Standout Creatives: Business, marketing, and creativity tips for solopreneurs launching their ideas

What if the version of yourself you keep trying to get back to was never the one you were supposed to become? Grace Grossmann has lived in England, Spain, Germany, and now Costa Rica. She’s been a journalist-in-training, a freelance writer, a yoga teacher for nine years, a well-being coach, and a kindergarten teacher. She self-published Chill Out and Cheer Up: A Ten-Step Guide, a book she wrote while grieving her best friend. She then sat on it for four years because her inner critic wouldn’t let her release it. She finally did it from inside a mental health clinic. She doesn’t call any of this a comeback story. She calls it a cycle. Highlights Reinvention isn’t a phase. It’s a practice. Grace doesn’t describe her life as a single before-and-after. She describes it as ongoing. “I’ve reinvented myself all the time. I feel like it’s a never-ending cycle, right? You’re always growing and becoming every day. There’s never a moment where you’re like, yeah, this is fully me.” Most people wait for reinvention to be finished before they trust it. Grace’s story suggests the opposite. You don’t arrive at yourself. You keep stepping into higher versions of it, over and over, for the rest of your life. The book almost never came out. Grace wrote Chill Out and Cheer Up while grieving her best friend, who struggled with mental health his whole life. She finished it years before she published it. “I didn’t self-publish it for four years until I was in the mental clinic and I was out of my mind, like of boredom and just like horrible thoughts, suicidal thoughts. I was like, well, there’s no better time than now.” That’s the part the highlight reel skips. The book that “changed everything” for her readers almost died in a drawer, because her inner critic told her no one wanted to hear it. She published it anyway, from the lowest point of her life, and it became the thing readers said felt like talking to a friend. The inner critic isn’t protecting you. It’s shrinking you. Grace is direct about what imposter syndrome is actually doing. “Your imposter syndrome and your inner critic is just trying to protect you from being the best you... it’s like, no, go back into your shell, shrink back down again.” If you’re sitting on something you’ve written, built, or started because a voice in your head says you’re not the one who should be saying it, that voice was never protecting you from failure. It was protecting the smaller version of you it’s used to. Living in different countries taught her who she actually is. Grace left England for Spain at 18. Later, Germany. Now Costa Rica. “When you live in different countries and different cultures, you get to know so many of yourselves, if you know what I mean. You can be who you want to be.” Nobody needs to move across the world to reinvent themselves. But if you’ve ever felt like your environment was the thing keeping an old version of you alive, Grace’s experience shows you the way. Change the room, and you find out which parts of yourself were actually you, and which parts were just the room. Being a “spaceholder” for everyone else eventually broke her. Yoga teacher. Well-being coach. English teacher. Every role Grace has held has been about giving other people room to grow. “I’ve always been a spaceholder... and hence also why I had a breakdown, because I think I’ve always been a spaceholder for the past decade, and I never knew how I could take up space myself.” This is the part of the healer’s story that rarely gets told. You can’t hand out something you’ve stopped giving to yourself. Grace’s breakdown wasn’t a failure of her calling. It was the cost of doing it without taking care of herself too. Rest is necessary if you want to be productive. Grace’s Substack writing centers on rest, and she’s specific about why. “In that rest, you can be your best and show up as your best... when we go slow, we actually soften smarter.” Most people treat rest as something they’ve earned after the work is done. Grace treats it as the thing that makes the work possible in the first place. Not a reward. A requirement. The small things were never small. At 30 Grace became a kindergarten teacher, and found herself paying attention to what young children notice without trying. “It’s funny, isn’t that beauty of life that we’ve forgotten because we’re all just so in our own worlds... Little things is also a chapter in my book. And the little things have always excited me.” A butterfly. The taste of your food. A tree outside a classroom window. Grace doesn’t romanticize simplicity. She just recognized that most adults have trained themselves out of noticing anything that doesn’t come with a task attached to it. You can dance with discipline instead of fighting it. Grace rejects the idea that structure has to be rigid to work. “I like to think I dance with discipline now, because when I was going through mental health issues, the lack of structure was really hard.” She keeps routines and creates rituals but she doesn’t treat a missed habit as a failure, and she doesn’t force her body into a schedule that ignores how she actually feels that day. Structure gave her safety. It just stopped being allowed to run her life. Closing Reflection Grace Grossman has been an aspiring journalist, a freelance writer, a yoga teacher, a well-being coach, and a kindergarten teacher. She’s grieved a best friend, broken down completely, and rebuilt herself in four different countries. And she still doesn’t consider any of it finished. “There’s no need to have to explain yourself or want to optimize yourself, but rather knowing already as you are and embodying that is the biggest part.” Reinvention was never about arriving somewhere permanent. It’s about trusting that the next version of you is already trying to come through, the same way it always has. If you’ve made a bold change: a move, a career shift, a creative leap, and you think your story could inspire others, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell us about your reinvention.

