Milestones And Why I Started

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On May 1st, 2026, which, if you are listening to this podcast, the day it is published, that is tomorrow. So tomorrow, this business turns 10 years old. And somewhere along the way, sometime in January, I think, I also passed 100 podcast episodes without ever acknowledging it, without any kind of fanfare. So today I'm marking both of those milestones, and I'm sharing 10 things I've learned over the past decade. So, way back in 2016, I was working at the University of British Columbia, and I handed in my resignation, and my final day was April 30th, 2016. So as of May 1st, I was officially a freelancer. And back then, the dream was small. I wanted to work for myself and control my own schedule. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I wanted to challenge myself in a way that I was not being challenged in my role. And let me tell you, starting and running a business with no formal business training, with no real plan in mind is certainly a way to challenge yourself. But I am so proud of 10 years ago me for being willing to bet on myself and take that risk. I never could have imagined where that decision would take me. And I'm standing here 10 years later, full of gratitude and appreciation, and also full of many more gray hairs than when I started. But I want to talk about that path from that modest dream to where I am today and some of the lessons that I have learned along the way. And of course, the lessons that I am choosing to share are the ones that I think are most relevant to you and your research career, as relevant to you as they have been to me. So let's get into it. Lesson one, figure out where your skill and your interest meet a specific challenge. So in those early days, in kind of 2016, 2017, I was scattered. I was doing a little bit of everything, editing manuscripts, reviewing grants, just being sort of a jack of all trades. And I remember feeling like I was casting about, spinning my wheels a little bit and not really getting anywhere. And a coach gave me a piece of advice that changed really everything for me. And that is figure out the common thread across the work that you're doing. Where does your skill and your interest meet a specific challenge? For me, that answer was immediately obvious, and so obvious, in fact, that I felt foolish for not having seen it before. The answer was grant consulting, advising PIs on how to communicate the value of their research. I cannot believe that I didn't see it sooner, in part because I had been doing that work informally for years in my in-house university roles. It was never officially in my job description, but people would ask me all the time to review their grants before they submitted them. And I always said yes because I genuinely enjoyed it and I was also really good at it. So the lesson here is that sometimes the thing that you're meant to focus on is hiding in plain sight. It's in the work that you already do naturally that you might not see as special or valuable because it comes easily to you. But once you identify it, everything sort of falls into place. It's easy to do that kind of work because you enjoy it, because you're naturally drawn to it. And so organizing your career around that type of work can be energizing rather than depleting. Lesson two: everything is an experiment. And over time, those experiments become instincts you can trust. This one is really two lessons that have sort of merged over the last decade. In those early days, I had to try a lot of things without knowing whether they would work. And the way that I framed it to myself that helped me a lot was that I'm treating everything as a hypothesis that I'm testing. I would try something, I would gather the data, and I would make a new decision based on what the data was telling me. That helped me stay less attached to outcomes, especially when the outcomes weren't the ones I was hoping for. I did my very best to treat a failed experiment as useful information rather than a reason to believe that I wasn't capable of achieving something. And that framing gave me and gives you permission to try things you would be too afraid to try if you thought the results were permanent or saying something about your abilities, for example. And I think that matters a lot for anyone who's at a stage in their career where so many things feel high stakes. But I've also noticed something over the years that I'm sure any clinician can relate to. And that's that all the data you collect it accumulates into pattern recognition. It becomes instinctual. At this point, for example, I can identify those patterns really quickly and make decisions almost immediately because I've seen the pattern enough times to know this is what's going on. And so all of that early hypothesis testing and data gathering I did have now become or have now enabled me to rely on that pattern recognition as a decision-making tool. I can trust that now because I've seen it enough times. And every so often I will go back and test my assumption to make sure that my pattern recognition is working properly or that my instinct is correct. And the vast majority of the time, doing those little spot checks just reinforces that, yeah, I this is indeed what I'm seeing, and I'm confident making a decision based on this information. Lesson three, be reliable. For many years now, my signature service has been a strategic grant review, which requires me or a member of my team to deliver detailed, high-quality feedback to someone who is working towards a specific and immovable deadline. And so if I miss that deadline, the consequences are real and serious for my client. That means that my entire business is built on being reliable. It requires an enormous amount of planning and structure and organization behind the scenes all the time, so that I can deliver what I promise when I promise. If I or anyone on my team wasn't reliable, my business would not exist full stop. And I think reliability is underrated as a professional skill and as a form of leadership. When the people around you, your collaborators, your team, your mentees, when they know that you will do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it, that builds trust in a way that nothing else can. It's not glamorous, it's not the kind of thing anyone gives you an award for, but over time, it builds a reputation that opens a lot of doors. But before you can be reliable to anyone else, you have to show up for yourself. I know plenty of people think that they can show up for others at their own expense. And sure, you can do that for a little while, but if you want to build a reputation as someone who is reliable and trustworthy, you need to get right with yourself first. You need to be aware of your own capacity. You have to be able to communicate clearly with team members and collaborators. You have to be able to anticipate obstacles and create contingency plans. And you have to be honest, first and foremost, with yourself. You have to be able to use discernment in what you say yes to and what you decline, all in service of preserving that reliability. And to that point, the last thing I'll say about being reliable is that you need to know what your end game is, what your ultimate goal is. Because you can, if you want, build a reputation as someone who is very reliable, who helps move things forward for others. But if you're not careful, you'll end up sabotaging your own vision and goals because you just say yes to everything that you have the capacity to do. And trust me, I have been there. And that truly was my life before I started this business. So if you're not clear on what you want to accomplish and what you're working towards, it's really easy to get swept up in serving other people's goals. And again, that's fine if that's what you want to do. But if you're a PI, if you're running a lab, you have a responsibility to your own vision and your own goals. So make sure that your reliability is put to work to serve that vision. Make sure that the reputation you're building is serving the collaborations that will help move your own research forward. Lesson four, name what's true even when it's uncomfortable. In the early months of the pandemic, so March, April, 2020, I felt helpless. I was worried about everyone, my clients, my newsletter community, the future of my business, not to mention my family and friends. If you remember, in those days, research was basically paused. Everything was uncertain, and I definitely did not have any answers. All I could think to do during that time was to try to understand what people were going through. So I put out a call to my newsletter community asking people a series of questions that they could answer just by replying to my email. And I ended up with dozens and dozens of pen pals during that time. Researchers from all over the world telling me about what their days looked like. Oh, I'm getting emotional even thinking about it. Um, telling me about what their days looked like, what they were scared of, what pausing their research meant to them, what mattered to them about their work. I was moved to tears on a regular basis hearing their stories. And I'm sure you can hear it in my voice. I still get emotional thinking about it. What I learned from that experience, and then again last year in 2025, when the funding landscape shifted so dramatically, so quickly, is that people are hungry to have their experience acknowledged, to be reminded that what they're feeling is normal, that it's okay to be angry, frustrated, and uncertain, that they're humans, not robots. That kind of honesty gets overlooked a lot, I think, in academic spaces. But this lesson goes beyond what I do for my audience, for my newsletter community. It applies to your career too. Being willing to name what's true, whether that's to yourself, to your mentors, to your institution, is often extremely uncomfortable and also necessary. That might sound like I can't take on another project right now, or I need more support that I'm getting, or you really screwed up here. Or even just the private admission of I'm not okay right now, and pretending I am is making everything harder. Academic culture does not make a lot of space for this kind of honesty. There is a pressure to perform competence and certainty at all times. And I think that really harms people. The willingness to name what's actually true, starting with yourself, is revolutionary. Lesson five: consistency compounds. So, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, I recently passed a hundred podcast episodes. And I've sent a weekly newsletter for a decade. One of the very first pieces of advice I got as a new business owner working in online spaces was to set up a newsletter list and write to my newsletter community weekly. And of course, in the early days, that was, you know, half a dozen to a dozen people. And now there are thousands and thousands of people on my email list. And I have been consistent. I have sent a weekly newsletter now for a decade. And as long as I've been running this business, I've been able to maintain that, which has meant that sometimes I'm pre-writing newsletters and pre-recording podcast episodes to be published while I'm on vacation. So I can actually take a break from time to time, right? Which takes a commitment to that consistency and obviously some forethought and planning to make sure that you can maintain it. Which might seem unnecessary, right? Because no single episode of my podcast or newsletter changed anything. But the cumulative effect of that body of work is very important. Consistency is truly not glamorous. Some of the time, if not most of the time, it feels like an annoying task. I have to check off a list. Some of my newsletters are easy to write, and some of them take me an entire day. But I made that commitment to consistency when I started my business. And for me, it's just not negotiable. And the fact that it's not negotiable makes it so much easier because I don't have a choice. I don't get to argue with myself about it. It just has to get done. And the benefits from my perspective are obvious. I have developed and communicated a point of view, which is important to me even without an audience. Just being in dialogue with myself over the years on topics related to my profession is extremely useful and important. And for your career, this is just as