The (next) shiny thing you hate...

Why chasing every opportunity will ruin your life (and business)

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This essay is part of a series I’m writing in conjunction with January Joy, a free slate of events I’m co-hosting with Claire Venus ✨ this month, including live conversations with experts about how they grow with joy, challenges to help you plan your own joyous growth, and a masterclass at the end to wrap it all up. You can sign up for free to get access to all most of the events.

All you have to do is subscribe to the January Joy publication, and you’ll be registered for everything but the masterclass, which is $100. However, Hapitalist members get a free ticket. If you’ve been thinking about joining, this is a great time to consider an upgrade.

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Hi,

I know you want to chase that shiny new thing. You think it’s going to save you, and that if you could just catch it then all your problems will be solved, but let me ask you this:

How do you really think your life will feel once you finally nab that new shiny and it becomes your new normal?

I have been there a few dozen times in my life, and I’ve caught that new shiny more times than I can count. Let me tell you that more often than not my life did not change at all.

In fact, it almost always got worse until I figured out how to jettison it again. Yes, I was able to suck out some experience from it, and often level up in my business knowledge, but day-to-day it was usually insufferable.

We’re obsessed with what we’re missing. The skills we haven’t mastered, the income streams we haven’t built, and the transformations we haven’t achieved, but do you actually want what your life becomes if you pursue that thing?

Do you want to become an SEO expert? Do you want to master Facebook Ads? Do you want to be a non-fiction speaker or high-ticket coach?

Sure, it all sounds glorious from the outside, but do you want that life when it stops being exciting and simply becomes...Tuesday?

I thought I did every time I caught that pretty bauble. Take coaching, for example. I’m good at it, like really good, and I could make a fortune doing nothing but coaching calls all day…

…but I would genuinely rather have a job because that sounds like my nightmare.

A few coaching calls a month? That’s fine. It’s energizing even, but more than 2-3 a week makes me feel claustrophobic. The money is excellent, but how much money do I need, really?

It’s not the clients, either. It’s because every time I accept a coaching call, I am agreeing to show up at a specific time, which takes away from my time freedom. If I start committing to more than one thing a day, I get jittery.

I much prefer asynchronous communication, like a podcast or blog, where I can create at my timeline, instead of working on somebody else’s. It’s the same amount of effort, often for even less money, but it allows me to keep my schedule flexible.

Because I know that truth about myself, I generally only take meetings between 9:30am-3pm PT on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. On top of that, I book at most two calls a day.

If I was just motivated by money, I would probably get a high-paying sales job in tech with benefits and stock options. I choose this life because it gives me time wealth, and that means not being shackled to things.

Yes, it probably means I’ll never make more than $200k a year before expenses, but I get to go to the movies every day if I want and make a few cool projects with people every year. That’s what I would be working for anyway.

Other people do coaching and love it. It fills them up. They finish a day of back-to-back calls feeling alive and purposeful.

That’s not me, though. For me, it’s exhausting work that requires too much effort, regardless of the financial reward.

I’m a very good coach, but I don’t want a life that centers around coaching…

…and that’s exactly what would happen, too. Your life warps around the things you do, for the better and for the worse. I’m as often turned off by what having success doing something looks like as I am by wasting time trying it.

I know I can have success doing a lot of things, but I don’t want what my life becomes when that inevitable success happens.

The things that grow are the things you water.

For anything to work long term, it requires consistent care and attention. It doesn’t just sit politely in the background. It expands to fill the space you give it.

That’s what happened when I used to run Facebook Ads to help people grow their mailing list.

I hate running ads. Despise it, really, even though I’m legitimately good at them and they pay well. Some months, I would make $1,000 per hour doing that work.

It paid my bills and let me funnel money into book production for years, but I loathed every single minute of it. The money was so good that I felt obligated to keep doing it, but the work made me miserable.

That’s another thing they don’t tell you. If you hate something, but it pays well, it’s really really hard to stop doing it, especially when people start coming out of the woodwork to pay you to do it for them.

It’s the most expensive free money you’ll ever make.

You want to know what’s stopping me from running ads for my own books right now? It’s not lack of knowledge or skill. It’s that I literally cannot bring myself to open the ads dashboard.

Because I know what happens when I do. It becomes my life, and I don’t want Facebook ads to be part of my life.

The checking. The tweaking. The optimizing. The dashboard becomes the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I check at night. The metrics worm their way into my consciousness and set up permanent residence.

I refuse to let that happen again…and it will happen again.

You literally cannot do all the things, because you exist in linear time like the rest of us mortals…

…but more importantly, you shouldn’t do most things because most things will suck once they become normal.

The majority of business opportunities, no matter how lucrative or impressive they sound, will drain you once the novelty wears off and they become the thing you do every single day.

If pursuing something will make your life suck, you shouldn’t do it. Full stop.

You shouldn’t do things that will make you unhappy, especially because even doing things you want to do will often make you unhappy.

This is especially true if you’re running your own business. The entire point of entrepreneurship is to build a life that doesn’t suck.

So why would you construct a business around activities that make you miserable?

• The money doesn’t matter if you hate your days.

• The status doesn’t matter if you dread your work.

• The expertise doesn’t matter if applying it makes you want to crawl back into bed.

Before you chase the next opportunity, ask yourself the question again:

Do I want this to be my normal?

Not “Would this look good?” or “Would this be impressive?” or even “Would this be profitable?” The question is:

“Do I want to do this thing so often that it becomes mundane? Do I want my life to warp around this activity?”

If the answer is no, you have my permission to walk away. You have my permission to be good at something and still choose not to do it. You have my permission to turn down money in favor of a life you actually enjoy living.

Because at the end of the day, what matters is not what you’re missing, but whether what you’re building is actually worth inhabiting once the shine wears off and it simply becomes your life.

What do you think? If you want to start living this way in 2026, I’m co-hosting a free program this month with Claire Venus ✨ called January Joy.

It’s all about how to grow joyously in 2026, and also make the money you want to make. It’s filled with live conversations, challenges, and even a masterclass at the end of it.

The masterclass is $100, but the rest of it is completely free. Plus, it will be free for all Hapitalist members, and be available for watching afterward inside my archives.