Simone Seol

I built a business that earned a cumulative revenue of nearly $15 million.

Here’s what I would do if I were starting over from scratch today, knowing everything I know now. 

A lot of things on the Internet have changed since the days when I was  “coming up.”

In those days, there was no TikTok. (not that I’ve ever been on TikTok anyway)

Instagram and Facebook hasn’t devoured by monetization monsters and ads yet. They were actually places where people just showed up to chill, where you could make friends and find community with relative ease. 

But, actually, social media isn’t where I found my people originally.

I found it via blogging.

Yup, blogging. I started a little blog 15-ish years ago. It slowly amassed a small group of people who loved to read my writing and interact with my ideas. (Emphasis on small.)

These people became my Facebook friends. And many became my real life friends. They were many of my earliest supporters and paying clients. (For a tiny tiny business that barely earned a part time income, but was fun and meaningful nonetheless.)

Then it took about a decade after that for me to figure myself out. Gaining in self awareness. Learning how to like myself and believe in my own work enough to show up for my passions in a bigger way without needing external approval every step of the way. 

Yes, I said one whole decade.

That’s not slow.

That the time it takes for sustainable internal shifts to happen.

Remember the very small group of original blog followers?

Let’s say there were 20.

Once I started showing up on social media like I mean it — that is, without self-censoring, without requiring for your approval — the 20 people who loved my brain turned into 30. 

Then 30 turned into 50. Then 50 into 100. And so on.

This, too. Slowly.

At the same time, I was honing my business skills, little bit by a little bit. The basics of copy. Humane marketing. I checked out a million “experts” and learned from many of them, but the only person who taught me anything worth a damn, which has since become the soul and bones of my business, came from my teacher Fabeku Fatunmise, an ordained priest of the Yoruba tradition. (@ownerofcoralandbrass on IG, though he isn’t here much. He no longer teaches business, and hasn’t for a long time.) He is not just a business teacher for me. He is a soul teacher. And that’s the only kind of business teacher you should have. Don’t settle for anything less; so many of us have gotten used to such low standards nowadays. 

So then the 100 of people who love my brain turned into 200 and 200 turned into a thousand and on and on. This coincided with my personal growth and taking bigger and bigger risks with my creativity.

The throughline of my business growth — and integrity — has been my writing. Still is. Always will be, most likely. 

I am a writer. I write.

I am a multupassionate ADHD person.

My business has, correspondingly, morphed into new forms multuple times. Things I’ve done for money: coaching, hypnosis, art, classes… on becoming more of who you are, marketing, spirituality, creativity. I can’t stick with one thing, and never will, and that is part of my genius.

You can look forward to me continuing to evolve. 

The only consistency in my work is my spirit and my indefatigable curiosity.

I never set out to be a big star, or to get rich.

I am endlessly grateful that I get to support my family with my creativity. 

This is a tremendous blessing and privilege that no one is entitled to. There are countless millions of people in this world who are far more talented and hard-working than me who will never get to enjoy the same because they are facing too many systemic or cultural barriers. 

So I practice gratitude instead of entitlement, and orient myself to the humility of knowing that the gift of “making a living with my passion” can be taken away from me anytime, and that’s okay.

So, let me come back to answering the actual question of, what I would do if I were starting my business from scratch today.

I would do what I have always done.

I would tend to my own spiritual wholeness first and foremost. I would doggedly follow the breadcrumbs of my curiosity. I would be in a passionate relationship with life and learning. 

And I would write about it. Again and again. Because I am a writer and I write. Without the expectation that the world needs to validate me with others’ approval or reward me with “success.”

Incidentally, this is exactly what I am doing.

And if you’ve been a student of mine, you also know that this is what I have been teaching YOU the entire time.

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?