true, especially when it comes to writing. Devoting consistent time to writing grants and publications will inevitably lead to a body of work, whether or not it produces the results that you're seeking. It's important in and of itself. That's the point I'm trying to make here. Lesson six, find your people. This goes without saying, but nobody is self-made. And nobody who's trying to achieve something important can do it completely alone. What I've learned over 10 years is that you need different people around you to support you in different ways. You need peers who understand your context, someone who gets it without you having to explain yourself. I am so lucky to have found that in my friend Jane Jones. I met her in 2016, not long after I started the business. We met in an online community for business owners, and we bonded over the fact that we were both academic editors in very different spaces, but both academic editors in a sea of life coaches, essentially. We started speaking to each other weekly, and we've done that for a decade. That's another example of consistency. She is the person that I talked to the most, aside from my own family, and I could not be more grateful for that. Then around 2019 or 2020, Kathy Mazak and Kemi Dole came into the fold, and we became a foursome of academic adjacent business owners, meeting weekly and supporting each other as we set and achieved our goals and navigated the pandemic, among many other things. These are the women who understand what I'm trying to build. We understand what each other are trying to build, and we understand the specific challenges that come with it, because we're all doing something roughly similar. Sometimes that means we give each other advice, but a lot of the time, honestly, it just means having someone to commiserate with, someone who understands what it's like. I am so grateful for these women, for this group, for their friendship and their wisdom and their support. Aside from peers who get it, you also need a good team. There's a saying that if you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go together. And that has been absolutely true in my experience. Nobody will care about what you're doing more than you do. You are the person who cares the most, and that is as it should be. But it is so important to find people who believe in what you're doing, who believe in what you're building, and who are excellent at what they do. The job of any good leader, in my opinion, is to enable the people around them to work at the very top of their skill set, to find ways to bring about the best in everyone on the team and to create an environment that values everyone's contribution and skill set. That was always the goal with the people that I brought into my team. I know I didn't get it right 100% of the time, but that's always what I was aiming for. I wanted everyone to feel valued and appreciated and stimulated and challenged in the work that they were doing. And then there's the support that you have at home. If you have a spouse or a partner, their support matters a lot. Building something takes time and energy and emotional bandwidth. And having someone in your life who believes in what you're doing and supports you in doing it, that is no small thing. What that support looks like depends on what you need and what you value, and it will change depending on the season that you're in. But being able to communicate that and knowing that it will be met with love and care is invaluable. And I want to broaden this even further because the kind of growth that it takes to build something meaningful, whether that's a business or a research career, is really intense. It asks a lot of you. And you deserve support for that process. So that might be a coach or a therapist, or ideally both, who helps you work through some of the internal stuff. It might be a nanny or a house cleaner who frees up your time and mental energy so that you can focus. I think we underestimate how much these kinds of support matter. And sometimes we resist asking for them because we feel like we should be able to do it all ourselves. You don't have to do it all yourself. And getting help is one of the smartest investments you can make because it's an investment in you. So finding your people, investing in those relationships, being honest with each other, that's one of the most valuable things that you can do for your career and for yourself. You don't have to do this alone. You actually can't do this alone. And it goes a lot better when you don't do it alone. Lesson seven, create the environment you wish you'd had. So this is a bit of a carry-on from the previous lesson. Over the years, many people have worked in my business, whether that's editorial staff, admin staff, or collaborators of various kinds. One of the things that mattered the most to me was creating the kind of working environment that I didn't get to have when I worked in university settings. An environment that valued everyone's talent and contributions. I tried really, really hard to create that. And it's something I'm really proud of. And for you, as you move into a PI role, you'll be creating an environment for the people who work with you: your research assistants, your postdocs, your students, your collaborators. You have an opportunity to build something intentional, to think about what kind of leader you want to be, what kind of culture you want to create, and what kind of experience you want the people around you to have. You might already know what it feels like to work in an environment that doesn't value you. You know what it costs. So as you step into a broader leadership role, you get to choose something different. Lesson eight, be in dialogue with yourself. This one might sound a little abstract, but I think it's one of the most important lessons that I've learned. To succeed in really any work that matters to you, you have to know yourself. And to know yourself, you need to be in dialogue with yourself regularly, honestly, asking yourself real questions and being willing to sit with the answers even when they're uncomfortable. Questions like Is this still what I want? Am I making this decision because I believe in it or because I'm