What if the thing keeping your idea stuck isn’t a lack of money, connections, or credibility? What if it’s just that you’re aiming for the finished version before you’ve made the pilot? Darnell Brown calls himself a multi-passionate creative polymath, and after 18 years in branding, design, and storytelling, he’s earned the title. He helps non-creatives find their voice through design, and runs Forge, a community for multi-passionate entrepreneurs who want to grow their impact without abandoning what makes them them. In this conversation, Darnell traces his path from drawing superheroes as a kid, to cutting lawns with a mower he didn’t own, to the mindset shift that changes how he helps people get unstuck today. Highlights Art doesn’t need permission to matter. Before there was a business model, before there was a plan, there was a kid with a pen who couldn’t put it down. “I would just doodle and draw and just always have a have a pen or some chalk or a pencil or something in my hand and just like go into town with it.” That instinct never asked for approval. It just needed an outlet. Maybe yours doesn’t need a five-year plan either. Maybe it just needs you to pick the pen back up. Resourcefulness beats waiting for the right conditions, every time. As a kid, Darnell wanted to mow lawns for money. He didn’t own a lawnmower. He went door to door anyway. “I don’t got the lawnmower. But I got the grit and I got the will to actually do this and stuff for people.” He kept knocking until he found someone who had the tools and needed the help. No plan survives when you think “I don’t have what I need yet.” The plan survives when you show up anyway. Your idea doesn’t need $200 million. It needs a pilot. Darnell’s favorite metaphor: you walk into a movie studio pitching a blockbuster with no track record. They say no. Most people stop there. “The difference between me and them in that context is that if I would have went to you, yes, I would have did all of that, but if you said no to me, I wouldn’t continue to just go to the other studios. Like I would say, well, what’s a way that I could get this idea out without needing that much money to do it?” The idea doesn’t die because the funding said no. It gets smaller, scrappier, and out the door anyway. That’s the version that gets noticed. The smallest version of your idea is still the idea. Robert Rodriguez made his first film for $5,000, playing every behind the scenes role himself. Darnell described the exact same principle without ever having read the book. “Think about your pilot, man. Don’t think about the business model or anything yet. Get the idea out there.” You’re not failing by starting small. You’re doing the one thing that actually moves you from thinking about it to having made it. Community is the multiplier. Through Forge, Darnell works with entrepreneurs who don’t call themselves creative, helping them see that their business itself is a creative act. “We’re just there to basically align and integrate our entrepreneurial inclinations into our creative identity so that one isn’t at the expense of the other.” Cross-pollination through networking is recognizing that someone else already has the piece you’re missing, and you probably have theirs. Knowing your worth starts with knowing the right questions. A free lead magnet called Breaking the Time Barrier changed how Darnell thinks about pricing entirely, moving him away from hourly rates toward pricing based on value delivered. “How can I price things based on the value that I can provide if I’m working with you one-on-one... you have to be able to do that as well, I think, to be able to command a different price point.” Charging more isn’t about confidence alone. It’s about learning what to ask so you actually know what you’re worth to the person in front of you. The work you leave behind doesn’t need your name attached to matter. Darnell doesn’t have children, but he thinks often about creating things that outlive him. “I want to put out art that does outlive me, even though I don’t have children.” You don’t need a legacy plan. You need one piece of work good enough to still be useful after you’ve moved on to the next thing. Closing Reflection Darnell’s story keeps circling back to the same idea in different costumes: the lawnmower he didn’t have, the studio pitch he didn’t get, the years he spent not drawing because life got in the way. None of it stopped the work. It just meant the work had to get resourceful. What would your idea look like if you stopped waiting for the full budget, the perfect timing, or someone else’s permission, and just built the pilot instead?

