"On The Internet, Everyone Looks Rich" with Jenny Blake

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:00)
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I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. The title of this episode is On the Internet, Everyone is Rich. Now, of course, that's not literally true. It stems from a conversation that I had a few years ago with a friend who is also a professional content creator. I guess you could call her an influencer. And she said, you know, I just feel like compared to everyone else I follow, I'm doing so much work and I'm making so little money.
And I actually knew the person she was talking about, and I knew that that person also wasn't having a very good year. And while I didn't spill the beans on my friend, I did say, you know what? On the internet, everyone looks rich, because that's what we do, especially if we work for ourselves, right? We have to eat what we kill. And so we want to present a certain kind of image. We all look like we're killing it. But when it comes to the actual revenue we're bringing in, things get a lot more opaque. And today is a really frank and open conversation between two self-employed people who have definitely killed it at times, but have been having, you know, in Jenny's case, a rough few years, and in my case, a rough year. And I really love this conversation because it's very honest about money and revenue. And also how we, as people who work in the field of leadership development and personal growth, try to thread the needle between believing the sometimes toxic positivity that we all spew about hope and resilience and rebirth and regrowth and pivoting with the fact that you don't know if it will get better. You don't know if your business will turn around. This could be a failure or as Jenny calls it, a flop.
And that's something that we have to deal with. And how Jenny deals with it is with art and creativity and writing and putting one foot in front of the other and her very special mad libs and permissions lips. So this is a great conversation for anyone who's been just having a rough year. And I know many of you are Jenny Blake.
Jenny, I'm so excited.
I inhale your substack and I'm really happy to have you here.

**Jenny Blake** (4:14)
Oh, well, thank you. And as I told you before your record, I've been a long time listener and admirer from so far away. And the day I saw you subscribe to Rolling in Dough, I squealed with glee. And I just thought I must be doing something right if Morra is reaching out. So it's really a treat. It's like a culmination of many, many years of loving this podcast and what you do. So I'm thrilled to be here.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (4:38)
Oh, gosh. Well, thank you. I mean, I'm struck in reading your body of work also. Just I feel like we might be the same person.
But that's really a little bit of what I want to touch on today is you write so openly and so beautifully about the creative journey of not knowing as an entrepreneur and the stakes. And one of the things that I like about your writing, and where I think we are not the same person, is that you are very hopeful and you look to art and nature and lived experience to inform that hope in your writing, which is so wonderful. But I have a question for you, which I want us to sort of explore today, as well as you can share your story and your thinking with the audience, which is, what if it doesn't all work out? It's something that I have been wrestling with myself in the past few months. I've had just a terrible year in my business. And you know, I'm turning 50 this year. And I was like, what if I'm done? What if the pivot that I have embarked upon since 2022, when I sold my business and tried to do sort of work placemental health full time? What if it's failed? And it struck me to be like, wait a minute, Morra, it can't fail because you're resilient and you're strong and you meditate and you do all the right things. And then it was sort of like, well, who says? Like people deal with failure every single day. Why are you so special? So I kind of want to explore that a little bit. Your own thoughts, where you are in your journey.