Most of what you’re taught in business is how to drive “top line” growth.
How to make more sales. How to create more revenue.
Less talked about, but probably more important, is your take-home pay.
How much is left in your pocket after your expenses are paid? That is your “bottom line”, as most of us know.
(Who cares if you made a million dollars if you had to pay out $999,999 in expenses, right?)
And you know what matters — in my opinion — even more than the bottom line?
It’s what I’m calling the bottom-bottom line. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything more elegant to call it, but it just came out of me in conversation with friends.)
That’s what’s left with you when it’s ALL said and done. What you get to “take home” at the end of the day — but this time, we’re talking about your spiritual home.
(Because none of us is making it out of this world alive. None of us is going to be able to take a single penny with us.)
Your bottom-bottom line is the state of your wellness/intactness as a soul.
Why do we all want more money? So that we can live better, have more freedom, options and safety, be able to enjoy ourselves more, and help others, right?
And the reason we want those things in the first place is because we believing those things will make us well.
Focusing singularly on making more money, and determining whether your business is a success or failure based on “top line” — or even “bottom line” —
… is like pouring all our energy into the middle man instead of the goal. The tool, rather than the project.
Human wellness existed long before the system of money was invented.
And it still exists in spades in parts of the world that are severely monetarily deprived. I would argue, it exists more in many of those places because people there have been less corrupted by individualistic capitalism.
They still maintain a connection to their ancestral spirituality, a coherent sense of their orientation and belonging in the visible-invisible material-spiritual web of life.
(To be sure, I don’t mean to romanticize or gloss over the real struggles faced by impoverished people across the world. There is nothing noble or romantic about poverty in itself; but I do observe with immense humility and admiration how so many of these people manage to lead lives that are way richer in joy, connection and spiritual wholeness than most rich Westerners can even imagine — in spite of it all.)
Let me be very clear. I’m not saying that money doesn’t matter. I’m not naive or delusional.
Money is a vital tool in the “consensus reality” world (of 2025, anyway) with which lives can be saved and human potential expressed.
The simple fact is that money can stitch wounds, feed children and provide paper and paintbrushes for the artist. All these things matter.
But in order for us to create a new, better world that serves the deep health of all living beings (as opposed to more wealth in the hands of the top 0.1%), we have articulate and anchor to a different paradigm than the one we’ve been handed by default.
And we have to do it on purpose, again and again and again.
And that paradigm is one that prioritizes the bottom-bottom line.
Determining business success NOT by how much money you’re bringing in, but by what the journey is doing to/for our souls, our sense of connectedness to each other and all that is alive and true in this Universe.
I have some questions for you.
What is it like when you are well?
How do you know when you feel that sense of deep wholeness and connectedness, regardless of what’s going on in life?
(I have had the experience of being on the floor sobbing, devastated from a personal loss, unsure of myself and grieving — and still feeling more WHOLE and INTACT than ever before. Have you ever had a similar experience?)
How do you recognize those moments of deep wholeness/wellness/connectedness? What do they feel like?
Some people, when I talk about attuning to “enoughness”, misunderstand me as saying, you should be content with the minimum that allows them to get by without dying of hunger.
Nope, nope, nope.
Have you taken a vow of poverty? Have you renounced the world to devote yourself to an ascetic spiritual life?
If not, “enough” means so much more than “the bare minimum you need to not DIE.”
Human beings need food, shelter, clean water, and some clothes that protect us from the elements.
These are the bare minimum that we need to survive.
Let’s say all of humanity — all 8 billion of us — achieved this. Woohoo! That’s an accomplishment, right? Everyone having enough to be materially safe.
But imagine that that’s where it ended. Let’s say no one had the tiniest extra thing more.
You want to paint? Sorry, no paintbrushes for you. You’re not gonna die without it.
You want to form a band with your friends? Sorry, no musical instruments for you. You’re not gonna die without it.
You want to read books of poetry, make sculptures, build a playground for children? You want a hammock for naps, and extra coconut butter to soften your skin and hair? An altar and offerings for your gods? Nope. You’re not gonna die without any of that.
