Once upon a time, when I was developing my first doesn’t-need-me-live evergreen course, I was eating cereal for dinner — again — standing at the kitchen counter at 9pm writing a launch email on my laptop with one hand and spooning Cheerios with the other. I had at least 6 tabs open — Stripe, ActiveCampaign, Canva, a Google Doc with a half-finished sales page, another Google Doc with social posts I was supposed to have scheduled yesterday. I had cancelled cable TV two weeks earlier. Not for philosophical reasons. Because I needed the hours back.
And somewhere on Instagram, a business coach in a cream-colored room with a candle lit behind her was talking about how she only works four hours a day and her business runs itself and it all just flows.
I looked at the Cheerios. I looked at the accusatory tabs. And I thought: I must be doing this all wrong.
Rachel Rodgers has a phrase I love: “work hard once.” Build the infrastructure, build it well, let it run, cash the cheques, enjoy. That’s the soft life. That’s the dream. It’s real — I’ve helped a lot of people get there.
What I object to isn’t the destination. It’s the lie about how you get there.
The lie is that you can build a scaled, course-based, IP-driven business gently. Slowly. With ease. In just four hours a day in your linen pants with a matcha in hand. No hustle. Just flow.
And if you’re reading that and feeling a knot in your stomach — because your build doesn’t look like that, because you’re exhausted, because you’re wondering why it’s so hard for you when it seems so easy for everyone else — I want you to know: that knot is the damage.
That’s what the false expectation of ease does. It takes women who are doing something genuinely difficult and labour-intensive and makes them feel like they’re failing at it. You see the linen pants and the matcha and the four-hour workday and you look at your own fourteen browser tabs and your cereal dinner and your cancelled cable and you think something must be wrong with you.
And if you take the soft-life messaging seriously, you stop pushing so hard because apparently the pushing is the problem. The soft life lie can make you stop doing the hard thing that would actually get you to the other side.
That’s not aspirational. That’s a containment mechanism wearing a silk robe.
The soft life is what’s on the other side of the build. The build itself is the “work hard once” part. And it’s real, lots-of-hours work.
What “build a course” actually means
When a client gets excited and tells me about this brilliant idea they have and want to turn into a course or a program, I always pause — because the course is maybe 20% of what they actually need to do.
Here’s the full scope for the work: