Be Weird About It
Stop Micromanaging the Muse
If you’d like to listen to this essay
There comes a moment—quiet at first, then impossible to ignore—when the thing you’re building starts to feel like a costume you can’t take off. The language, the metrics, all of it. Even the mission starts to sound suspiciously like something you wrote while trying to sound important enough to be taken seriously.
It’s not burnout. It’s not boredom. It’s the ache of misalignment. The sense that you’ve outgrown your own creation, or maybe never actually grew into it. What once felt like magic now feels like management—like another thing you need to maintain, optimize, schedule, control.
But what if the problem isn’t you?
What if the issue isn’t your messaging, your mindset, or even your morning routine—but the premise itself: that you’re supposed to build this thing from scratch, from ego, from your own inherently small vision of what’s possible?
In my world, business isn’t just a brand—and certainly not a burden. It’s a being. A spirit. A collaborator. I don’t run it. I don’t identify with it. I work with it—like a priestess with a temple, or a sculptor with a block of marble that’s already whispering what it wants to become.
There’s a trust between us. A mutual respect. We’re in a real relationship. One that allows me to set it down without guilt. I’m not gripping, hovering, endlessly checking its pulse. I’m not in anxious attachment, obsessing over every fluctuation in mood or metrics, assuming its mad at me on a slow day. I don’t need to be constantly productive to prove I care.
I know it will still be there when I come back. And it knows I will too.
I’m in devotion to it.
Devotion, not discipline.
(That’s what spaciousness really means.)
Devotion gets thrown around a lot, but most people don’t really know what it means. It isn’t romantic or soft. It’s not even mood-based. It’s not about being consistent for the sake of being impressive. Devotion is consistent because it’s relational. You keep showing up because you’re in conversation with something real—something that’s alive, evolving, responsive. Something that wants to meet you exactly where you are, if you’re still enough to hear it.
The discipline model says: push through. Stay on track. Go.
The devotion model says: be here now. Connect. Listen.
Most of what people call discipline is just self-abandonment in a prettier outfit. It’s hyper-vigilance dressed as mastery. It’s an addiction to control dressed up as strategy, built on a lack of trust. It’s checking every box and still feeling empty—and then blaming yourself for not wanting it more.
That’s why I don’t have to force myself to “create content” or “stay on brand.” The spirit of my business is already speaking. I just have to tune to its frequency. That doesn’t mean I’m always inspired. But it means I know what to do when I feel disconnected. I don’t consume more. I don’t tweak my strategy. I get quiet.
I ask: what do we do now?
Because the business is building me too.
I’m not just the architect. I’m the altar. I’m the site of transformation. What I’m making is making me—refining me, burning off the parts that can’t hold it, sculpting me into someone capable of carrying its vision.
Just like the Renaissance sculptors believed the statue already lived inside the marble, my job isn’t to invent—it’s to reveal. To chisel away what doesn’t belong, and let the form underneath emerge.
That’s what I mean by a Personal Renaissance. Not simply a pivot. Not a productivity hack. A return. A rebirth. Where the work is less about what you do and more about what you’re becoming. Where the business stops being a mask and starts being a mirror.
Because without that connection, the whole thing starts to hollow out. You can still be productive. Still check the boxes. Still impress your peers or your high school classmates who lurk your stories. But the work starts to feel like performance art. It looks like it means something, but it doesn’t move you. You’re simulating passion. Strategizing authenticity. Optimizing creativity.
And the worst part? You can get really good at it.
You can build an entire empire from that place. But it will ask more and more from you, and give back less and less. The “shoulds” get louder. The pressure mounts. You start thinking in quarters and KPIs instead of seasons and signals. You forget how to hear your own voice underneath the noise.
You confuse being useful with being worthy.
You mistake value for vitality.
You try to matter more by disappearing into the work.
This isn’t a moral failure.
It’s a spiritual drought.
The ancients would’ve called this a loss of favor from your muse. Or the silence that comes when you’ve abandoned your pact with the daimon—the part of you that’s here to serve something larger than self-image.
What you’re really craving isn’t success—it’s resonance. It’s the click of alignment. The bone-deep yes. You want to feel plugged back in. Lit from within. Like your work is part of something older than Instagram, deeper than your business plan.
You want to feel your own desire again. Not the borrowed kind, shaped by algorithms and applause. But the subterranean kind. The kind that lives in the marrow. The kind that rearranges your days. That remakes your work from the inside out.
Maybe that means speaking less and saying more. Maybe it means dismantling the empire you built when you were still trying to prove you deserved to take up space. Maybe it means letting your business change shape entirely—because the spirit in it is growing, and it needs a new container.
This is the part where most people tighten their grip. They stay busy. Make a new plan. Rebrand the same old structure in prettier fonts.
Anything to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.
But there’s another way.
A slower, stranger, more sovereign way. Where you don’t drive the work—you walk beside it. Like a wild animal that trusts you, barely. Like a god you made a pact with. Like a lover you don’t try to impress, only honor.
Because when you’re in right relationship with what you’re building, you don’t have to force momentum. The ground moves underneath you. The work pulls you forward. The muse arrives—not because you chased her, but because you became the kind of person she visits.
This is the portal.
Like the studio door for the artist. The sanctuary for the oracle. The cave for the prophet.
And if you’re reading this, you’re standing at the threshold.
Your Personal Renaissance is a ceremonial space to re-enter the conversation with what you’re truly here to build.
Not what’s trending.
Not what you think will work.
Not what you’ve been told to do.
But what wants to be made through you.
The door is open. Come in.
