Years later, one of the biggest takeaways from that book for me is still:

Successful people are simply those that try the most things…

• Pablo Picasso created more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, plus prints, rugs, and tapestries. Only a few actually became known.

• Thomas Edison completed 2,774 experiments before successfully creating the lightbulb.

Modern ambition is a paradox: we have access to seeing what seemingly everyone else in the world is doing because of social media. Every single day our feed is inundated with people doing cool things & creating their modern career. & I think it leaves a lot of us thinking “I want to do something, but I have no idea what that something is”.

Thats where experimentation really shines. The truth is, you’re never going to know what you want until you try things. Each thing you try, gets you closer and closer to building a career that you love working on every single day.

So if that’s how you’re feeling, like you want to go after something bigger, but you have no idea where to start, I want to leave you with 3 practical tips to start experimenting more in your life and in your career.

1. stop asking “what do i want to do forever?”

The college-to-adult pipeline makes us feel like we have to choose our path for the rest of our life at 22 years old, and here I am at 27 telling you that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve had 3 different W2 jobs and countless 1099 gigs since graduating from college, and I can’t even imagine how many pivots, career changes, and different projects I’ll have worked on by the end of my career..

Instead of asking “what do I want to do forever”, start asking “what am I curious enough to try next?”. No career decision has to define the rest of your life..

That’s why freelancing is such a powerful career archetype - because it lets you test different skills, industries, and types of work on a small scale. I started picking up freelance gigs alongside my W2 job within 12 months of graduating and those experiences taught me so much.

2. make the experiment small enough to start

You do not need to quit your job, launch a full business, or completely reinvent your career in order to start experimenting. There are so many things you can try alongside of your W2 and once you open your eyes to it, you’d be surprised how many people actually do have side hustles too..

Create a small, inexpensive, reversible test: take on one project, publish four videos, spend 30 days learning a skill, or try an idea with five people. The goal isn’t to prove that this is “the thing.” it’s to gather information & start experimenting.

3. start offering your help

If you’re reading this wondering “okay but how do I find opportunities” - start offering your help.

For example, my friend offered to help a restaurant owner with their social media, and now has a monthly retainer freelancing gig for them as their social media manager. She had no experience, but through organic conversation the opportunity came her way.

Be curious about people, ask them about their needs, and pitch yourself when you can! Look for founders, startups, creators, or local businesses with a problem you might be able to help solve—and offer to help with one small project. Your first experiment could come from sending a message that says, “i noticed you’re working on this. i’d love to help with that.”

I especially love this tip because real work gives you evidence that thinking alone never will: whether you enjoy the process, whether you’re good at it, and whether someone is willing to pay you for it. & once you get that first gig, getting the next is exponentially easier..

The year was 2020, I was 21 years old, and I spent a large amount of my free time listening to this podcast.

I learned about the FIRE movement (financial independence retire early) which was an entire movement of people who were passionate about early retirement. If I had to sum up their strategy in one roadmap:

1. live well below your means (whether its moving back in with family, house hacking for free rent, multiple roommates, or getting rid of your car - you’re finding a way to significantly decrease your expenses & live frugally)

2. buy a rental property (use the money you’re saving from #1 to put a downpayment on a rental. maybe its a single family rental, or maybe its a duplex that you could live on 1 side of)

3. rinse, and repeat (start saving the money you’re earning from your rental to save for the next one)

4. do that again and again until the cash flow from your rentals = the money you need to live.

In that 2020 era, almost all of the financial freedom content I could find was using that real estate investing strategy to retire early.

Once your income producing assets pay you enough money every month to fund your lifestyle, you are financially free.

That concept alone changed my life. It’s the idea that retirement is a number not an age.

That concept is the sole reason why I:

• started working a lot harder (to make more money)

• started meticulously looking at my expenses (to save more of that money)

• started paying off my debt (to decrease my monthly expenses)

• started investing my money (to build my portfolio)

It’s not that I cared so deeply about budgeting, it’s that I cared so deeply about gaining more freedom over my life.

