EP114: The Radical Power of Doing Sh*t, Just Because

What if joy didn’t need justification? In this episode, I call out the sh*tty, toxic pressure to monetize every moment and be productive at all costs. From a simple Pilates practice to dancing alone in the kitchen, I shine a light on what we lose when everything becomes a performance — and why reclaiming your time, mediocrity, and autonomy is a radical act of self-leadership. If you’ve ever been made to feel like your hobbies need a purpose (or a paycheck), this episode is your permission slip to stop performing and start living. This isn’t about anti-capitalism. It’s about coming back to yourself.

Chapters

• 0:57 Welcome to Business Blasphemy
• 1:45 When Joy Needs Justification
• 4:05 Three Things We Lose
• 6:03 Self-Leadership is Messy
• 9:39 Do Something Useless
• 11:17 Closing and Call to Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Welcome to the Business Blasphemy Podcast, where we question the sacred truths of the online business space and the reverence with which they're held. I'm your host, sarah Khan speaker, strategic consultant and BS busting badass. Join me each week as we challenge the norms, trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello blasphemers, welcome back. You want to know what's exhausting Feeling like. Every decision you make has to be productive, has to be strategic, has to be monetizable. Let me give you some real life rage fuel.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Okay, I told someone recently that I started Pilates twice a week, 50 minutes, nothing intense, just a way to feel more present in my body, move a little, breathe a little, show up for myself a little, and I'm doing it with my older daughter, which is great because it gives us time to do something together and bond and we both really enjoy it. And, to be honest, I haven't really moved my body in any kind of a meaningful way since my younger daughter was born seven or eight years ago, so I shared this and they looked me in the face, dead serious, and said oh, that's not really enough to lose weight. Though, right, when I tell you, it took everything in me not to flip the fucking table, because when did we start needing to justify joy? Why can't it be enough to do something that simply feels good? And I want to talk about that today. I want to talk about how the world keeps trying to turn every spark of joy into a business plan and why saying no to that pressure is a radical act of much-needed self-leadership. I want to get something straight. Okay, this is not about capitalism. I'm not ranting on capitalism. This is about autonomy and identity and self-leadership.

Speaker 1: 2:34

There is this cultural obsession right now where the second you enjoy something, people rush in to ask well, what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it? You learn to bake bread or you make really good recipes oh, you should sell those. You should start a restaurant. You should start an Instagram channel. Get into watercolor oh, you should open an Etsy shop. You go hiking oh, you could start a wellness brand. And I get it right. I get it.

Speaker 1: 2:58

We live in a world that rewards productivity and performance, but the consequence that few people think about? We've been trained out of doing things just because we want to. We've been taught that anything that doesn't serve our image or our brand or our bank account is somehow a waste of time. And that is a dangerous belief, particularly for leaders and especially for ambitious women who have internalized the idea that every hour must earn its keep, that unless you are doing, you are not productive and somehow your value does not exist. And here's what we're losing in the process.

Speaker 1: 3:40

When we frame everything around outcomes, we lose three very powerful things. Number one we lose the ability to be present. When you are always thinking about how something might pay off, we lose the ability to be present. When you are always thinking about how something might pay off, you're not actually in the experience. You're half a step ahead. You're calculating ROI, you're wondering if this moment will translate into content or influence.

Speaker 1: 4:03

It's kind of like if you listened to a few episodes back where I lost my phone. I didn't lose it, it was stolen. My phone got stolen in Spain and I did not have a phone for a week and a half of my two-week trip and it forced me to sit and be present. I had an entire content calendar planned out. I knew exactly which pictures I was going to take and what I was going to take pictures in front of, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when I lost my phone, let me tell you, it forced me to sit down and actually be in the moment, to enjoy the flavors in a cup of tea, to enjoy nature when we were at the lake, instead of worrying about taking pictures of the swans and setting it up so that it was something I could post on Instagram. Presence is the foundation of clarity and that presence that I was forced to have. It was the catalyst for all of the clarity and all of the changes I've been making in my business and, for the first time in years, I feel so aligned and so in myself that it is freaking unbelievable. So, like I said, presence is the foundation of clarity. If you cannot be where your feet are, you cannot trust your thoughts, your needs or your boundaries, and without that, your leadership becomes reactive instead of intentional, and this is a really big one.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Being bad at something has become taboo, especially for people who are used to being excellent, gifted people. But the truth is, mastery is born in mediocrity. If you're only willing to do things that you're good at, you're never going to grow. And maybe you don't want to hear this, but you don't build success by staying safe. You build it by sucking at something, staying with the discomfort and learning from that, growing from that. Mediocrity is not failure. It is actually freedom. It's a stepping stone to something greater and it's proof that you're stretching beyond your current identity, which is where the evolution happens.

