Design work around what fits you most, not what other people are saying you should do. Almost one year ago, I left my scientist full-time job to work in the online content space. Could I have started on the side? Absolutely. But according to my energy levels after a full day at work, traveling around Europe? No way. When I tried that, all it left me feeling was lazy, failure, and a lack in my own confidence. A year later, I can see that going all in was the best decision I could have made for me to give my dream job a real chance.
When you can’t start on the side, save for 6 months of expenses and give your dream a chance to go all in. This requires two things in advance: a basic knowledge on financial education to know what kind of saving accounts you need to set up for yourself (I learned from books) and the confidence that if it doesn’t work out, you have the skills and confidence to figure out your next move.
You’re going to have to overcome the cringe. Don’t make building a website your first priority. Instead start building a personal brand on social media. Overcoming the posting anxiety is no small feat but a necessary one. Some people even told me they could never post like I do. Others told me they're too scared to leave something so permanent on the internet. Stop waiting for the right moment. I still have posting anxiety because being visible is vulnerable. Just as stage fright, it never truly goes away but you just manage to deal with it better.
Focus on the right audience. Your friends, ex-colleagues and former manager are not your target audience. They are not going to buy your service or bring in money for you. So stop asking for their opinion and start doing the things a potential client would value.
Another important thing: stop trying to impress people you don’t want to work with anyway. You can’t go all corporate language when what you really want is to work with creatives (and the other way around).
Write even though you are not ‘the’ expert. Want to be a science communicator? Start your own blog. Looking for work as a social media manager? Become a media expert by curating other people’s insights. Post before you are ready. How would you even know you like it if you haven’t tried?
As a PhD, I thought putting yourself in the spotlight was arrogant. Surely, if you’re good at what you do, people will notice… right? But that’s not what happened. It wasn’t the work. It was the visibility. Show up. Build in public. And connect with people who need what you know.
Niching down, down, down. When you start creating content everybody will shout at you to niche down. They're not wrong. Becoming known for one specific topic fast tracks your way to a well positioned expert on social media. My problem has always been this: I don’t want to be the expert. I want to be the forever learner, know many things about a lot, connect the dots, dive deeper into where curiosity leads me. Still trying to figure that part out but be warned: if you are looking for monetary success as fast as possible, you will have to specialize.
Content comes in seasons. In the beginning of the year I posted almost every day on LinkedIn, following the Ship30for30 challenge. I ran many 30-day sprints throughout the year. Some were necessary to get clarity on my ideas and directions. Some sprints were necessary to get me going, especially after the summer break. Some I needed when I was beginning to hate my content. There are moments on LinkedIn where I felt I don’t want to be another guru. I desperately was trying to find how I can do things differently because all the content I was consuming on that platform seemed, felt, and were saying the same. Whereas in the beginning of the year I was excited and enjoying the platform, towards the middle of the year I was resenting it. In part it’s my own fault. When in doubt, seek a fresh perspective.
Having a north Star is as important as working on your visibility because one cannot feed without the other. What am I trying to achieve? It takes some orientation and reorientation throughout the year but having a clear vision helped me run towards the things I really wanted. To do this exercise I constantly had to ask myself, "How does one live the good life?" The exciting thing is that for everyone this looks different. The downside is you need to be honest with yourself without external influences of other people’s achievement.
The struggle between quality vs quantity is real. In July I applied as a writer for a LinkedIn ghost writing agency. I got good feedback. The founder liked my visual design. Throughout the conversation I realized that I was not going to be the fastest writer. I put a lot of energy into crafting posts and I cannot imagine doing this at the high quantity that is required. For this job I was honest about the quantity I could deliver and obviously didn't hear back. I think quantity versus quality is a more recurring struggle. I see it in my own content, in potential freelance jobs. I see it in online discussions: some people strive for quality, don't want to compromise, while others preach that quantity is the way. I had the same struggle during my PhD research. You can do a lot of experiments fast or you can spend a little bit more time designing them properly and execute the ones that you think are the most promising. I now believe that it's not so black and white. As a creator you can have seasons, seasons of quality and seasons of quantity. As a scientist, you can find a balance between doing things right while still having a higher output. The way I applied that to my own content is I committed to posting challenges and sprints during one part of the year and I slowed down, consumed more on others. Hack: If you can’t deliver quantity, find the people that value quality.
