Just Do The Thing. Do It Scared
It's thrilling, it's expansive and it builds your confidence.
This weekend I woke up to my first paid subscriber. I lay there reading the notification, and I had to read it twice. Someone had decided that my voice was worth exchanging their own actual money for - not a follow, not a free subscription, an intentional decision that what I make here is worth something to them.
After the initial thrill of realising I am, officially, a paid writer (thanks YourMoneyMateSarah for pointing that out), something else slowly crept in. My negative, nervous Nelly voice, right on schedule, doing what it always does: what if you can’t deliver? What if it’s not good enough? What if your one paid subscriber changes her mind and leaves?
And then I remembered the motto I gave myself at the start of this year: do the thing, and do it scared.
Because if I had waited until I wasn’t scared anymore, if I had sat and waited for that feeling of calm readiness to arrive fully formed, I would still be waiting. I would never have started an Instagram. I would never have said yes to going my first podcast. I would never have pressed ‘post’ on a video about Expensive Things Worth the Money on commute to work, a video that ended up getting 3.5 million views on TikTok and propelled me into the world of Intentional Spending. And I would never have started writing on Substack.
And taking it all the way back, I would never have started investing in stocks and shares at 30. Every single one of those things happened before my brain was ready for them, and every single one of them changed my life in some way I couldn’t have predicted.
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I asked my followers on Instagram recently whether they invested in stocks and shares, and if not, why not. The majority of people who said they didn’t invest gave me the same answer: they were scared.
And I so relate to this, because I only started investing outside of my pension at the age of 30, and only then because I finally got tired of letting the fear win. And I didn’t realise my pension was a form of investing until embarrassingly late in my career.
When I finally did open a Stocks and Shares ISA at 30, I was still scared. My hard-earned savings, sitting safe and still in a bank account at exactly the value I’d put them in, were now going to be subjected to the rises and falls of the stock market, and the thought of that felt genuinely terrifying. Why on earth would I choose that?
This is not financial advice, by the way. I’m just sharing my own experience, and I’d encourage you to do your own research and speak to a professional if you need personalised guidance.
What I did was pick a fund. I don’t pick individual stocks. I invest in funds, where a fund manager makes the stock picks on my behalf.
Think of investing via a fund vs picking your own stocks like the difference between a set menu and à la carte: ordering à la carte means you pick every single dish yourself, taking full responsibility for the whole meal coming together. A set menu means you trust a chef who does this for a living, and you let them get on with it while you enjoy the company of your friends around a dinner table. The fund is the set menu option.
I am absolutely the set menu person. I picked a risk level I was comfortable with, set up an automated monthly contribution, and then got on with living my gorgeous, elevated life full of fun. And I pretty much never look at what individual companies and stocks are doing.
I wish someone had explained it to me sooner. I used to believe that keeping my savings in a bank account was the genuinely safer option - the number wasn’t fluctuating, it wasn’t at the mercy of anything, and there was a comfort in that stillness that felt like security.
What I didn’t fully understand was inflation, and what it was doing to the money I thought I was protecting.
Here’s a simple way to think about it. Imagine your favourite pair of trainers costs £100 today, and you know you’ll want to replace them in five years, so you put that £100 into a savings account earning 3% interest to future plan for when you need to buy them again. Five years later when you go to buy them your £100 has grown to around £116, but if inflation has been running at 5% a year, those trainers now cost around £128. Your money grew, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with inflation.
The buying power of your savings had been shrinking a little more every year, in a way that was completely invisible to me because the number in the account stayed the same. That bank account that felt safe was actually losing value in real terms.
Now, a really important caveat here, because this isn’t a case of everyone should move everything into the stock market immediately: money you need in the short term, meaning anything you might realistically need within the next five years, should stay in a savings account.
The stock market goes up and it goes down, and you never want to be in a position where you’re forced to withdraw money during a downturn and crystallise a loss.
If you’re saving for a house deposit, a wedding, an emergency fund, or anything else with a fixed horizon, that money belongs somewhere accessible and stable. The five-year rule is a useful guide: if you genuinely won’t need it for at least five years, it can work harder for you in the market. If there’s any chance you might need it before then, keep it out of the market. I spoke about it on the Curve podcast episode - linked here.
Everytime you Do It Scared, and it works out, you’ve just handed your future self a piece of evidence. Proof that you said yes while terrified and survived it. Proof that the catastrophe your brain promised you never actually arrived.
I think of it as a trust muscle. Not confidence in the outcome, because you can never guarantee the outcome, but confidence in yourself. Trust that whatever happens on the other side of the scary thing, you’ll be able to handle it. And like any muscle, it only grows under load. You cannot build it by reading about other people doing brave things, or by waiting until the fear subsides, or by rehearsing the moment endlessly in your head. You build it by doing the rep. Scared, shaky, imperfect, done.
The first rep is always the heaviest. Pressing post on that first video felt enormous. Saying yes to the podcast felt enormous. By now I have a small stack of evidence that the fear was a terrible forecaster, and the decision came easier. Each scared thing makes the next scared thing slightly less impossible.
And I’ll tell you a secret: it’s thrilling. Genuinely, properly thrilling. There is a specific feeling that only exists on the other side of doing something you were afraid of, a kind of fizzing aliveness, and no purchase I have ever made comes close to it. The notification of a first paid subscriber. Watching the view count climb on a video you almost deleted. Checking your ISA after a year and realising it just got on with growing while you got on with living. These moments are the real luxury. They cost nothing and they cannot be bought, only earned, one scared decision at a time.
None of it waited for me to feel ready, and I’m so glad I didn’t wait either
We don’t restrict. We decide.
M x
Love this - you are a truly brave woman.