scared? What am I avoiding? What would I do if I trusted myself here? That kind of self-interrogation is how you develop the awareness to make good decisions, to recognize when you're out of integrity, and to course correct before things go too far in the wrong direction. It's also how you develop the self-trust that I talk about so often on this show, because self-trust comes from genuinely knowing yourself, knowing what you value and knowing what you're capable of. It doesn't come from affirmations or power poses or any of those surface-level things. It comes from knowing yourself. I practice this in my own life and work, not as consistently as I would like, but when I am at my best, it is very consistent. And I think one of the reasons it matters so much for you, especially at this stage of your career, is that you are being asked to make so many decisions with incomplete information. The clearer you are about what you want and what you value, the easier those decisions become, even when the circumstances around you are really foggy. Lesson nine. Growth requires you to become someone new. The most exciting and exhilarating and truly surprising part of growing this business, especially in the early days, was what it asked of me in terms of personal growth. I will admit, I was not expecting that. I don't know why I wasn't expecting it, because to even embark on this career change was incredibly risky, but it just, I guess, didn't occur to me that I would need to challenge myself so much in terms of personal growth. I had to do so many things that were deeply uncomfortable. For example, asking people to pay me, making YouTube videos, sharing my opinions in public, just generally putting myself out there in ways that felt terrifying in the beginning. That discomfort forced me to grow in all kinds of ways that I truly had not anticipated. And figuring out who I had to become in order to get where I wanted to go was one of the most exciting parts of the whole experience. I didn't necessarily see it that way in the beginning. I just thought, well, this is what I have to do if I want to get to this place. But to be able to do that thing required that I transform. And I think any meaningful transition in life asks this of you. You can't get to the next stage by staying exactly who you are right now. The skills and the mindset and the habits that got you to where you are are extremely valuable. And they're not sufficient to get where you want to go. For me, discovering what is required to get to that next stage and rising to meet it is one of the most rewarding parts of the journey. And I hope that it can be for you as well. Lesson 10. Define success for yourself 10 years in, success for me still looks like having control over my own schedule. And it also looks like working with really talented people, making sure that my work doesn't come at the expense of my health or my family life or my friendships. But that's really it. Those are the metrics that matter to me. Sure, there are business goals that I want to achieve, but those pale in comparison to the way I want to feel in my career. I admit that I am still a recovering high achiever, but I am so much better now at defining what success looks like for me and sort of keeping my eyes on my own paper. I'm not at the mercy of all the things I feel like I should be doing, because quite frankly, most of them don't matter to me very much. And so I think it's important, certainly for me to notice that the dream I had initially to work for myself and control my own schedule is still very much the dream. I think it's important to recognize that the definition of success can stay simple, even as the way to achieve that dream sort of grows and evolves. So it wouldn't be the first time on this podcast that I encourage you to think about what success actually looks like for you, not what your institution defines as success, not what you think you're supposed to want, but what you genuinely want and what would genuinely make you feel fulfilled and proud of the career that you're building. But the reason that it keeps coming up is because it's so vitally important. That clarity you have over what success looks like will serve you in every decision you make from here on out. So there you go, 10 lessons from 10 years. And before I wrap up, I want to take a moment to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who has worked in this business over the years. To every client, student, listener, and subscriber, thank you. It has been enormously gratifying to do this work in service of your success. And one of the very best parts of the last 10 years has been watching some of the people I worked with in those early days of niching down into NIH grant consulting around 2018, watching those people become leaders and mentors in their own right. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing someone I worked with years ago thriving in their career and passing on what they've learned to the up-and-comers. I'll also admit that hearing about my clients and students' successes still makes me emotional. I still cry a little bit when somebody writes in with good news. It never gets old for me. And to you listening right now, thank you for being here. Whether you've been listening since episode one or this is your first episode, I'm really grateful for your time. I'm sure that the next 10 years will hold plenty of things that I can't predict, just like the last 10 did. And I've learned enough by now to know that that's just part of the ride. Sometimes it's exhilarating, sometimes it's terrifying, but it's never ever boring. And I'm just so grateful to do this work. Trust me, I have also felt hopeless and despondent at times, especially over the last 18 months. But I believe so much in the value of research, in the potential for science to improve quality of life for everyone. And while I can't say that I'm optimistic about the state of American science these days from a political perspective, I remain eternally optimistic about the scientists themselves. Your curiosity, your passion, your desire to make things better for the communities you care about, that's what keeps me hopeful and motivated. All right, I'll see you next time.