External Validation versus Intrinsic Motivation

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Look, I’m not saying Taylor Elyse Morrison has figured it all out, but she did launch an entire coaching business in one week while actively avoiding her PhD coursework, which is either BIG galaxy brain energy or the most relatable form of procrastination I’ve ever witnessed.

She’s out here juggling multiple businesses, consulting for Google, getting her doctorate, and casually dropping wisdom about portfolio careers while also seeming to have a lot of fun and make a lot of cool stuff. Which makes her the perfect person to talk to about embracing your multiplicity and experimenting in public.

In this conversation, we talk about why so many of us are climbing career ladders only to realize we hate the view from the top, how to know if you’re being strategic or just performing for LinkedIn, and whether that thing you’re working on needs to be your magnum opus or if it can just be, like, a regular bone in the skeleton of your life’s work.

We also get into the very real shame around being an experimenter, why consistency has been weaponized against creative people, and how to tell if you actually want the thing or just want to post about having the thing. If you’ve ever felt like you should want what you have but secretly dream about burning it all down and starting something new — or if you’ve been waiting to feel “expert enough” to do literally anything — this one’s for you.

In this episode we talk about...

Action as expertise-building. Why “building expertise through just action” actually works better than waiting until you feel qualified enough, and how Taylor Morrison went from procrastinating on a PhD project to launching an entire coaching offer in one week (spoiler: it involved a lot of specificity and zero permission-seeking).

The shame of experimenting. What it really means when high achievers are terrified of looking “flaky,” why consistency has been weaponized against creative people with active minds, and how to tell the difference between running away from a challenge versus running toward something that actually lights you up.

Portfolio careers and the “so what?” moment. Why climbing the hill only to hate the view is the defining career crisis of our generation, what happens when external validation stops working, and how to figure out if you actually want the thing or just want to post about having the thing.

The minimum lovable product approach. How to launch something in a week instead of spending months perfecting it, why AI can help but specificity is what makes your work actually good, and the surprisingly liberating truth that not everything you create has to be “your big thing” — sometimes it’s just your femur in the skeleton of your body of work.

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