What if you lost almost everything, except the one thing you were building? Migdalia Sanchez and Claudio Soriano (aka Migdy and Clau), didn’t set out to become authors. Migdy is a professional counselor and life coach. Clau has a background in electrical and process engineering. Both spent twenty years mentoring young adults, first as volunteers, then as certified life coaches, long before either of them thought about putting any of it into a book. Then came a workshop, a hurricane, a decade of writing, and a 450-page manuscript that had to be split in two just to become manageable. In this conversation, Migdy and Clau talk about what it actually took to turn twenty years of mentorship into their book What The FCK is Happening To Me? (Esp: ¡¿Qué PÑTA me está pasando?!) They also talk about why they left Puerto Rico with almost nothing, and why the project survived every single thing that tried to stop it. Note: Some quotes below have been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Highlights Trust isn’t given. It’s earned one relationship at a time. Migdy’s first experience with mentorship came through a volunteer program in Puerto Rico, matching mentors with teenagers from high-risk environments for a full year. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t supposed to be. “No matter if the program is finished, no matter if the school year ends, no matter if you change schools, that senior still looks for you. And they still call you… they keep in touch with us.” That’s something deeper than a program. It’s what happens when a young person finally gets to feel like someone showed up for them without needing anything in return. One offhand comment can change the whole direction of your work. Migdy and Clau spent years running relationship workshops for young adults before they ever thought about a book. The shift happened during one particular workshop, when they asked the room a simple question: who do you know that’s been together for more than ten years and is still happy? Only one or two hands went up. And one participant told them something neither of them expected to hear. “You are the only couple I know that you look happy together.” Out of thirty-something people in the room, that was the answer. It was an admission that healthy, long-term love wasn’t something most people in that room had ever witnessed up close. That’s when the idea of writing something bigger than a workshop started to take shape. Sometimes your audience finds you. The same workshop surfaced another realization neither of them expected. Parents in the room wanted the same guidance their kids were getting. “That means they understand that the parents need this information too. It’s something that they are looking for, that is something missing in their environment.” That was the moment the idea of a book stopped being abstract. Not because they set out to write for a wider audience, but because the wider audience showed up and asked for it first. Ten years is a long time to keep believing in something. What started as notes typed into a phone became a 450-page manuscript, then two separate books, illustrated, edited, translated, and self-published, all while Migdy and Clau kept mentoring, working day jobs, and raising a family. “That is a 10 years project. That idea was maybe 12 years ago. I don’t remember, but we start everything and hold the process. It took us almost 10 years.” Nobody hands you a book after ten years just because you stayed committed. But there’s no book at all if you don’t. AI can’t write the book that took you a decade to live. Clau is direct about what AI can and can’t do, especially for a project built on twenty years of real relationships and hard-won lessons. “There’s nothing in AI related in this book. People need to understand something. There’s a lot of people writing books and they’re writing books with AI. AI does not have the capacity to create something up until now. What it does is that it goes to the books that they have built or fit into the large language model and it creates something related to what you’re asking.” Migdy’s editor ended up teaching her to edit rather than editing for her, because she recognized something worth preserving. “Migdalia is an