Kat Elizabeth on why the urge to start a Substack, podcast or channel is worth following even if it never leads anywhere, and how to commit long enough to find out.
6 Things Actors Should Know About Starting a Creative Side Project
Drawn from what is actually said on camera, so you can decide whether to
spend the 11:12 watching it.
Endless questions mean you are in the dark forest
Kat maps this moment on her mythic journey: the call comes, you step into the unknown, and the doubts arrive. If you keep asking whether it is silly, how you will do it and what it is for, you are stuck there. Strategy and logic do not get you out.
Many of her clients stay in planning mode because they think knowing every next step will remove the fear. It does not. Action leads to answers and creation leads to clarity, and the signposts, people and resources show up only once you start moving.
Kat says it plainly: this might never be monetized, never blow up your career and never connect to what comes next. Underneath the strategy questions is usually a fear of public humiliation. The project can still be worth doing on its own terms.
Her own Substack went nowhere and still changed her direction
She started one a couple of years ago and published very little on it. It still gave her permission to show up in a softer, more personal way, and that shifted her whole business, even though Substack is not part of that business.
The thing you feel called to do is rarely about the thing itself. It is about what doing it allows you to become. Kat compares the nudge to a scientific hypothesis: you know something first, then run the experiment to find the evidence.
Setting up the account is the easy part. The real work is the next week and the week after, when you have no ideas, no time or a troll in the comments. Pick the smallest schedule you can keep, give it real limits and do not read the first friction as a sign to quit.
This is for the person who's been thinking of starting a Substack or maybe a YouTube channel or a podcast or an Instagram account or even a good old-fashioned blog and you have been thinking about it for a while now. Like you're struggling to get off the fence and you are potentially in the zone of overthinking at this point. This is not going to be your typical why you should launch a Substack in 2026 kind of video. Like we're not actually going to be very strategic about this because I want to get you out of your head and into your heart or whatever you call your internal compass, that place of deeper knowing because I truly believe that if you're being called to this right now and the motivation is intrinsic, it's come from within. it doesn't necessarily make logical sense. Like it doesn't fully align with the path that you're on and doesn't lead anywhere and it's not that you have some plan to monetize or anything like that. You just feel like I think I'm supposed to start this thing. Well, I believe that there is a much deeper reason for this. I believe you are being called to your next level of expression to more fully embody all of your gifts and express all of those aspects of yourself. But we can very easily get stuck in overthinking this because while it feels like this really big deal to us, to the outside world, they might be like, "What's the big deal? It's not that deep." Or like, "Just start the thing." Or they might be like, "Why would you bother? Like you already have so much else going on.
Why would you want to create all this extra work just for it to lead nowhere?" I'm here to tell you that I believe it is that deep. It's deeper than deep. There is a part of you right now that is crying out to be expressed and that is really exciting and it can also be really scary. Actually, I'm going to pull up a map right now and show you exactly where you're at in this journey. So, this is a mythic map from my mythic journeys in case you're wondering. And we begin every one of our journeys, which are cyclical by the way. You're going to do this more than once in your life. You probably already have done it many more times than once in your life. But we begin with the call and it is this thing that tells us it's time to do something different. It's time to embark on a new journey and to step into the unknown. But as soon as we step into the unknown, we end up in the dark forest. The dark forest is where all the doubts come up, where we ask those questions, where there are all sorts of monsters and creepy things hiding in the shadows who are trying to scare us into turning back and staying where it is safe, staying where it's known.
And so if you are right now questioning why am I even wanting to do this? Is this silly? What am I really doing? How am I going to do it? If you're really stuck in the question asking and not taking action, then you are in the dark forest right now. And it's really important to understand that strategy and logic won't get us out of the dark forest. Neither will even having this perfect plan. A lot of my clients come to me because they have been stuck in planning mode for too long. They think as long as they know the 47 next steps that they need to take, then it'll stop being so scary in this dark forest. But the thing is, the only thing that gets us out of the dark forest is action because action leads to answers and creation leads to clarity. So when you start moving, the sparks will actually soon appear so that they can guide you. Those sparks are those glimmers.
It's like, "Oh, there's confirmation. Oh, there's a signpost. I'm going to keep moving in this direction." Sometimes the sparks are the people that show up to help us or the resources that suddenly appear. Sometimes it's just our own creativity coming more fully online and us being filled with a different kind of certainty that doesn't exist while we're in overthinking mode. But I know that one of the big questions that we can get stuck on is like, "Okay, but then what? Where is this actually leading? What is the big picture point of me doing this thing?" Because we are absolutely living in a day and age where everything has to be monetized. We all have to have a reason for doing whatever it is we're doing that is strategic and that leads to making money. And when we are at this part of the journey and we don't have all of those answers, that can feel like a dead end of like, well, if I can't justify this strategically, if I can't justify this financially, then I probably shouldn't move forward. And I think one of the deeper questions that can come up that is hidden beneath these questions of strategy and logic and financial viability underneath it is the yeah but what if this goes nowhere? What if all this does is leads to like public humiliation? And this is where I want to kind of rip off the band-aid and speak to the elephant in the room and say this thing that you're doing right now may absolutely lead nowhere.