You have enough to survive. Be happy with that.
Would you want to live in that world?
I’m guessing not.
There’s surviving by meeting biological needs.
And then there’s flourishing, by meeting emotional, psychological, aesthetic, relational, and spiritual needs.
I want you to be able to flourish.
When I talk about knowing what is ‘enough’ for you, it’s actually useful to know both numbers.
What is an “enough for sheer survival” number? (That matters.)
And what is an “enough for me to flourish as my fully expressed, most joyful self” number?
Do you need paintbrushes, rose-scented perfumes, weighted blankets, regular trips to the beach, money to help out your friends and family from time to time? Then you gotta factor that into your “enough for flourishing” number.
To be sure, the number is not an easy thing to arrive at.
For about a year now, I’ve been studying myself, me and my family’s basic survival needs, as well as what our needs are for our maximum flourishing.
What exactly does that include? What do those things cost? What if our needs and priorities change? What if this happens? What if that happens?
When you’re trying to plan for future contingencies in an ever-complicated world and/or have dependents, this gets even more hairy.
I still don’t have an exact figure yet.
But, through a whole year of thinking about it and talking to my friends and advisors about it, I have a much clearer sense of what my values are, how to express them through money, and a a better sense of the range of numbers I need to be thinking about.
All of that has directly shaped how I make plans for my business.
And awareness is power.
So I don’t expect you to be able to arrive at a clear-cut number right away.
You will, most likely, have to do some investigation into yourself, your world, and the future you want first.
And it will most likely be a dynamic process, and an ongoing journey of learning and iterating, rather than deciding that a number must be written in stone.
But engaging in that process left me feeling so much more purposeful and empowered about what I’m doing with my money and life.
So, if you resonate, I recommend that for you.
I wish for your survival and safety.
But even more than that, I wish for your flourishing.
I’m not here to toot my own horns and talk about how great I am.
Because 1. that’s not the point of why we’re here, and 2. The quality of my work should be evidenced by the change it makes in YOUR lives, not by me talking about how great I am.
But there’s something I need to tell you that you might never know because the information is intentionally obscured from you.
I know of almost no one in the online business coaching who makes revenue at the range that I have for the past 5 years (well over 10 million, haven’t done the exact math)….
… who spends on ads a little as I do (I spend almost nothing because I never bought into the idea that it was some kind of magic solution and anyway, it always felt so boring to try to work on it)…
… who has as few business expenses as I do (because I have an incredibly lean team and business structure, and we simplify and bootstrap almost everything, which means I spend money on almost nothing except things that directly impact client experiences, like accessibility)…
… and therefore has as high a profit margin as I do (i almost never take home less than 70% of my total revenue, and that number would be even higher if I didn’t insist on paying my people extremely well)…
… while working with a team who shows up for me and has my back like we’re family…
… while also having a sliding scale pricing system and especially in the past couple years, no reliance on high ticket offers…
…. while also using my platform vigorously and unapologetically for social justice issues and fundraising for those causes.
I say this NOT to toot my own horn but to let you know there are ways to make money AND THEN THERE ARE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY.
The “how” you buy into matters enormously in terms of your mental health, quality of life, and how much money you actually end up with in your pocket.
Juggling complex systems, lots of hiring and outsourcing, fancy bells and whistles that project an illusion of success, prioritizing short term cash, constantly looking to giant-corporation-dependent “conversion” processes (like ads) to save you may make you money… but at what cost?
You can train your own mind to be the most powerful tool you have for business growth.
You can partner with your own spirit to get the highest-quality guidance about where to go next. Better than any fancy consultant you can hire.
You can nourish your human-to-human relationships with honesty, generosity and genuine care so that your community becomes your very insurance against ever-volatile trends.
Not all business coaching is built the same.
Trust what feels right and good to your heart.
Know that you can have a good business, do good for the world, and be surrounded by a community of people who pay you AND are with you, through thick and thin, for the long haul because they’re primarily invested in your HEART, not your transactions.