editor. Migdalia writes better than AI, let’s say, because this book was prior AI.” The book works because it came from two decades of sitting across from real young adults, not from an AI model. Resilience is the only reason the book exists. In 2017, Hurricane Maria destroyed the island Migdy and Clau called home. Clau lost his consulting work overnight. Their son’s therapy, school, and support systems disappeared along with the electricity and water. “We have been kicked out from Puerto Rico after the Hurricane Maria that hit… in 2017.” A childhood friend of Clau’s, reached by landline because there was no cell service left and paid for their plane tickets to Florida. They moved four times in three months. Clau couldn’t find work for six months. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the manuscript kept moving forward. “That book is so resilient… because the book survived the transition, the moving, the adaptation, the other adaptation that Claudio has to… another state.” The book survived because they refused to let it end. The first time you hold your book, nothing goes the way you pictured it. When the printing company sent a sample ahead of the full order, Migdy and Clau assumed they were finally about to hold the finished book. What arrived instead was a stack of loose, unbound pages, sent only to check paper weight and transparency. “We opened that envelope and what we found were pages... it was so frustrating.” The real moment came later, in Miami, picking up the full shipment straight off the pallet. “We were so exhausted that night... you know, so many people cry when they received the book and opened the book, smell the book. But we don’t have any more tears to cry… we were just watching the book and… we laugh.” Ten years of work, and the reaction wasn’t tears. It was laughter, because there was nothing else left to give it. Authenticity isn’t optional when your reader is young and paying attention. Clau’s advice to other authors comes from two decades of sitting across from teenagers and young adults who have zero patience for anything that isn’t real. “Young adults can smell shit a mile away. So they’ll find out if what you’re putting in the book, or when you’re coaching a young adult, if what you’re saying, you’re standing behind it.” Migdy adds the piece that keeps a project like this from collapsing under its own weight. “Do not reanalyze things because you’re going to paralyze the process. Just flow, flow and flow. Do not try to be perfect because it’s not going to happen. You have settle for being excellent.” And here’s the thing that actually gets a ten-year project across the finish line: “Never forget why for you are doing this. When you feel frustrated, when you feel stuck, keep going, and never forget the reason that put you in that situation.” The book is structured around whatever the reader needs. The book is built around seven chapters: Mommy and Daddy, Life and Stories, Who the F*** Am I, You’re Gonna F*** It Up, Distinctions and Ways of Being, After, and Couple Relationships. But Migdy and Clau don’t even agree on how it should be read. “I tell young adults, if you want to read the book, you go to the index and you read the name of the chapters, and if there’s something that resonates with you, read it and that’s it. Migdalia says, start with the book from the beginning and read it until the end.” Two authors, two voices, two philosophies on how to approach the same material and both work, depending on where the reader happens to be standing in their own life. Closing Reflection Migdy and Clau didn’t write this book because the timing was right. There was no good time. There was a hurricane, a job loss, a cross-country move, a son who needed support systems that had just been destroyed, and a decade of mentoring squeezed in around all of it. “That is a 10 years project... we start everything and hold the process.” The book is proof that the project you truly believe in doesn’t need perfect conditions to survive. It just needs you to keep showing up for it, one difficult year after another, until it’s finally real. If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too. You can find Migdy and Clau’s book at MigdyYClau.com and through Hola-Books.