Now here we are 7 years later, I did achieve certain levels of financial freedom, and I realized the roadmap actually looked completely different.

I don’t think the road to financial freedom looks the same today, in 2026, than it did even 5 years ago.

The world has changed, our opportunities have changed, and our desires have changed as well:

The world has changed & so have our opportunities

I don’t think real estate investing is our best opportunity anymore to build assets, make more money, and reach financial freedom.

The internet has completely democratized business, wealth and success. You can start a business completely for free using only your laptop. People are earning a significant amount of extra money by doing things like:

• starting the photography biz

• creating a YouTube channel

• selling digital products

• Etsy marketplace

• content creation

• user-generated content

• freelance gigs

• event services

Today, people aren’t spending their free time looking for rental properties to purchase. They’re finding unique ways to make money alongside their W2 job.

Our desires have changed:

When I was 20 years old listening to those podcast episodes, I thought “early retirement sounds amazing”..

Now here I am, almost 10 years into this journey, and there’s no way I would want to retire.

I thought early retirement sounded great because I was stuck in a corporate job that I didn’t hate, but also didn’t care about at all.

I think our desires have shifted from the freedom to “retire” to the freedom to go after a career you truly love.

So here’s my roadmap to modern financial freedom

Modern financial freedom is about using money to create the space to build your dream life (which includes a dream career).

• employee to modern career: this is your phase of building side hustles, multiple streams of income, and testing things to find out what you like to do.

• modern career to financial freedom: use the money you’re making in all of your experiments to start achieving financial freedom. every financial milestone makes you more and more free. pay down debt, save, build your investment portfolio.

• financial freedom to owner: the more financial freedom you gain, the more risks you can start taking to build your dream career. maybe that starts with taking the leap to leave your 9-5. maybe it means joining the risky startup. maybe it means investing your own money into a business.

I don’t think we crave retirement, I think we crave the ability to go after our true purpose. & money gives us that freedom.

I’d bet that if you’re reading this, you too struggle with the “what do I even want to do with my life?”

I’m 27, but I feel like my career over the last 7 years has taught me as much as a 20 year career, so looking back I’ve now realized..

I think we’re approaching “purpose” completely backwards.

Why your financial foundation is the first step to finding your purpose

When I was 22, working my first corporate job out of college, I didn’t have the luxury of thinking of my “purpose” in life.

My paycheck was hyper-optimized to building my emergency fund, paying off debt, investing in my Roth IRA, and tracking every dollar to make sure I could continue to do so.

Now fast forward, I do feel like I’m on the top of this pyramid (incredibly fulfilled and purposeful in the career I’ve built), and it taught me that there’s 4 distinct phases I went through, and you can too:

financial foundation: build a solid financial foundation to ease money anxiety. pay off high interest debt, build your emergency fund, start investing a lil for retirement, learn to live within your means.

financial freedom: increase your income, use the excess to invest more (reaching toward a milestone called Coast FI). this stage helps you create space between money and decision-making, which lets you think more clearly about what you want.

choose your work: now that you have that space between money and the decisions that you make, you’re able to take more risks and more action to figure out what you actually want out of life. maybe it’s taking a year off to travel to gain new experiences, maybe its leaving the stable job to join a riskier startup, maybe its investing into a side business to let it scale.

purpose: experiences from the last stage are the thing that will help you find your purpose. the one thing that you love so much that you dedicate your life’s work to. ultimately, we have no idea what we want to do with our life, and trying new things is the way to figure it out.

We’ve been approaching purpose backwards

Trying to figure out what you want to do with your life before creating the financial space to do so, will leave you anxious and creatively blocked.

Trying to find your purpose without trying new things and having new experiences, will leave you feeling defeated because how are you supposed to know?