It may not have some direct connection to this thing that comes next. Like, this may not be the thing that you monetize. This may not blow up your career. This may not be the thing that magically unfolds all of the other strategy for the rest of your life that you're searching for. But that's not why we do these things. Sometimes we launch things and they actually build momentum and they become this vessel that leads us somewhere else in our lives. And yet, this can be just as worthy an endeavor if it doesn't end up doing that for you. Because while it may not lead to these really obvious payoffs in the outside world, going on journeys like this, committing to projects like this have the potential to be very transformational experiences. Things that help us evolve from one version of who we are to the next version of who we're supposed to become. I actually started a Substack a couple of years ago that has so far gone nowhere because what I was finding was that I did not have an outlet for me to experiment with my expression. I wanted to start playing with new kinds of expression, sharing things that felt a lot more personal to me, a lot softer, a lot more poetic, a lot more artistic. and the business that I had set up and the platforms that I had set up weren't allowing me to do that.
And I created the Substack and didn't publish a whole lot of content. And yet the process of me publishing what I did, even just the permission slip it gave me to start showing up in a different way. It actually unlocked something in me and has helped really shift my trajectory with my business even though Substack is not part of my business. So, it became this meaningful move that I made and it was guided intuitively like it did not make logical sense and if I had shut it down just on the fact that I don't need this for my business right now, I never would have had the opportunity to lean into this and have this send me in a new direction with my expression. And this is what is completely overlooked in this day and age. The thing that we're being called to do is rarely about the thing itself. It's about what that thing is going to allow you to become through the process of doing it, of trying it. So, it doesn't actually matter if this thing lasts a week, a month, a year, or a decade. I believe your soul is asking you to have this experience. And this is me getting a little bit woo, but I believe that as soon as you allow yourself to have that experience, like you commit to it. What you're doing is selecting a new timeline that actually is going to open up all sorts of other opportunities even if they're not directly related to this thing that you're doing. So, Kat, are you saying that I should start the thing?
Should I do this thing? Is that what you're saying? Well, here's the thing. I'm not the person who can tell you whether this is right for you or not, but I did pull a card for your final contemplation. The card is nosis, which is about innermost knowing and mystic truths. And essentially what it says is that true knowledge isn't found in facts and figures and, you know, books that we get at the library. It comes from this deeper knowing. I mean, I truly believe that so often we know something to be true first and then what we do is we find the evidence in the outside world to back it up. In fact, this is how so many scientific discoveries actually happen is that someone has this hypothesis, this nudge that I think that this might lead to that I think a plus b equals c. And then what they do is they set up scientific experiments to prove it. So, here's the thing. You have this niggle, this nudge, this hypothesis that you are potentially supposed to be doing this thing, launching this platform.
The only way you're going to figure out why truly you were supposed to be doing this and what it could lead to is by allowing yourself to follow through on that niggle, on that nudge. So, if this is the thing that you want to do, I say go do it. with one caveat and this is my recommendation take it with a grain of salt but whatever you do follow through as much as you can now I know I said it doesn't matter if this thing lasts a week a month a year but the thing is you are naturally going to experience all sorts of friction and challenges like as you are becoming this new version of you through this project you are going to be challenged there is going to be tension and the sooner you give into that and go oh this is a sign I'm not supposed to be doing it, the sooner you cut off the potential for this transformation. And so, I highly recommend that if you're going to do this thing, at least commit for a minimum amount of time, 3 months, maybe even 6 months. I know that sounds a lot. I'm not saying you have to publish every single day, but figure out what is the absolute minimum commitment that you could make to really see through this hypothesis that you have. Cuz truly all of the juiciness, all of the the gold or the treasure that could come from this experience is going to come every single time you can come face to face with those challenges and you find a way to overcome them. The act of just setting up a Substack or whatever platform that you're going to do requires very little from you. Okay, that is actually the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what comes next. What happens the next week and the next week? What happens when you don't have any inspiration?
What happens when you're pushed for time? What happens when you get some sort of negative feedback or a troll? All of those things are what are actually transforming us. So, if you're going to do this thing, do it for real. I'm not saying you can never quit. Of course, you can quit. But make sure that this experiment has some actual confines involved. So, with all of that out of the way, I'm going to hand this back to you and say it's now up to you to make this decision. And if you would like to tell me what you ended up deciding and even sharing a link if you decide to launch something, please do so in the comments. I would love to hear from you. Thank you for being here. I'll chat to you soon.
Bye for now.
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