Speaker 1: 6:08

But we are so worried about what people are going to think. People are not thinking about you. They don't give a shit. You think of yourself way more than anybody else does, and you have to allow yourself to be bad at things in order to be good at things and then eventually be great at things. And number three we lose a relationship with ourselves when everything becomes performative. You stop asking yourself, do I like this? And you start asking will people approve of this? I want to say that again you stop asking do I like this and you focus on whether people will approve of it. Instead, you start building your life based on optics instead of alignment. You start making choices to manage perception instead of honoring the truth that you know deep down. And here's where it becomes really really critical True leadership, true success.

Speaker 1: 7:01

Whatever your end point, your end goal is, it doesn't come from external affirmation. It comes from knowing who you are. It comes from knowing what you value. It comes from knowing how to move through the world in a way that feels like you, even when nobody is watching. And we don't do that enough. We really really need to stop and come back into relationship with ourselves, and that has to start with allowing ourselves to do things for joy, to do things simply because we want to do them, with allowing ourselves to do things for joy, to do things simply because we want to do them. That's real, honest-to-goodness self-leadership. And self-leadership is the catalyst for any goal achievement. It's the catalyst for any happiness, it's the catalyst for better boundaries, for literally everything. Self-leadership is what it takes.

Speaker 1: 7:48

But a lot of leadership experts will talk about self-leadership like it's this polished thing. Right, you journal, you have vision boards, you have high performance routines, you're part of the 5am fucking success club. I have a whole rant about that, I'm not going to get into today. But no, self-leadership is actually messy. It's doing the thing anyway. Right, doing the thing anyway, even if it's inefficient, if it's imperfect, oh God, especially if it doesn't scale right. It's choosing Pilates twice a week because it makes you feel good, not because you're trying to get lean or post-transformation pictures or build a fucking brand or content strategy around it. It's baking cookies and burning half the batch and still enjoying the process. It's sketching in a notebook. You know no one is ever gonna see. God, I'm getting emotional. It's it's dancing in your kitchen at midnight because you want to.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Those things matter and the second you tell yourself they don't unless they produce results. You have lost your compass, your inner guide, you have lost your true north. So here is the radical ask that I'm making of you this week Can you let yourself do something just because you want to? Can you give yourself permission to be mediocre, to fall on your ass, to not finish, to not monetize? Because that is where real growth happens, that is where identity gets built and reinforced, that is where your capacity expands and that is how you start separating who you are from what you produce.

Speaker 1: 9:44

Like, I'm not going to tell you to journal about this. I'm going to tell you to do something useless this week. I want you to carve out time for one thing that has no ROI, no social value, no path to monetization, just joy and you know what. Don't turn it into content. In fact, put your phone in another room. Don't explain it to anybody. In fact, put your phone in another room. Don't explain it to anybody. Don't even tell them you're doing it. Just let it be yours, let it be messy, let it be pointless. Because in a world that measures everything, choosing not to be measured is its own kind of power.

Speaker 1: 10:28

I'm Sarah Kahn. This is Business Blasphemy and, like I say every single week, you can have success without the BS. But sometimes you need to remember that not everything needs a strategy. Some things just need space. I'll talk to you next week. Some things just need space. I'll talk to you next week. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blasphemy Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help a sister out by subscribing and, if you're feeling extra sassy rating this podcast, and don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to businessblasphemypodcastcom to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening and remember you can have success without the BS.