Yesterday morning I was someone who had never done an Instagram Live and, by the afternoon, I was someone who had.

It was an hour of diving into my favourite topics… being a multi-passionate, side hustling, leaving Shopify, hustle culture, ambition, entrepreneurship, relationships, and all that good stuff.

Did the internet police come to shut it down? No.

Did I embarrass myself terribly? No.

Did I have the most nourishing conversation with another ambitious and multi-passionate human who feels like my kindred spirit? Absolutely.

A theme that kept coming up in our conversation was the idea that we are always allowed to reinvent ourselves. More importantly, we don’t need to wait for a major breakdown before making that change. We can reinvent ourselves even when life is smooth sailing—especially when life is smooth sailing.

We can wake up one morning and at the snap of a finger decide to step into a new identity. From someone who has never done an Instagram Live to someone who has.

But taking on a new identity often feels small and pointless in the moment… in other words: easy to avoid. As byproducts of the corporate world, we tend to only do things when we have to do them. We become trained to do what we’re told and the small ideas we secretly have? They get pushed out into the far-far-away-future, the landfill of forgotten dreams.

Why feel the nerves today when I can push them out to the illustrious tomorrow?

But those small and pointless moments add up. They may not be newsworthy, which is why we don’t talk about them (seriously, am I really writing an entire newsletter on recording my first Instagram Live?!), but it’s these small moments that keep us from waking up one day and thinking how the hell did I end up here.

The more we push our “small dreams” out into the future, the more resentment we start to feel seeing others living our dream. We think, “How’s that fair? I’ve been pushing my dreams out to the future, why isn’t she doing the same? Why is she so special to get her dream now?”

Like I shared last week, it’s the people who deny themselves their desires that are the most resentful when other people are living them.

Left unchecked, we soon begin telling ourselves that we don’t even want that dream anymore. “Fine. She can have it. It’s a stupid dream anyway. She’s probably miserable and has no friends either, what a fake.”

These seeds of resentment and jealousy are probably my favourite emotion to explore. They signal that I’ve been kicking the can on one of my dreams for far too long and that it’s time to either choose a life of continued judgement or step up.

That’s why my current success metric is new identities unlocked.

Isn’t that what an entrepreneurial mindset is, after all?

A journey of growing into a more expansive version of ourselves?

If that’s the journey we signed up for, then unlocking new identities is par for the course.

So tell me, what new identity have you recently stepped into? I would love to hear what ambitious dreams you lot are pushing towards!