I Did Not Need to Stop Building. I Needed to Know Why I Was Building. A very different way of looking at ambition, money and success.
Episode Description
For years, I tried to leave the entrepreneur in me behind.
I had built a fashion business from almost nothing, starting with around €500 and eventually selling in more than 40 countries. I made my first million around the age of 25, learned everything from production to international growth, and became very good at the game of building a business.
But there was a question I had never really asked myself: Why did I need to win?
Looking back, I can see that some of my ambition came from a genuine love of creating and building, but some of it came from somewhere much more personal. I wanted to make money, I wanted to be successful, I wanted to be seen, and I wanted my father to see what I was capable of.
When life eventually stopped the hamster wheel I had been running on, I began questioning not only what I had built, but the person I had become while building it. For several years, I went so far in the opposite direction that I almost rejected the entrepreneur in me completely.
Now I understand that entrepreneurship was never the problem.
I did not need to stop building. I needed to understand where I was building from.
In this episode, I talk about ambition, money, success, pain, external validation and what changes when we become honest about the real reasons we want what we want. I also share why, after years of resisting the label, I am finally ready to say again that I am an entrepreneur.
The ambition is still there. The love of building is still there. What has changed is the intention behind it.
Because perhaps the most important question is not What do you want to build?
It is:
Why do you want to build it?
In This Episode
I share the story of building my fashion company from around €500 into an international business, making my first million around 25, and developing the instinct and skills that made entrepreneurship almost second nature to me. But we go much deeper than business.
We explore what happens when ambition is partly fueled by pain and the desire to be seen, why external success cannot necessarily satisfy an internal need, and how easily achievement can become a sophisticated hamster wheel.
I also talk about the years when I rejected my entrepreneurial identity, why I now see that as another form of denying myself, and what it means to build from a place of purpose without losing ambition, money, growth or the joy of the game.
Most importantly, I invite you to ask yourself the question I wish I had asked much earlier:
Why are you doing what you are doing, and would you still want it if nobody were watching?
Chapters
00:00 Why I tried to stop being an entrepreneur
01:52 Loving the game versus needing to win
03:48 When pain and external validation drive ambition
05:57 The question I wish I had asked before building
07:52 Why I am redefining ambition rather than rejecting it
09:46 What changes when you start building from within
10:46 The question I want you to ask yourself