Try many things until you find what you love. This is not common advice on socials so I find it worth mentioning. In your content, you are supposed to be the expert to get paid, but with no experience and no previous clients, it is nearly impossible to establish yourself as the expert in a specific service. Be the expert! Be different! Have a unique selling point! As a beginner, this constant input is confusing and demotivating if you don’t have clarity yet. It was not until I started talking to people in private messages that I realized one universal truth: nobody has it really figured it out.
You are allowed to pivot, adjust your offer, refine, change your mind, burn it down and build it back up at all times. It’s different than just winging it. It’s having peace of mind knowing that your freelance work in the beginning might look very different from the work you do in the end. It could take as long as 10 to 12 months into your journey. Sometimes longer. You are not a failure if you are still lost. In 2025 I found myself: interviewing scientists and writing feature articles, doing LinkedIn consulting and management for individuals and companies, transforming long-form content into short-form content, booked for my first speaking seminar on career orientation for scientists and got my first ad money from my newsletter, a whooping 20$ that will feed right into my coffee addiction.
On working for free. I have a complicated relationship between knowing my worth and wanting to show what I can do. In the middle of the year I started this experiment, creating digital assets mainly for social media for some creators I admired. This approach is not scalable if you want to do it right but it was creative enough that it kept me interested. I also ended up pitching some copywriting improvements to creators who I thought I could contribute to. Creators who are hesitant to sell themselves forget for a minute that their social email can transpire the same storytelling as their normal content. Creators whose energy on video versus their newsletter was completely off. I asked many people if creating for free is a wise strategy and they all came back with the same answer: yes. Nowadays when competition is fierce and AI is threatening everyone's lives and jobs, it's more important than ever to show and not tell. If you ask me for my advice I would gladly forward the advice given to me at the time. Pretend you are already working for the people/company you want to work with. Make a post for them, an article, a design, a concept. You cannot do this for everybody of course but focus on the people that you really want to work with. It goes a long way.
When you’re lost, look for role models. I am naturally drawn to successful introverted creators and I am happy that I came across Jo Bird. As an introverted creative, she reinvented herself several times throughout her career before working for her own more than a year ago now. The moment I joined Jo’s Personal Brand accelerator course I stopped seeing personal branding as a hype and started to look deeper at the energy I wanted to bring to social media. This course was a real confrontation with my values and the big picture behind what I want to build. What I realized is that people don’t connect with what you do, but rather why you do it. It was also the first time that someone didn't give me the advice to change my headline to the infamous formula: I help X do Y , where X equals target audience and Y equals outcome. It was an aha moment, and evidence that the point of personal branding is to be weirdly you, not a copy-paste formula. As Jo says, creativity always wins. Do your thing, but with conviction.
Design your own morning routine. It never worked for me when I copied someone else’s. I tried and failed many many times to have a productive and satisfying morning routine. It is so frustrating to disappoint yourself! One of my failed attempts was the 22nd of April, where I first wrote about the goal to invest the first hours of the day in myself. But it got me into a crazy spiraling loop. Instead of doing something productive for myself, like working on content creation, planning out ideas, getting my online visibility on track, I procrastinated. I didn’t have an exact plan of how working on myself would look like and it was an absolute recipe for failure. I struggled a lot to find the right motivation and purpose to wake up at my regular 7:30 in the morning time. I had no pressure. I had no deadlines. I had no big motivation to jump out of bed. So for a big part of the year my mornings consisted of snoozing. I hated it. I hated myself for doing this. But I couldn’t get past it. What was wrong with me? I had read more productivity and self-help books than I admit and yet I couldn't manage a simple morning routine. But then something changed when I joined a community of creatives in September. I started to take my own goals more seriously. Got fitter because I prioritized fitness again. I spend my morning with powerwriting or ‘morning pages’ as some people know it for. I don’t have a word count goal, I just write. And when I have a thought, I let it guide me and distract me. There are no rules.