In our culture, it is so common to use LIGHT as a metaphor for all that is good, healthy, civilized, and virtuous.
And, conversely, DARKNESS as a metaphor for all that is bad, sick, uncivilized and sinister.
You may not be surprised to hear that associations not only have done enormous harm to people with melanated skin across the globe (by justifying racism)…
… but they have also created distortions in our relationships to our bodies and nature.
If you’re used to associating “light” with good…
Consider that: withholding darkness from people is literally a torture technique. Nonstop light, leading to sleep deprivation, is designed to break people down.
24/7 light would kill species and destroy ecosystems.
And while light in and of itself is natural (hello, the sun), light pollution — an unnatural excess of light — is doing enormous harm to humans and the ecosystem.
Fetuses grow in the dark.
All life is nourished by dark soil.
Dreaming happens in the dark — as well as transcendant and liminal visions.
There’s a reason that so many artists, writers, spiritual leaders and visionaries are night owls. Darkness reveals what light obscures.
Now, I’d love to invite you to read some excerpts from an article I just found:
“Should we avoid liturgical language of light and dark?” written by Steve Thorngate, for The Christian Century magazine.
(Be assured, this is enormously relevant even if you have nothing to do with Christanity.)
It said so many things so more eloquently that I could at this moment.
There is a long history in the church of using words like light, white, bright, and fair to connote goodness in a straightforward way and words like dark, black, shade, and dim to connote the opposite.
Most instances of such usage were not written for explicitly racist purposes (though some were). Still, this language has thrived alongside racism in White-dominated church contexts.
And language—especially ritual language, repeated again and again—has great power among those who speak or hear it, power not constrained by the intent of its creators.
The Bible is chock-full of light/dark imagery, with much (though not all) of it presenting light as the positive side of the coin.
Jesus is the light of the world, the morning star, the one who obviates the need for lamp or sunlight, the one in whom there is no darkness at all. Forgiveness for sin washes us whiter than snow.
And then, over on the other side of things, there’s the power of darkness. Why should the church avoid this language the biblical writers use so freely?
Yes, praise for the light is all over scripture… but the Bible says lots of things, and not all of them find their way into our liturgies.
Christian views of scripture vary, and I know there are those who maintain that “Is this biblical?” is the main hurdle for any idea or phrase to clear. But I have yet to visit a church that follows this principle through to its logical conclusion, giving every jot and tittle a hearing on Sunday morning.
So the mere existence of a light versus dark paradigm in the Bible hardly seems like the last word on its suitability for worship.
After all, the plain fact is that some biblical language can be hurtful to some people among us. It has been used to buttress concrete harm in the past, still is in some places, and even where it isn’t the words themselves can be a significant stumbling block.
So while addressing this fact might not be simple or straightforward, we do need to address it. “Deal with it, it’s in the Bible” is inadequate; it fails to take the problem seriously.
So does this mean we should jettison the language of light and darkness entirely? I’m not sure it does.
This language, after all, is more than biblical: it’s elemental. It names a fundamental experience of all living things.
The earth’s days and seasons are defined by the planet’s relationship with the sun’s rays—their presence and absence, the distance they travel to reach us, and the angle at which they arrive.
These cycles of darkness and light have shaped creatures, ecosystems, and communities across generations and continents, and the depth of this shared reality makes it a rich source for liturgical language.
Christian liturgy forms us in no small part by defining the passage of time in our lives. This means it is deeply invested in the role of darkness and light in the life of the planet we live on.
The challenge I faced in my songwriting project was how to explore light/dark language with care, embracing its richness and depth—while also seeking to avoid the harm it can do.
I’m considerably less certain that the particular guidelines I came up with are the best available. No doubt there’s much to quibble with and refine here. But here’s what I tried…
1) Consider the various senses in which positive language about light is used. Light can mean illumination, vision, transparency, openness, the revealing of secrets—ideas rooted in the physical function and utility of light. Explore these with care. Light can also connote color, complexion, innocence, and even cleanness—more immediately value-laden ideas that can be dangerous, especially when paired with binary language like light/dark. Avoid these.