This is my story of how I applied this pyramid to my own life (unknowingly), that led me to a career and a life that I genuinely feel so grateful for every single day:

my financial foundation phase (age 19-22)

In college and through my first year out of college, I was super disciplined with my money. I worked literally as much as humanly possible, and was able to graduate with $30k in my HYSA. Early into my career I focused on using extra money to pay down my debt and started investing in my Roth IRA.

my financial freedom phase (age 22-24)

Once my financial foundation was built I started focusing on increasing my income. I got into freelancing in the content creation space (user-generated content and social media management), and started posting on my own social accounts! Within a year I went from 1 income stream from my corporate job to 4+ income streams between W2 job, freelance gigs, digital product sales, and affiliates.

This phase helped me invest WAY more, getting me closer to a financial milestone that would make me financially free.

my “choose your work” phase (24+)

When I turned 24 I really saw how gaining any level of financial freedom gives you optionality.

A LinkedIn networking session turned into a job opportunity at a startup..

The thing was, this was a risky move.

I was working my corporate job at FedEx (huge company, huge company benefits..), and this startup was FRESH. I’m talking the app wasn’t even on the app store yet, and I’d be the first full-time hire..

By this point I had paid off all of my debt, had a great emergency fund, and money in my investment accounts, and I took the leap.

this was my founder and I at a techstars pitch event, just 2 23 year olds pretending we knew what we were doing before we actually did!!

That decision changed the trajectory of my career, and my life.

I don’t even still fully work there, but I still believe that to be true. I ended up working full time at that startup for a year, before transitioning to an advisory role equity-only.

That year of working there taught me more than I would’ve learned in 10 years at a corporation, and it also propelled me into full-self employment after the year was over.

my “purpose” phase (26+)

I’d be lying if I said I fully have an answer for what my “purpose” is. But I can honestly say that I feel so fulfilled and purposeful each and every day as an entrepreneur. The experiences that I had in my earlier phases helped me get closer to that answer. When I was picking up a ton of freelance roles, I wasn’t doing it because I LOVED the jobs or the companies I was working for, I did it because that was the phase I was in. the “make as much money as possible and gain as much experience in the process” phase.

reminder: these ages are MY story, they don’t have to correlate with yours! this pyramid is a reminder that life goes in stages, and to trust the process of building a life you love 🫶

It’s the ivy league-to-high paying tech job pipeline that I see so much of online, that reminds me of the limiting belief I always faced around my own career in my 20s:

I went to an average school, so therefore I just always envisioned my career as being average.

I saw a creator’s video the other day where she said “the real benefit to going to a school like Stanford is that you grow up believing you deserve to be in the room”.

& I think that sums it up perfectly.

We all have a ceiling for success, and it’s not actually determined at all by where you went to college, but it is in fact determined by what you believe your ceiling is..

When you go to a school like Stanford, you’re immediately surrounded by successful people that make you think “if they can do it, why couldn’t I?”

I don’t know what prompted me to just take that attitude when I entered my early 20s, but I can tell you it’s one of the biggest reasons why I’ve accomplished as much as I have ($1M+ media brand, fully self employed, my dream career) so far.

So in this article I want to explore:

• how to believe you’re capable of more (like you would at Stanford)

• the curriculum that you can learn on your own to have the business school skills of an Ivy..

Ivy League schools don’t produce successful people because of the classes.

I think they produce successful people because they normalize success.

When everyone around you is building companies, getting VC funding, or landing jobs at Apple… that stops feeling extraordinary.

It starts feeling expected.

The exciting part is, the internet can actually give you that exact same feeling today.

In my early 20s, I decided that a much bigger life was possible for me. I was super interested in personal finance, and I spent a lot of my free time listening to PF podcasts.

I started hearing so many examples of people who started from exactly where I was (or much worse off), and were able to accomplish insane things with their money, think: early retirement, a huge rental portfolio, the ability to take a year off and travel mid career.

I didn’t realize that what I was doing at the time was the very first step to believing I was capable of more:

Build an ambitious environment.

You need to be in close proximity to people doing cool sh*t. First that might look like listening to podcasts hearing them speak. Then it might look like attending in person conferences to say hi and have a convo. Then it might look like a warm intro. Then it might look like being their friend.

