7 Lessons From a Weekend With the Internet's Top Creators and Entrepreneurs

The 7 Lessons from a weekend with the internets top creators and entrepreneurs

Last week, I spent a few days at Craft & Commerce by Kit, surrounded by some of the most successful online creators, influencers, and entrepreneurs in the country — including one speaker whose single book has sold over 25 million copies worldwide.

I wasn't there to self-promote. I was there to listen. I was there to learn. Or so I originally thought.

Old habits are hard to shake. Within the first hour, I caught myself doing what I do for a living: watching the mental game underneath the surface.

These are people who, by any outside measure, have already won. And yet, the self-talk, the doubts, the recalibration happening in real time, the same stuff I work through with athletes and executives every week, was seeping quietly underneath rooms full of success.

At that point, I do what I always do. I grab my notebook, click my pen, and begin scribbling, fast and furious. Every conversation, every off-hand comment, every reframe someone dropped without realizing how much weight it carried, is jotted down.

When all the wisdom has been spoken, I stop and count. There are 21 pages of notes. Here are the seven that earned a circle.

1. You Can't 10x Your Effort. You Can 10x Your Aim.

If you're a high performer, you're already working hard. That's the one variable that isn't changing. The variable that changes everything is where that hard work is pointed.

The tool I use to fix my aim is a simple audit, run on a regular basis: Start. Stop. Continue.

What do you need to start doing that you've been putting off? What do you need to stop doing that's eating time and energy without paying you back? What's working well enough that it deserves more of you?

(Note to self: I have not run this audit since January. Adding it to the calendar before this newsletter even goes out.)

An honest answer to all three is worth more than another hour of grinding on the wrong thing.

2. Make Someone Else Tell You No.

This one stung, because it's something I'm constantly challenging my clients with—and something my better half throws right back at me. "Apply your own coaching. Make someone else tell you no."

Even a coach needs a coach. Hearing someone else challenge me with the exact challenge I give others was a gut check. Sometimes, in the middle of helping people see what they're not doing for themselves, we miss the same thing happening in our own lives.

We see the opportunity, the ask, the bet, and then we talk ourselves out of it before anyone else even gets a vote. We assume the rejection. We write the no ourselves and hand it to ourselves, free of charge.

Make someone else tell you no. Don't eject yourself out of a room, a conversation, or an opportunity. Let the world have its say before you decide the answer for it.

And while you're at it, remember, it's not about who you know or even who knows you. It's about who knows what you want. People can't open doors for you if they don't know which doors you're looking for. (Another note to self!)

3. You Don't Live in the Garden

One of the speakers dropped an analogy I haven't stopped thinking about.

Your life is a house. Your business is a garden.

The house is your family, your friends, your health, your rest. The garden is where the actual work happens — planting, watering, harvesting.

You don't live in the garden. You visit it.

Go out, plant. Come back home. Go out, water. Come back home. Go out, harvest—and bring it back to the house, where everyone gets to benefit from it.

(Note to self: I have been living in the garden for years.)

Burnout isn't about the work itself. It's about forgetting there's a house to go back to.

4. Grit vs. Discernment

Most of us were raised on a single message: winners never quit. It's incomplete, and it costs us more than we realize.

Grit is the ability to keep going when something gets hard — to push through resistance, fatigue, and the voice telling you to stop, because the thing you're working toward is worth the discomfort.

Discernment is the ability to tell the difference between resistance worth pushing through and a path that's wrong for you entirely. It's the judgment to recognize when "this is hard" actually means "this isn't it" — and to act on that recognition instead of overriding it with more grit.

Every major breakthrough anyone in that room had experienced was preceded by quitting something. The job. The partnership. The version of the plan that wasn't working. Grit got them to the point where they could see clearly enough to quit the right thing. Discernment is what told them what that thing was.

(Note to self: grit without discernment is just stubbornness with better branding.)

Quitting the wrong thing at the right time doesn't end your story. It opens the next chapter of it.

5. Name the Real Fear

One of the sharper moments of the weekend came from a conversation about fear of failure. Fear of failure sounds like a single, identifiable thing. It rarely is.

Underneath "fear of failure" is almost always something more specific — fear of debt, fear of judgment, fear of disappointing someone, fear of having to start over. The general fear is a mask. The specific fear is the actual thing running the show.

Once you can name the real source, you take your power back. "I'm afraid of failing" leaves you stuck, because there's nothing to act on. "I'm afraid of going into debt" gives you something concrete — a number, a timeline, a plan.

The work isn't getting rid of fear. It's getting specific enough about it that it stops being able to hide.

6. Pronoia

Everyone knows paranoia—the gnawing sense that the world is working against you, that people are talking, that something's about to go wrong.

Pronoia is the flip side. It's the belief that the world is quietly working for you. That the delayed flight put you next to the right person. That the contract falling through cleared space for the one that was actually meant for you. That setbacks are redirection.

Paranoia keeps you scanning for threats, which is exhausting and, over time, self-fulfilling. You start finding the threats because that's all you're looking for. Pronoia keeps you scanning for openings. Same brain, same situations, completely different harvest.

(Note to self: the next time something falls apart, try asking what it might be clearing space for—before deciding it's a disaster.)

This is the same muscle behind coherence — the trust that your story is still being written, that even the hard chapters connect into something whole. Pronoia is the version of that trust you can use in the moment, while the setback is still happening and you have no idea yet what it's for. Coherence is what you'll call it later, once you can look back and see how the chapters fit.

7. This Feels Hard Because It Is Hard

One of the speakers shared a line from Dr. Becky Kennedy that landed somewhere I wasn't expecting:

"This feels hard because it is hard, not because you are doing something wrong."

I do my best to show up steady in public. That's part of the job when you coach people through hard things for a living, there's an expectation that you've got it figured out yourself.

But entrepreneurship is hard. Some weeks it's a contract that doesn't get renewed, a launch that underperforms, a season where nothing seems to be working no matter how much you put in. Leadership is hard. Some days, life is just hard.

Sometimes the work isn't fixing what's hard. It's letting it be hard, without turning that into a verdict on you.

Final Buzzer

That weekend, I sat next to the author of one of the best-selling books of the last decade, success stories that didn't seem mathematically possible to me a few years ago, and every reason to wonder what I was doing there. But that's the whole point. You need the courage to step into the rooms that scare you. Surround yourself with dreams, ideals, and outcomes you didn't even know existed. Use that exposure to learn from, without envy taking the wheel.

You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. You just need the courage to step into the room.

And simply listen.

Challenging you head-on and always in your corner,

​— Coach VJ

If you’re looking to bring a mental performance message on confidence, pressure, and belief to your team or organization, you can connect with me here.

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I also offer 1-on-1 mental performance coaching. You can learn more or book a conversation here.