You Need Audacity.
How to start building something of your own without blowing up the stability you've worked for
If you’re going to build a life you actually want - the kind you think about at night and daydream about between meetings - you need audacity.
We don’t talk about this enough, especially as women in corporate.
Corporate is a system. A very well-oiled, very comfortable system. It pays you. It validates you. It applauds you. And if you’re highly paid, the applause is louder. Before you know it, the polish, praise, and pay become handcuffs. Your identity becomes intertwined with them. Your security depends on them.
I’ve spoken with so many women who feel this deep, almost painful desire to build something of their own.
But right after that desire surfaces, something else rises too. Not fear of judgment, or disruption, but fear of the unknown.
“What does this even look like?”
“Where do I start?”
“What if I get into this and realize I have no idea what I’m doing?”
“What happens when I step into a world without clear rules, clear feedback, clear promotions, clear paths?”
If you’re like these women, you are exceptional at operating inside a system you understand. What you fear isn’t failure; it’s uncertainty. It’s the discomfort of stepping into a new territory with no roadmap, manager, quarterly review, or clean checklist that tells you you’re on track.
But here’s the truth: the version of your life that exists inside this system is only one of many possible. And it was designed by someone else.
To do the thing you actually want to do with your life, to create the version of you that’s in your mind’s eye, you need audacity. Not recklessness - audacity. The kind of boldness that sees risk clearly and chooses to move with intention.
It’s the courage to expand your life, even when the system you’re in feels comfortable.
And if you want to build that kind of audacity - the strategic, grounded, safe version - here are three ways to start:
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1. Stop waiting for the desire to feel "logical" before you honor it
Corporate trains us to build a business case for everything, including our own dreams. We wait until we can justify the want with a spreadsheet, market analysis, and a five-year plan. But the desire to build something of your own doesn’t arrive with a pitch deck. It arrives as a quiet restlessness that won’t go away.
I know because I felt it for years before I acted on it. It showed up in the gap between what I was doing and what I knew I was capable of. I kept waiting for the “right time” and then I was laid off during maternity leave; the system I’d trusted made the decision for me. I had tested waters before but now I’m all in.
You don’t need to justify wanting something different. You just need to stop arguing yourself out of it long enough to take the first step.
2. Run a real experiment, not a thought experiment
The women I talk to have thought about this endlessly. They’ve mapped the risks, imagined the scenarios, stress-tested every possible failure in their heads. But thinking about building something and actually building it are fundamentally different activities.
Pick one idea. Give it 30 days. Not 30 days of planning; 30 days of doing. Talk to five potential customers. Build a rough version of the thing. Post about it publicly. The point isn’t to succeed in 30 days, but to learn what you can’t learn from inside your own head: what the market actually wants, what you actually enjoy doing, and what “hard” actually feels like versus what you imagined it would.
Audacity isn’t in getting it right immediately. It’s in being willing to be a beginner again, in public, with evidence instead of assumptions.
3. Get close to women who've already made the leap
You cannot become what you cannot see. If everyone around you is optimizing for the same corporate ladder, the same retirement plan, the same risk-averse life, you will unconsciously adopt those same boundaries.
But this isn’t just about inspiration, it’s about recalibration. When you spend time around women who’ve built businesses while raising kids, or left senior roles to start from scratch, or figured out how to stay employed while building empires on the side, something shifts. The thing that felt impossible starts to feel like a logistics problem. And logistics problems are something you already know how to solve.
Seek them out intentionally. Not just their content, but their communities, their events, their DMs.
Let their audacity become contagious.
The security of a corporate job will always call to you. But the window to build something that’s truly yours, to take up space in your own life, that window doesn’t stay open forever.
Instead of asking “What if I get it wrong?” What if you started asking “What will I regret not trying?”
That’s where audacity begins.
💬 Your Turn
What's the thing you've been wanting to build, but haven't started yet? What's the unknown that's been holding you back?
See you next time,
Tomide
Considering what I'm being called to build, this hit at the perfect time.
Especially this, "Audacity isn’t in getting it right immediately. It’s in being willing to be a beginner again, in public, with evidence instead of assumptions."
Building publicly is equal parts thrilling and terrifying.