Another hack I used to get over my procrastination paralysis: the answer is often community. In my case, I really enjoy online communities. I can recommend a few if you’d like!
Procrastination is what you do when you feel lost. If I were to do a word count, my most journaled thoughts would probably be around procrastination. In May I came across this point of view on Mark Manson's YouTube channel and the concept that laziness is the misalignment between ambition and desire. I knew at that moment that what I was doing and taking action on did not align with what I want my future to look like.
You will have the most irrational fears. The first weeks of my solo business I had the most irrational fear that I would not be able to pay my pension and thus live in poverty at an old age. This is a fear that keeps coming back to me, which at the moment is irrational because it's a long-term fear. A lot of things can still happen until I retire. But knowing that I can save a small amount of my income every month gives me inner peace to continue this journey. 2026 will be focused on that either by opening a Dutch pension account that comes with tax benefits or by investing in ETF stocks. Ideally both. Shut up those fears with action.
Your intuition will be loud. Listen to it. Somewhere in the middle of last year I was pitched an interesting business idea. The concept was to develop a good program for scientists to become better and improve their social media presence. Great. I thought exactly in my alley, people I enjoy working with, scientists, and teaching the very things that I wish scientists would know more of and do better: online communication. But as I got deeper into the nitty-gritty of the program details, one moment struck with me. All I would have to do is create the workshop and guide these people one-to-one, giving them feedback and jumping on calls with them in a narrow time frame for 10+ participants. This scenario made me pause. For me this sounded like my biggest nightmare. I thought I wanted to do more one-to-one guidance, mentorship, or even teachings but the reality of what it takes to build a business on one-to-one interaction I had never felt so vividly as in that moment. I do not want to have my calendar full of meetings. I cannot handle having more than five, yet alone ten meetings per week. I was in a deep panic and I knew deep in my body that this was not the path that I wanted to go. Sometimes clarity comes from a body reaction. Sometimes it comes from outer feedback. Sometimes it comes from paying attention to how excited you are about ideas, about imagining how to execute a new business plan. The answer is not all in the numbers or what the internet is telling you to do to run a successful business. It's a lot in what feels right for you to do and in realizing in time what feels completely wrong.
Being honest with yourself is tough. I found this journaling prompt useful, that I first heard of from Chase Jarvis. Ask yourself repeatedly: What do I really want? The more I do this, the more patterns emerge. It’s a radical practice of being honest with yourself. Sometimes you will not be, because you can’t even see how to make money out of that vision. But it helps to get more clarity. More clarity, more action you can take.
The internal fight between generating income and creating for yourself. I can finally admit to you and myself that my passion is to create my own content ecosystem. Not to be the best freelancer out there. Not to become a social media expert. I want to seed my own ideas, grow my newsletter, write a book. Not because I necessarily have a lot to say, but because it allows me to follow my curiosity. My ultimate goal is to get paid to learn. This sounds weird and might not resonate with everybody but if I could spend my time watching educational videos on YouTube and reading self-improvement books and telling an audience about it while getting paid, that would be my dream day. I do not have a big enough audience or strategy to pay the bills for my own content yet. So while I am learning everything I need, building up self-confidence and making creator friends I focus on getting jobs doing the next best thing: highlight people and displaying their work in the best possible way. My goal is not to choose my offer, but first choose the people I want to work with. I noticed that is what energizes me the most.
You don’t need to stay in your lane (if you don’t want to). As an ex-research scientist the attachment to that identity was strong. After all, I spent 10+ years at university, first as a student but then in a paid PhD position investigating how to make cancer therapeutics more efficient. Was I throwing all that away in a blink of a cursor? In the beginning of this solopreneurship journey I thought I wanted to work with tech founders, life science companies, and be an established person in life science marketing. But I realized rather quickly that this life science was not my passion anymore. Here is a question to identify that in less than a minute: would you start a newsletter/podcast/book on this topic and talk about this in your public profile? If the answer is no, dig deeper.
