I Followed All the Right Advice. It Backfired
How good advice slowly pulled me away from the life I actually want
My coach recently gave me a piece of language that I haven’t been able to shake.
She called it self-authorship.
And the moment she said it, something clicked into place that I’ve been circling for a long time.
I’ve always talked about living life on my terms. My definition of freedom has always been clear: doing what I want to do, when I want to do it, and being able to afford it. Nicely. Not scraping by. Not struggling. Comfortably. That’s the life I’m building toward.
But self-authorship takes that further. Because freedom is the outcome. Self-authorship is the practice. Freedom is what you get when you stop letting other people hold the pen. And I think that’s the most honest description of what I’m actually after.
The Way You Earn Is The Way You Live
Here’s what I’ve come to understand, and I think a lot of us dance around this truth: the way you earn determines the way you live. Full stop.
We spend the majority of our waking hours working. And if you’re in a job or a situation that drains you, let’s not pretend that stays contained. It doesn’t. The anxiety follows you home. The resentment leaks into your evenings, your weekends, your relationships. The reverse is also true. When your work feels aligned, the rest of your life has room to breathe.
So when I talk about self-authorship, I’m starting with the income engine because it is foundational. And this platform, On Your Terms, is a piece of that - me building the infrastructure for a self-authored life.
The Audience That Almost Stayed Behind
When I paused my handbag brand Olori, I realized I was walking away from nearly 50,000 people. Years of audience building, gone, because that audience belonged to the brand, not to me.
That was the wake-up call, and I knew that I needed to build my own audience. One that could come with me no matter what the next chapter looked like. So I started writing and sharing this messy, honest journey of pausing a business, having a baby, getting laid off, and rebuilding from scratch.
And for a while, it flowed.
Then it stopped.
The Freeze
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ve probably noticed. The articles stopped coming on their usual days. The LinkedIn posts slowed down. And I couldn’t figure out why.
And then it hit me.
I had been consuming so much advice about how to do this. Substack experts say you need to publish at least once a week or your audience will forget you. Notes gurus say you need to post multiple times a day. LinkedIn coaches say you need value posts and client testimonials, with a minimum of three to five posts a week.
Everyone had a rule or a formula.
And the sad part is that I internalized all of it, and eventually froze.
Because the rules were in direct conflict with what I actually wanted to do. I don’t want to write ‘value’ posts right now. I don’t want to teach anyone anything at this moment in my life. I’m not in teaching mode. I’m in living it mode. I’m in figuring it out in real-time mode. What I want to do is share this journey, the real one, not the polished one, and write about what I’m genuinely passionate about: helping people wake up to a life they’re actually happy to live.
I can talk about entrepreneurship all day. But I want to talk about it through the lens of life, not business strategy.
So when all those rules piled up and none of them sounded like me, I just... stopped writing. Without even realizing it, I had handed the pen to everyone else.
Self-Authorship Goes All The Way Down
And that’s why the self-authorship thing hit me on a completely different level.
I realized I had been practicing it at the macro level. Exiting corporate, starting my own business, choosing entrepreneurship…. the big, visible decisions. But I hadn’t carried it down to the details. The how in how I build. The how in how I show up. The how in how I create.
Self-authorship isn’t just choosing to write; it’s choosing how I write. It’s not just choosing to build a platform, it’s choosing to build it in a way that actually feels like mine, even if that breaks every rule in someone else’s playbook.
I am one of one. And the life I’m building will be one of one, too. It won’t look like anyone else’s, because it’s not supposed to.
So Here’s Where I’ve Landed
Yes, I’ll listen to the advice. I’ll take what resonates and leave the rest. But I’m done following other people’s rules for how to do something that is supposed to be mine.
The harder part, the part I’m still working on, is trust. Trusting that what works for me will find its people. Trusting that I don’t have to perform consistency the way someone else defined it to build something real. Trusting that doing this my way is not just okay. It’s the whole point.
Because what is self-authorship if you’re writing someone else’s story?
I’m writing mine. On my terms. Even the way I write it is on my terms. And the first step was noticing where I’d handed over the pen, and taking it back.
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💠YOUR TURN
Where in your life have you handed the pen to someone else? Where are you following rules that made sense for someone else’s story but don’t fit yours? And what would shift if you trusted yourself enough to write a different script?
I’d love to hear. Reply, comment, or just sit with the question. That’s self-authorship too, deciding how you want to engage.
The self trust element really does make a difference. It feels hard because we don’t want to make the wrong choice. We want certainty, but that could lead to constantly chasing the end, instead of living in the experience of what we are creating.
The way a draining job leaks into everything — evenings, weekends, relationships — and you spend years thinking it’s a you problem. It’s not. This is the reminder.