Over the last 7 years I went from listening to podcasts for proof, to putting myself out there (social media + in person experiences), to being friends with people that are doing insane things that make me believe I could too.

The internet can teach you everything an Ivy can these days..

It’s one of my absolute favorite things about the internet. Success is completely democratized & now it’s completely free to learn the skills you need to be wildly successful.

So I want to give you my modern ambition curriculum for getting everything you want out of life. Let’s call this semester 1 - I’m trying to consume better lately, so I’m doing this curriculum right with you.

1. Learn how to build things people actually want.

Why it matters:
Ideas are cheap. The ability to identify a real problem and create something people will pay for is one of the highest-leverage skills you can have.

Read:
📖 The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

Watch:
Y Combinator’s startup lectures (especially “How to Start a Startup” or Michael Seibel’s talks)

2. Learn how to communicate on the internet.

It’s not just “personal branding” for the sake of getting brand deals. It’s distribution.

If you can communicate well…

• you get jobs

• raise money

• attract opportunities

• sell products

• build communities

Everything compounds from there.

Watch:

• Justin Welsh’s long-form YouTube videos

• Jay Clouse’s Creator Science content

3. Learn how money actually works.

Not budgeting.

Ownership.

Investing.

Taxes.

Cash flow.

Assets.

Read:
📖 The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel)

OR

📖 The Simple Path to Wealth (JL Collins)

You don’t need permission from an Ivy League school to think bigger about your life. You just need to start building an education that reflects the future you’re trying to create. Welcome to semester 1.0 of The Modern Ambition Core Curriculum—class is officially in session.

In this diary entry I’m telling you why that’s actually been one of my biggest superpowers, and tactically how you can apply it to your modern ambition too.

We’re told impulsivity is a bad thing, but I challenge you to reframe it:

Impulsivity = acting on something when you’re excited about it.

I got the idea for this Substack channel (channel? is that what its called?) on Thursday night. It kept me up super late just lying in bed thinking about it.

So Friday morning I got up earlier than usual, and spent an hour starting my Substack before my 9AM pilates class.

I’ve literally never even read a Substack before. I just got the idea in my head and got so excited about it that I wanted to act on it asap.

I have so many other examples that I can give you:

• posting on social media was something I acted on super quickly (no 1+ month of content ideas before posting the first video)

• moving to Nashville was an idea that came into my head (I signed a lease 1 week later)

Impulsivity is actually a superpower for modernly ambitious women, because your best work comes from that initial excitement about an idea.

My first Substack article (which you should go read if you haven’t already!) was objectively better because I wrote it when I was excited about the concept.

If your thought process is:

• have an idea < feel like you need to fully flesh it out before you spend time working on it < live your life < let the idea fade

You’re never going to get where you want to go..

If I would’ve had the idea to start posting on TikTok, but waited until I 1) thought about it more to make SURE it was something I wanted to do & 2) waited until I had 30 days of content fleshed out to post the first video -

I promise I’d be here, 5 years later, still without starting..

But what if it ends up being a waste of time?

This is one of the biggest roadblocks that we need to let go of.

I find myself thinking this way here and there, afraid to get started on something because if it doesn’t work out, all of the time you spent working on it is “wasted”.

What we’re forgetting is that even if you don’t get to the end result that you were thinking initially, just working on something IS progress, and will absolutely get you closer to what you DO want to do, than doing nothing at all.

Let me give you an example:

6 months before I started posting on TikTok, I thought I wanted to start a personal finance blog. For 6 months I spent so much time getting a domain, designing a website, learning about SEO, writing blog articles. If you’ve ever tried blogging, you know these things take a LOT of time.

& within 6 months, I learned it wasn’t for me. However, 1 month after I stopped trying to blog, I had the idea to start posting personal finance content on TikTok instead. Which TikTok was the thing that ended up catapulting my career to where I am today.