What if the thing standing between you and your best work isn't a strategy problem? It's a permission problem. Christi Johnson spent ten years as a wedding photographer, earned a master’s degree in piano performance, and later burned out so badly as an online business manager that she stopped sleeping and had to shut her business down for six months. Now she runs the Dream Biz Playground, teaching creative and neurodivergent entrepreneurs to build businesses through creative play instead of hustle. In this conversation, Christi walks through what her crash and burn actually looked like, why she had to relearn how to sit at a piano without judging herself, and how a five-minute photo walk became the thing that pulled her back. Highlights Success on the outside doesn’t mean you’re okay on the inside. Christi was fully booked. Her online business management clients were happy. From the outside, everything looked like it was working. “We were booking clients, we were successful and things were like on the outside going really, really well, but I was extremely stressed... it got to the point where I was having panic attacks.” She kept pushing past the signs because she didn’t want to let her clients down, or her team, which included family members she’d hired. Eventually her body made the decision for her. She got sick for three months straight, and the exhaustion turned into a full breakdown. Maybe the metric you’re using to check in on yourself isn’t “is it working.” Maybe it’s “how do I feel while I’m doing it.” Permission over motivation. After the burnout, Christi assumed she’d never run a business again. Her coach’s first assignment wasn’t a strategy session. It was homework to lay around and watch TikTok without feeling guilty about it. “She gave me homework like that and we really focused on tapping into what actually really is fun for me.” Christi didn’t need a better system. She needed someone to tell her it was allowed to be easy. The self-judgment shows up long before the finished thing does. Christi has a master’s degree in piano. She went eight years without sitting down to play for fun, because in her head, playing meant working toward something impressive enough to post. “I had to make a conscious choice to allow myself the freedom to just sit down and play for fun... only recently haven’t I been able to sit down and just play for fun, play for five minutes, play whatever I want.” Notice what actually blocked her. It wasn’t lack of skill. It was an audience that existed only in her head, judging a video she hadn’t even made yet. Naming the block is the first move, not the last one. When Christi missed a business goal she’d set for herself, her instinct was to perform positivity about it. It took her coach pointing it out for her to admit she was actually disappointed. “I had to recognize, you know what I’m, I’m actually disappointed... I think the first step is like admitting it. Hey, I have this block. I’m discouraged about it.” Only after she named it could she ask the more useful question: what would be fun to try instead. Dream life exercises work because they collapse the timeline. One of Christi’s favorite tools with her community is having people build a paper zine mapping out a day in their dream life, then finding pieces of it they can bring into today. “What often happens when we do this exercise is that you will find really specific ways that you actually can bring your dream life to today... I don’t have to wait five, 10 years to pull these things into my dream life.” The exercise shows you that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is smaller than you thought. Leaning into what makes you you is the actual differentiator. Christi’s brand has nine colors in it, against every piece of conventional branding advice. It came from a piece of art she made in therapy. “The more you lean into yourself, the more you will attract people who want to be around that and also repel people who don’t.” You don’t need a bigger platform or a smarter funnel. Just stop editing of the parts of you that already work. Christi’s Challenge for You “With every single piece of content that you put out there... can you just ask yourself, how can this be more me? Or how can this be more fun? Or how can this be easier?” Closing Reflection Christi’s story isn’t really about photography, or piano, or even business strategy. It’s about what happens when you keep overriding your own signals long enough. She didn’t get her creativity back through a better routine. She got it back by giving herself permission to be bad at something, to rest without guilt, and to admit when she was disappointed instead of performing okay. What would it look like to ask “how can this be more me” about the next thing you create? Let us know in the comments.

