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Welcome to Joyful Ambition. Every Thursday, this letter is our session: one idea you can implement, from a three-time founder with 18+ years of entrepreneurship and $280M+ in client results, for women entrepreneurs who run expert and service-based businesses.

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Hi Visionary,

I run a company called Pretty Damn Ambitious, so you might expect every letter from me to push you toward something enormous: the bigger launch, the longer list, the goal that keeps you up at night. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I ask for one thing each week, with a smaller version in weeks when you have less to give. Ambition, the way I practice it, has to fit inside a real life, with clients, family, and a calendar that changes by the hour. When life gets that full, even the most capable women get overwhelmed, and we deserve strategies built for the complexity we actually carry.

Some of my best thinking happens in the shower. Something about the water loosens whatever I’ve been gripping all day, and the answer I've been chasing at my desk finally arrives there. Where does yours show up? The shower, a long drive, a walk around the block?

Last December, I found an answer there, in the shower. I was preparing for a workshop I had planned months earlier with Christen N. James, known as CJ, a side-hustle coach for women building businesses around their full-time jobs. One picture kept following me: a woman walking through her front door on a Thursday night, still in her work clothes, with one hour left before her body clocks out. She has the laptop and the good intentions. What she lacks is a starting point, so the hour drains away as she negotiates with her to-do list, and she ends up scrolling through strangers' accomplishments instead of working on her dreams.

Maybe you left the full-time job years ago, and that hour still finds you. It shows up on the Saturday morning you cleared for the business, when you finally sit down and have nothing left to give. It shows up at the end of a day of client calls and family logistics.

That hour is where a lot of good businesses stall, quietly, one lost hour at a time.

The fix that came to me in the shower was almost embarrassingly small, and that turned out to be its strength.