When you set limitations for yourself because of an outdated identity, you are missing out. With time, self-doubt and impostor syndrome, I found that I wanted to belong to the world of online creators: people who make money with their own newsletter, on YouTube, or by creating digital products or books and work 100% for themselves without taking on external projects. Do I have the necessary receipts to belong to this category? Absolutely not. But if you know where you are going, this journey is easier mentally, more fun, less lonely.
Leverage your background. I now appreciate the foundation that I laid in my previous career that benefits solopreneurship life. What I saw as a weakness (no experience in the online world), I started seeing as strength. I’m good at research, especially at finding sources, simplifying concepts, and linking ideas together. A lot of important facets that one needs as an online creator. I am also not afraid of content flopping, but rather an experiment to observe. If you don’t stop trying you cannot fail. I didn’t get my results together until the third year of my PhD. The third year!! Imagine quitting in year one, that has just crossed my mind so far because of my previous conditioning.
The same perseverance that you brought in your previous job, the same curiosity, drive, mindset… are all assets that cannot be quantified on your CV, but matter the most if you are going through the journey of being a starter again.
Start a newsletter. The old me would have thought: do you think you are that important that people will read what you write? You need to let go of that mentality. Write about literally anything you are passionate about. Start writing for you, before you discover what is interesting for others. My first newsletter was on self-development. I eventually abandoned it and started Audacious Introverts with all the accumulated 1) technical knowledge on how to set it up 2) more clarity on the people I am writing for (explicitly in the name) 3) more excitement about the topics (= things I am learning about creating content). My master plan is to combine both worlds: mindset + content. My idea was to publish one edition per week. I only managed 32 editions in 2025. That is 32 editions more than not starting at all.
Everything will be slower than you think. If you look out for the right people you will see normal people like you and me having a full-time income as a content creator. These people are not overnight successes as many loud voices want you to believe. This kind of people I am admiring have been a long time in this game and that is the first rule of expectation: it will take years to establish yourself, to find out what your business is going to be about, to be an authority in the online world in your fields, and to maybe start monetizing your own creator brand. So don’t beat yourself up too early.
Celebrate the little wins and note them down before you forget. Don’t sleep on this one. I personally use the Day One app to record feedback I got, people I met and surprising work-life moments. You also use any notes app.
The perfect idea never comes. As a scientist, I always wanted to run my own startup one day. I was just waiting for the perfect idea! But guess what? The perfect idea never came. None of them felt big enough, urgent enough to jump. There comes a moment when you have to decide if you are more in love with the journey or the outcome. I loved the journey of entrepreneurship! So I started to look for other ways I could come about having a similar steep learning curve (= freelancing).
Lack of motivation is the number one excuse to get out of something we don’t want to deal with. Tomorrow I may be more motivated, next week I will have more time, and next year sounds like a perfect start for this new hobby I’ve been wanting to try. Meanwhile, as time passes, our motivation doesn’t get higher though, does it? It’s time to turn the tables and start seeing motivation as what it really is: a cocktail of discipline, resilience, introspection, perseverance, and boldness. And above all, motivation is action.
Being a beginner is the hardest thing you will do. Being a beginner means showing up even if you know you are not perfect. Imagine a successful writer that has published numerous newsletters, books and is currently writing for one of your favourite magazines. What if she never started writing at all because she thought she was no good at it? Imagine Sarah J. Maas never had the audacity to keep going! Beginnings are so scary because we can’t see the ending. We can’t see if we will be successful in the near future or if we discover that it’s really not working out for us. What a waste of time investment you think? Not at all! Because every time you discover something that is not for you, you come closer to the thing that is.
The best self-awareness hack is knowing what kind of accountability you need to perform your best work. Are you self-motivated or do you strive with deadlines? Needing outside accountability is not a flaw! Build the accountability systems you need around your most important goals. If you need to pay someone to get things done, do it. I literally just paid someone to mentor and hold me accountable on building on Instagram.
What resonated with you the most? Let me know!
Keep up the audacity,
Laura