What if the tool everyone else uses isn’t the only way in? Tiffany Yu is the author of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto and the founder of Diversability, an organization she built to help disabled people move through what she calls their shame-to-pride transformation. She was in a car accident at nine years old where her arm became permanently paralyzed. And she lived a decade feeling like there was no community built for someone like her. So she built one. In this conversation, Tiffany talks about how a literary agent found her through a fifteen-second TikTok, why she recorded her entire first draft instead of typing it, and how a book that almost didn’t get written on time ended up shaping a movement she never expected to be part of. Highlights She’s building the thing she wished existed. Tiffany didn’t come into disability advocacy through a career plan. She came into it through a decade of isolation, watching nine-year-old Tiffany go without the community she needed most. “I’m building and funding the things I wish existed when I was younger.” That’s the whole engine behind Diversability, the book, the TikTok series, all of it. It’s a memory of what was missing, turned into a mission to make sure the next person doesn’t have to go without it too. She didn’t write the book. She spoke it. Tiffany types with one hand. She knew from watching other writers develop injuries from overuse that typing an entire manuscript wasn’t sustainable for her body. So instead of forcing herself into the process everyone else uses, she built her own. “What are some creative ways that I can continue to write this book, lean into my strengths?” She recorded every chapter using a speech-to-text tool called Otter.ai, turned the transcripts into a rough skeleton, and edited from there. When she shared this publicly, she heard from people with hand injuries, arthritis, and their own barriers to writing, people who’d quietly given up on the idea of ever finishing a book. “Essentially, what I’m doing is you want a book, the way I’m going to do it may look different, but eventually you will get the book, right? I’m just doing it a little bit differently.” You don’t have to follow the same road everyone else takes, just the one that actually works for you. The book found her before she went looking for it. Tiffany wrote a letter to her high school guidance counselor once, mentioning that maybe someday she’d write a book. She forgot about it for fifteen years. Then a literary agent found her through a short-form TikTok series she’d started almost by accident, and a few months later, a publisher reached out directly before she’d even finished her book proposal. “Hachette at that particular point in time had also published books from a lot of my fellow disability advocate friends.” She got the book deal on November 11th, 2022. “I don’t know about you, 11.11 is meaningful if you are someone who views repeating numbers as what I like to call gentle nudges from the universe or messages that you’re moving in the right direction.” Nobody plans for a book deal to arrive before the proposal is finished. But sometimes the work you’ve already been doing publicly is the proposal, whether you meant it to be or not. Structure the book so people can find what they need. Tiffany built her book around a framework called Me-We-Us: what you need to understand about yourself, what you need to understand in relationship with others, and what all of us need to build together to create real change. “I think too often we jump to part three because we’re like, okay, policy change, let’s get to it. But if you haven’t done the internal work, the me, like why do I care so much about this particular topic, then you’re actually gonna jump to a place and it’s gonna feel performative.” Every chapter title is the takeaway of that chapter, on purpose. Because unlike fiction, where mystery pulls the reader forward, a book meant to create change has one job: help someone find exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. Make yourself impossible to forget. Tiffany’s book cover is orange. It almost wasn’t. And she leaned into that color so hard it became part of her. “I made my whole personality an orange book cover.” She kept her title short enough to include both roles that mattered to her, author and founder of Diversability, so that even a passing glance could spark curiosity in someone who didn’t know her yet. Standing out doesn’t require being the loudest voice in the room. All it takes is being unmistakably you. The book creates connections you never planned for. Tiffany didn’t expect her favorite part of the whole process to be the book events. But she learned to love the rooms full of strangers who showed up because of something she wrote. “There are two people who were on my launch team, who one lives in Los Angeles, the other lives in New York. They met through the launch team, kind of stayed connected, had a lot of other points of connection... and they just met in person for the first time in New York, like maybe a month ago. And that’s pretty cool.” A book doesn’t just reach a reader. Sometimes it introduces two people who never would have found each other otherwise, and gives them a reason to build something together long after they’ve turned the last page. Purpose makes it last. Tiffany doesn’t measure the success of her book by a single launch day. She measures it by whether the message is still doing something, still reaching people, long after the initial noise has faded. “I want people to feel hopeful that creating an accessible, disability inclusive society is possible. And I want people to not only feel hope, but know that their action in collective action is what is gonna create change.” That’s the difference between writing something for the moment and writing something built to outlast it. Closing Reflection Tiffany Yu didn’t write her book the way anyone told her to. She spoke it instead of typing it. She structured it so a reader could skip straight to the chapter they needed. She picked an orange cover and made it part of who she is. None of it followed the rulebook, and all of it worked. “You are gonna be the one who is the most excited about your book.” Tiffany reminds us that you’re allowed to build the process that fits you, and still end up with something that changes the room. If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.