If I never would’ve tried to be a personal finance blogger, I might not have ever had the idea to start posting on TikTok. Once I started posting, I also realized how many blogging skills I actually took with me to social media as well (SEO, hooks, affiliates, etc).

All of that is to say, working on anything is never a waste of time. It will always get you closer to where you’re actually supposed to be.

P.S. if you like this conversation, you’ll love our most recent podcast ep! Listen here.

I don’t think the biggest risk in your 20s is starting something that fails. I think it’s becoming someone who stops acting on ideas. Because the people who build interesting lives aren’t the ones who always have the best ideas. They’re the ones who trusted themselves enough to start before they had certainty.

I painted my office pink,

and now I want to do something cool as f*ck in it.

My friend Tessa inspired me to start this Substack. Not because she really wanted me to have a Substack, she probably doesn’t even know what Substack is.

Her story inspired me to write this today, and opened my eyes to what being ambitious in 2026 is really all about.

I’m getting married in a few weeks, and if you’ve ever been to a Pittsburgh wedding you might know we do a thing called the “Pittsburgh cookie table”. Essentially homemade cookies become an entire dessert table at a wedding. You ask your friends and family to bake and all of a sudden you have a table of 30+ different cookies for your guests.

I asked my friends if they wanted to help me bake, and Tessa offered her place to do it at, saying she has a Kitchenaid and all the baking things.

When we got there, she tells me she actually LOVES baking and actually did the entire cookie table for her friend’s wedding in the spring. 30+ types of cookies including seemingly some of the hardest to make. She baked all of them, brought them all to the wedding, and set up/decorated the entire table.

Now if you know anything about the wedding industry, you also know that a service like that can cost brides literally thousands of dollars. I once heard of a venue that was charging the bride $2000 just to SET UP the cookie table… let alone bake them..

Tessa’s actually in between jobs right now and as she’s telling us about her love for baking and wedding planning in general, my friend and I were like..

you do realize this is the perfect time to go after what you love, right?

By the end of the night, we hyped her up to see how her love is a skill, and a skill people would happily pay for.

That brings me to my initial question, what is Modern Ambition?

women have been told ambition looks like one of two things:

1. 💼 corporate. CEO. bossbabe. hustle.

2. ✨ soft life. romanticize everything. quit your job.

modern ambition isn’t about becoming someone else, it’s about building a life you own.

1. Modern Ambition is about building a life you own

You might be looking at Tessa’s example saying “not everything has to be monetized”, and sure, that’s one way to look at it.

But I actually think that in 2026, women want more control over their life, and they want more freedom to do more of what they love.

Life costs money, and would you rather pursue money on your terms, or terms decided for you?

You don’t have to love ambition for ambition’s sake, you can be in pursuit of a life where you’re ambitious when it feels fun.

2. Modern Ambition is about climbing your own ladder

Ambition used to mean the desire to climb the corporate ladder.

We don’t want that anymore, and frankly, it’s not even financially advantageous to do so anymore.

Modern ambition is about going after the thing that you can’t get out of the back of your mind. I think we all have one of those, whether it’s:

• becoming a pilates instructor

• writing a book

• starting the side business

• posting content

• taking a freelance gig

It’s about chasing those inklings of passion, and seeing where it takes you. Not the corporate ladder, YOUR ladder.

Maybe it’s the growth itself that’s fulfilling, not even the destination 🫢

3. Modern Ambition is recognizing you don’t have one true passion

That inkling you’re chasing, who knew it doesn’t have to be your forever thing?

The modernly ambitious women know that what they’re doing today is not what they have to do for the rest of their life, and that frees them to pursue things they’re even moderately curious about.

It’s not the destination they’re chasing, it’s the skills they learn along the way.

I started Modern Ambition because I knew what it felt like to have something in the back of my mind that I wanted to go after, but not have the confidence or permission to go after it. My goal here is to share stories, tips, systems and permission slips that empower you to go after your own modern ambition. Because the world doesn’t need another productivity app, it needs more women bravely enough to build a life they love.