2) Be especially cautious about negative language for darkness. Yes, it’s logically implicit in positive language about light, and some will argue that there is thus no meaningful difference between the two. But I’m convinced that it also matters what we make explicit, what we say out loud and emphasize and repeat—a point that became clearer to me as I wrote things like song refrains and they echoed in my mind. It is possible to use positive light language—and again, some forms of it are more worthwhile than others—while also taking care not to actively disparage darkness.
3) Ask, in a given situation, if you need to use language about light and darkness at all. Is what you’re saying important to your larger purposes, or are you just trying to pad an illustration or fill out a metrical line? If it is important, is there another way to say it that works just as well? The sort of qualified embrace I’m advocating implies a need to make each usage count.
4) Don’t use black/white language to mean bad/good. Just don’t do it (even though it’s biblical). The racist interpretation is too immediate, too easy to infer. Find another way to say what you want to say.
5) Perhaps most importantly: say positive things about darkness. Fertile soil is dark. A dark sky without light pollution promotes healthy rest and, paradoxically, visibility. Secrets and mysteries aren’t always bad things; their illumination isn’t always good.
What’s more, the biblical witness is not unanimously pro-light.
In Exodus 20 God occupies a space of darkness, in Genesis 15 God arguably takes the form of darkness, and the psalmist praises the protection provided by God’s shadow. In recent years, Christians have begun to write liturgical texts on such themes. There’s even a new children’s book, God’s Holy Darkness… (“Creation began in the dark. . . . Creation is God’s work done in holy darkness.”) We need more of this in the church.
6) Embrace the fact that liturgical images exist in tension with one another. The goal is not a tidy, closed system of what light/dark language is allowed to mean. Our metaphors proliferate, overlap, and sometimes even conflict. This is OK. Here I take my cues from the expansive language movement around God and gender: we need to imagine our way to a longer and better list of ways to use light/dark language in worship, rather than restrict our way to a shorter and safer one.
I’ve found these guidelines useful, but they remain a work in progress.
You can read the full text of this article, if you google the words “light dark Thorngate.” It will be the top search result.
So much of this applies directly to larger Western culture, which is formed in such large part by Christianity.
If you work in coaching or healing arts, where these metaphors are commonly used, what is your takeaway from this?
The internet is bombarding you with a seemingly infinite number of things that are promised to work.
Here’s how to keep your sanity intact, and make good decision.
The thing to remember is that, every business strategy
works for SOMEONE…
… for some TIME.
Put another way, any given strategy may not work for EVERYONE, because every brain and nervous system is different…
… and it may not work FOREVER, either because outside circumstances (like changes in algorithms/customer behavior trends/the popularity of platforms going up or down), or because it is unsustainable for YOU.
Consider that every single business strategy being sold to you… is being delivered to youVIA their business strategy.
Meaning, their #1 interest is getting YOU to buy their thing.
While they’re telling you “I’ll help you get popularity/sales,” what they’re really after is their own popularity and sales. (This is not to say they’re evil and their products suck and they don’t care about you! They may be great, have substance and genuinely care about you. But just remember, every business selling business solutions… is driven by their own interest.)
Here’s what will SAVE YOUR BUTT (and $$$), but is rarely said.
At the end of the day, whether your business succeeds or not comes down to two factors:
(1) the quality of your relationships
and
(2) whether what you’re doing feels nourishing + interesting, and therefore sustainable, for you.
(The quality and usefulness of your work is another giant factor, but let’s assume that is already in place.)
Let’s talk about each one.
(1) the quality of your relationships
This is the part that is tragically left out of so many conversations about marketing.
Getting more views, engagement, sales… is NOT the same thing as as cultivating HIGH QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS.
That is, when you have a true bond with people you give a damn about, who give a damn about you.
