why I wanted it — or whether I just might have it already.

Stuckness is an invitation to slow down and remember. I knowwwww, slowing down feels unsafe when your fuel is frustration. I’ve found it to be magical when your fuel is self-trust.

My challenge since re-aligning my life has been remaining magnetic instead of frantic. Magnetism isn’t always passive, and it isn’t just mystical. It’s what happens when you allow yourself to be fully where you are — when you trust that what’s meant for you will recognize you without tumultuous pursuit.

And it’s working. I’ve transformed so much pain into seeds for a fabulous future. My ambition was not my blocker; my hunger was not a flaw. I simply learned to take action with intention, and I guess you could say it’s paying off, because you’re here :)

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Who knew reflection could be so sweet? When you’re not looking for the flaws in your story, you can see that it’s a pretty good one and the path was there all along.

So, friends, the Alignment Edit workshop (and the accompanying podcast episodes) aren’t about shrinking your desire. It’s about redirecting the fuel. It’s about learning how to stop long enough to listen — so the life you’re building actually feels like yours.

If you’re ambitious, ravenous, and tired of outrunning yourself, this is your pause.

A moment to let the grief soften — to remember the girl who believed before she had proof, and to build the life she always knew was coming.

Hope to see you there <3 Sign up here.

xx

Alexis

This week’s episode is about money, which is already enough to make everyone mildly uncomfortable. (TBH I do get a little emotional at one point, fair warning!!)

It’s the Money Alignment Edit, and before you panic, no, I’m not about to tell you to open seven bank accounts or suddenly become an expert on Roth IRAs. That is not my ministry.

This episode explores the emotional connection you have with money.

Beliefs that impact your confidence, your dating life, your self-worth, and your ability to relax, even when things are technically “fine.”

BC like… right now? Things are genuinely tight for a lot of people. FOR REAL. And it doesn’t mean you’re failing or behind or doing life wrong. The economy is changing rapidly, and it’s destabilizing entire industries!!!

So why would you let this wobbly period define your self-worth?

The core shift I talk about in this episode — the one that changed everything for me — is taking money off the pedestal.

When money becomes your primary source of safety or self-worth, every fluctuation feels personal. A slow month feels like a personality flaw. Getting passed up for promo sends you into a spiral. Your nervous system stays on edge even when you’re doing “okay.”

This Alignment Edit is about expansion, permission, and regulation, but doing that with money takes a little more than just a new habit. It takes some interrogation followed by serious integration, I fear!!!

So if you want to go a little deeper after listening, here are the journal prompts I recommend. Don’t do them all at once. Light a candle (your most expensive one, maybe?). Romanticize it!!!! And you’ll be on your way to feeling way more in control.

💸 The Money Alignment Edit Journal Prompts

1. Taking money off the pedestal

• When money feels tight, what do I make that mean about me?

• Where did I learn that money = safety?

• If money were a tool, not a verdict, how would I treat it differently?

2. Net worth vs self-worth

• How does my self-talk change when I’m earning more vs less?

• Who benefits when I tie my worth to productivity?

• What would it feel like if my worth stayed constant across seasons?

3. Overworking to feel secure

• Where am I over-functioning to “deserve” safety?

• What emotional jobs am I asking money to do for me?

• What would safety look like without exhaustion attached?

4. Wanting more (without guilt)

• What do I want financially that I’ve been embarrassed to admit?

• Whose voice do I hear when I judge myself for wanting more?

• What would change if I allowed myself to want cleanly?

5. Judgment & comparison

• Who do I judge financially?

• What am I afraid people would say if I had more?

• Where might judgment be keeping me small or quiet?

6. Greed vs capacity

• What did I learn about “rich people” growing up?

• How do I actually behave when I have more resources?

• What kind of woman do I want to be resourced enough to be?

7. Making more money

• Where am I undercharging or overgiving?

• What do people already come to me for?

• What would shift if I expected to be compensated fairly?

If there’s one thing I want you to walk away with, it’s that you don’t need to punish yourself into abundance or prove your worth to earn safety.

And you don’t need to make money a moral issue anymore. You’re allowed to want more!

And yes — you’re allowed to decide that you’re going to be a wealthy woman and a grounded, generous one.

Hope you love this episode — drop me a comment if you liked it, share it with your fellow Ambitious Material Girls, and remember, you’re too smart to not love yourself <3

Alexis 💋