An Ode to 50 Cent

Welcome to Hot Girl Breakthrough, where I provide actionable ideas and curated insights to help you do you, but better.

Today’s Breakdown

Question: Are Your Goals Even Yours?

You’ve probably all read the viral NYT article on NYC cost of living. The writers asked several people what their dream life looks like, and then found people who actually live that life to cost it up. If you haven’t already read it, I’d highly recommend. My favourite quote - two parents we spoke to spend $75 a month just on strawberries and blueberries.

As you can imagine, nobody said “I want to live in an average home, eating at mediocre restaurants with minimal disposal income”.

What struck me as interesting wasn’t the specificity of peoples aspiring lifestyles, but how they came to those conclusions. In essence, who taught them to want those things? 

Ask yourself, why do you have certain goals and want the things you want?

I’ve been having this conversation with a number of friends recently. Ambitious, hard-working women who are…kind of just over it. In the wake of peak “girl boss” culture and post-Covid era, we seem to be redefining how we want to live our lives.

The world is obsessed with growth. If you’re employed, the focus is on promotion and climbing the ladder. Business owners seem to only be praised when they’ve had record eye-watering growth and hit major milestones. It’s not to say those things are bad but more to question why do we want them and why is it so bad to stay where we are? 

Success is shaped by what we see around us. We’ve been conditioned by a version of success which typically centres around working hard as a route to economic comfort, but do the benchmarks you strive for align with what you want?

A rather basic, yet universally shared list in modern Western capitalist society defines the tenets of success as buy a house, get married, have kids, work hard, make money. Untangling societal ideals and identifying what you authentically want for yourself is a process.

Perhaps the most difficult hurdle in defining success is that it requires you to know what you want. Echoing an earlier newsletter, many of us struggle to know what we want when we’re taught to put the happiness of others above our own.

Over the last 3 years, I’ve tussled with my own definition of success and what it even means. Do I want to pursue my big hairy audacious goals to feel purposeful, are they driven by ego or is it fear?

I grew up living in council houses, I had to self-parent from an early age making me hyper-independent, I watched my mum work back-breaking manual labour cash-in-hand jobs and battle with my Dad for child support. We were happy but I did not want that kind of life for myself.

My early environment instilled in me the need to work hard to always have my own money and therefore my own power. The underlying current was to become a self-sufficient machine so I would never have to rely on anyone or ask for help.

My survival was masquerading as ambition.

It’s a common unconscious strategy that worked for me until I realised that choosing to do things alone is pretty shit, there’s no badge of honour for going solo and not feeling vulnerable (or strong) enough to ask for help is not how I want to live my life.

What does your dream life look like? What does it feel like?

Having Peace > Having a Porsche. No amount of Birkins will alleviate burnout.

I do not want to break my back. I want to navigate fluidly, while of course still understanding the natural peaks and troughs of life, but not grinding at my own detriment. I want to become at peace with the seasonality of life - there is a time for seeding and a time for harvest.

Some elements will come to fruition through action, whereas others are enabled by money and I want to be financially wealthy in order to buy back my time. My version of success includes an abundance of money. I want to be rich and enriched in every essence of the word and in every area of my life. I also would love Porsche.

So to come full circle, take some time this week to truly think and write down what your dream life looks and feels like. And then cost it up financially and energetically.

You want a cleaner twice a week so you can spend more time visiting family? How much would that be? A healthy body and mind are a top priority? How much time will you need to carve out for movement that makes you feel good?

Sit down and envision your ideal life but don’t just dream it, reverse engineer it.

How To Get Unstuck

Scott Galloway is a marketing professor at NYU and founder of business education platform Section School. I’ve followed him for years and read his newsletter. He hosted a webinar last month about how to get unstuck.

40ish minute watch but worth it! Watch here.

They discuss:

• Tactical patience as a strategy.

• Seasons of exploring vs exploiting. Exploring = try everything to find what you like, saying yes is your default. Exploiting = narrow down on your idea, saying no is default.

• “You’re an index fund of yourself”

• Life is in 3 buckets of things we have to do, want do and should do. Focus and luxury comes by eliminating the “shoulds”

Breakthroughs

💄Fancy a facial? I had the divine pleasure of checking out Andrea Pfeffer’s new beauty clinic Salon C Stellar on Monday for a facial. Andrea is a beauty industry veteran when it comes to curating exceptionally results-driven treatments with a holistic edge. A surprisingly peaceful haven in the heart of Soho, I’d highly recommend a visit for a bespoke treatment and skin refresh.

🧘‍♀️ Yoga is helping me release a LOT of emotions. I’ll be in child’s pose weeping and it feels so good! Working my way through this YouTube channel because I really like her vibe and tone.

See you next week!

Rhea x

PS. Thoughts, feedback or just wanna say hi? Email me here