The work it takes to get ONE mega fan — the person who will drink up your every word like it’s an ice-cold glass of water in a desert, comes to IG to specifically check if you’ve posted anything new, tells all their friends about you, buys from you again and again, and will freak the fuck out if your account disappeared one day…
… is in an entirely different galaxy than the work it takes to get 10 sales from anyone who’s willing to pay, or get 1000 new followers.
And the former is INFINITELY more useful for your bottom line.
Most business advice is geared toward:
1. helping you get as many eyes and ears as possible from “just whoever.”
This is why those with 10’s of thousands of followers struggle to make a single sale.
2. helping you squeeze out as many sales as possible from “just whoever”
This is why so many people find that, the minute they pivot their offers or business identity, all their people drop off and they have to start from scratch
In considering business strategy, ask yourself:
does this feel like treating people with the utmost honesty, respect, and high regard for who they are as human beings
is this putting forward a version of me that the greatest number of people will find attractive OR a version of me that will call out powerfully to the RIGHT person, and repel everyone else?
Is this close to how I would treat people in my real life that I like, respect, and want to have long-lasting relationships with?
(2) whether what you’re doing feels nourishing + interesting, and therefore sustainable, for you.
Truth: business involves failing a LOT. Every single successful move is accompanied by 99 failures that came before.
Resilience is how you turn failure into learning, as opposed to “stuck in defeat and shame”.
And resilience is only possible when what you’re doing inherently feels nourishing and interesting to you.
When what you’re doing inherently feels nourishing and interesting to you, you are:
less attached to the outcome
more likely to bounce back from setbacks
more likely to enjoy the challenges
much more likely to keep going…
… which enables you to build a body of work that is worth gathering around.
Because so many people try to whiteknuckle it through activities that are DEPLETING and BORING to them, they quit fast, or just stay in the zone of flipflopping around with no growth.
You’ve heard the thing about workouts, right?
The only way to stick with it is if you find an activity that you actually ENJOY.
Exact same thing here.
A nuance here: this doesn’t mean there is zero discomfort. Let’s take the example of exercise.
If you’ve been a total couch potato and want to get moving, there is probably gonna be a phase where you’re trying different things and everything feels uncomfortable and awkward.
And even once you find something you like, there will be some pain as you learn how to get better at the thing.
And, even if you absolutely adore the thing, there will be “rainy days” when you just don’t feel like it.
So it’s not just eating strawberry shortcakes in a picnic every single day.
Nothing is that.
But identifying something that actually feels good, interesting and inherently rewarding for you to do, and focusing on that…
… is how you get resilient.
It is also how you build volume without quitting on yourself.
So, how do you find something that you actually LIKE to do?
Focus on what comes easily to you. Zoom in on your natural strengths and inclinations.
If you’re a social butterfly, go to real life events, meet people, and tell them what you do.
If you’re an inveterate writer (like me), write.
And ignore all the hype about reels or whatever. It takes discipline to be committed to what is inherently interesting and rewarding for you, and ignore the world’s noise. It’s worth it.
If you’re someone who loves structure and routine, don’t wing it. Plan everything.
If you’re a pisces queen with ADHD who thrives on just following your curiosity and intuition when you feel like it, DO THAT and fuck all the “you gotta plan” people. (Ahem, that is me).
If the idea of figuring out ads sounds deeply interesting to you, like inherently, do that.
If the same thing makes you vomity, ignore all the ad people and do your own thing. (I had made almost a $million before I ever ran my first ad. Ads aren’t magic. You are.)
I truly believe my podcast only became popular because I had zero attachment to how many people were listening. Making it was an inherently interesting challenge for myself.
Same thing with how I kept up my hypnosis, tarot-reading, and life coaching businesses for years and years when… it all barely added up to even a part time income.
Same thing with how I’m going now, as I emerge out of a months-long sabbatical and am deeply reconfiguring the foundations of my business, and there is zero guarantee that I’ll continue to be “successful” in the worldly sense.
Whatever isn’t inherently interesting and rewarding for you to do — that is to say, even if you got zero popularity or money from it, you would still do it for how fulfilled it makes you feel — YOU WILL QUIT ON.
If you don’t quit on it, you will burn out from it.
I promise you.
I speak standing before a ginormous graveyard of businesses that died because of this.
This is all a long winded way of just saying 3 things.
Focus on creating high quality relationships, not bigger numbers
treat people the way you’d treat folks in real life whom you like, respect, and hope to keep around for a long time
and
Do it in a way that works for you, and have the discipline to ignore everyone else.
If you really take this to heart, you will save yourself an enormous amount of heartache, energy drain, and money.
And put yourself on the track to the most sustainable business growth, and the highest flourishing of your creativity.
a redwood forest, possibly the very embodiment of the opposite of “noise”
I just did an extensive Q&A series on Instagram stories.
On all the topics.
(It is saved as a “stories highlight” on my profile if you want to look. It will be on there for a while, though it might be gone if you’re reading this post far enough in the future.)
Responding to something I said there, a friend asked, “how do I know if my program isn’t just adding to the noise, putting more of ‘what everyone else is doing’ out there?”
I was, and am, so grateful for this question.
It is a courageous question, coming from someone whose spirit is healthy enough to be willing to risk discomfort.
That’s more than I could ask for from… so many.
I thought deeply about how to answer this, and want to talk about it here.
But first, non-duality.
Nothing is inherently noise, or non-noise.
The music you love so much might just be noise to someone else.
The literature you find so meaningful might just be unremarkable strings of words to someone else.
The teaching that saved your life might just sound like fluffy nonsense to someone else.
Noise isn’t an inherent property of anything, but a perception, a judgment.
That said, judgments are sometimes useful.
Judgment is discernment.
And sometimes, the lack of discernment hurts us.
Here’s what I’m willing to define as noise, right now: that which lacks substance and root.
When something is lacking in substance and root and still manages to persist in the world, it is usually because it makes up for what it lacks in other attributes.
Like: the soft manipulation of shiny packaging and sleek slogans, and the ability to appeal to the lowest common denominator through the triggering of our basest instincts.
Add on top of that the irresistible pull of the “cheap, fast, easy, and convenient”, then we have a recipe for something full of static… but no signal.
One of the reasons I’m pulling my old, enormously popular podcast off the air is my profound regret that, in hundreds of episodes teaching people how to get the word out about their thing, I’ve rarely stopped to ask them: “is your thing worth getting the word out about?”
If I were to do a do-over — which I am, now — here’s what I would ask again, and again.
Does your thing have substance?
Meaning, did you come by what you claim honestly?
Is it embodied and battle-tested?
When you take away the packaging, the buzzwords, the constructs and methodologies skimmed off 2-month-long course without the much slower, non-linear, winding and vexatious work of personal cultivation, is there a there there?
And can you answer this infuriating — and yet, ultimately the most important — question of:
“Why does your thing matter in a world where wars and genocides are still raging, a quarter of the global population is living under the poverty line, and where we are all equally facing a mass extinction event, probably less than a century away?”
Does your thing have roots?
Meaning, how deep does it go?
Are the roots deep enough to sustain you through floods, draughts and storms?
What kind of worldsense is it grounded in — if not the default of appropriative, disembodied, post-colonial capitalist emptiness?
Can it stand the test of time?
Where can you track the lineage of your thing?
Is that something you can make moral sense of — if not be proud of?
These are thorny, inconvenient, terribly difficult questions.
If you have an easy and quick time answering them, you’re probably already on the wrong track.
And it’s worth repeating: my biggest regret is that I haven’t posed these questions to the world sooner, more frequently and insistently.
It’s not that I believe everyone should sit on their hands and wait to take action on their passions until they have all the answers perfectly figured out.
I actually think that’s impossible.
But I think the questions beg to be honestly, humbly and vigorously wrestled with.
I think doing so is the work.
It is how you become a person of substance, and how you grow roots.
I don’t think anyone who is unwilling to do so can claim to be a serious person in the public arena.
I think anyone who is unwilling to do so is most likely, by default, just contributing noise.
