Why you lost your spark

Luck and motivation won't build the life you want

May 04, 2026

“Layla, can I pick your brain? I am leaving work soon and I need to figure out the next steps. I’ve been thinking about LinkedIn, maybe starting a consulting agency. Is a personal brand worth it if I don’t want to be an influencer?” a friend recently asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied. And I’ll tell you why.

First, a personal brand doesn’t always mean being an influencer. It can be an email list, or some form of distribution. But distribution is power.

So let’s talk about power and why distribution matters so much.

HOW TO BE POWERFUL

If there is one thing that I have learned as both a founder and content creator, it is that the more power you have, the easier it is to shape things in your favor. Because power leads to credibility.

But credibility isn’t earned — it’s manufactured.

You can become powerful in one of three ways:

PATH ONE TO POWER: PROXIMITY

This could be nepotism — university legacy admissions show us that being related to an alum of an elite institution increases a kid’s odds (by 45%).1 Or being the boss’s favorite. Someone may see potential in you and want to grow you. Or riding someone’s coattails. Recently, Emma Grede has been in the spotlight for saying she doesn’t typically invest in first-time founders. Emma has lived this ethos long before confessing it on a podcast. She went from a successful talent management and marketing executive to consumer business. She made the transition by borrowing the Kardashians’ celebrity reach and using her strategic and intellectual prowess to build incredible companies. While Emma had solid work experience pre-Kardashians, she used that proximity to spin out massive consumer successes. She now has her own personal brand — but the path is effective, and I see it often.

The issue with path one is that proximity is largely unavailable to people who don’t look like the rooms they’re trying to enter.

PATH TWO TO POWER: FOMO

Rupi Kaur did this. Kaur had been posting poetry across social for years before she was taken seriously in traditional publishing. In 2014, she self-published Milk and Honey after literary journals passed on her work. She sold over ten thousand copies on her own and went viral for posting a project that showed menstrual blood around the same time. Instagram took it down. “They allow porn on Instagram, but not periods?” she remarked to the Washington Post. The public response was so large that Kaur couldn’t be ignored. Andrews McMeel saw the hype, picked up Milk and Honey, and the book subsequently spent 165 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 11 million copies later, I highly doubt any traditional publisher or journal would pass on the opportunity to work with her.

You see FOMO used a lot in venture capital. A hot deal and a savvy founder make rounds, communicate that the round is oversubscribed, and the self-generated hype pays dividends. Investors salivate for a piece. Like many founders, Elizabeth Holmes was very good at this. But we all saw how that played out. FOMO requires integrity to be sustainable.

And FOMO requires a little bit of luck. Luck can always be engineered, but it is heavily reliant on getting recognized. Kaur’s period-stained bedsheets could have led to…nothing. The moment could have passed. But it didn’t. And she’s now a star.

PATH THREE TO POWER: DISTRIBUTION

Distribution is the newest player to the game. This is the path that is most controllable — if you aren’t born to wealth and don’t have proximity to power. This path can and should be taken alongside paths one and two. Or, if you’re an underdog, it’s your best bet to double down on. This is the personal brand. The email list. The online following. The audience you’ve built makes you a bestseller — nobody chooses you, you’ve already been chosen. The audience you’ve built clicks your links and establishes your influence. You’re a risk-free bet to the powers that be as well, despite all odds or stereotypes held against you.

Distribution is extremely powerful when owned. And — for those with money — it can be gamed. I can count at least half a dozen influencers I know who started with no following and used Instagram ads to balloon their audience seemingly overnight. In reality, they paid for exposure, got their content right, and eventually built a brand.

DISTRIBUTION IS KING

Distribution isn’t just a strategy for underdogs, it’s structural equity. It’s the only path to power that can be built entirely on agency.

My personal approach to distribution has been this: years ago, I knew I wanted to write about everything I learned at work. I also knew that there were as many business bestsellers by men named John as by all women combined in 2020 — so I wouldn’t be chosen. I started posting on the internet. Then I met a book agent who told me I needed to collect emails to be taken seriously by agents and publishers. I moved to Substack, which became my primary mode of social media, and I wrote and wrote and wrote. My writing sucked at first — so honestly, emails were probably a secondary goal, and I hadn’t realized it. As I wrote more, my thing became clearer. My writing improved. And the emails came.

And people bit. The research assumed it would, btw.

I could manufacture credibility, because repeated exposure to me and my ideas led you to believe I am credible and to like me. Research shows us that repeated exposure to a person or idea increases perceived credibility and liking, independent of content quality — this is why consistent posting builds trust before expertise is proven.2

And it serves me in multiple ways because research also reminds us that most career opportunities come from acquaintances, not close contacts.3 Distribution has more people believing I know what I’m talking about. A majority of speaking invitations come from my audience. And once I have spoken, my return rate is high. People usually ask me to speak again, creating a flywheel effect built on weak ties.

What do you think so far?

DISTRIBUTION NEEDS VISIBILITY

Distribution needs visibility. And visibility and exposure are a high ROI bet. Maybe you will post and nobody will care. Maybe visibility will lead to more opportunity. Maybe visibility will lead to you realizing that you don’t have the charisma or value proposition to attract folks, and you shift your goal to building exactly that. But without visibility and exposure, you won’t get distribution.

DISTRIBUTION NEEDS INTEGRITY

Distribution really came for me when clarity came. Path three comes with clarity — clarity of goals, specifically. And because of that, it’s the largest mental lift.

We celebrate the bootstrapped audience builder, but statistically, proximity still produces more power faster. Building a network that trusts you is hard. Having a network to distribute to without a point of view is just noise. The internet is full of people with audiences and nothing to say. Reach and relevance are not the same thing.

And I am not surprised that my audience became stronger when my message became clearer (if you are new here, I talk a lot about emotional regulation and performance from the POV of a founder). Specific, challenging goals produce significantly higher performance than vague ones in over 90% of studies.4

I didn’t have clarity in my own content for a long time, clarity was my output — not my input. I didn’t start writing because I knew what I wanted to say. I started writing because I had things to figure out. The clarity came after — sometimes months after — not before. And it turns out, that’s exactly how the brain works. Neuroscientists have found that motor cortex activation — the brain region responsible for executing action — precedes conscious intention. You do before you know why you’re doing it. The brain builds understanding through experience, not anticipation. Schemas — the mental frameworks we use to make sense of the world — are constructed through repeated exposure and action, not through thinking about taking action.5 This is why waiting for clarity before you start is neurologically backwards. Your brain cannot give you a map of territory it has never visited. The only way to know what you’re building is to build it. I wrote my way into a point of view. I posted my way into an audience. The emails didn’t come because I had a strategy. They came because I stayed in motion long enough for a strategy to reveal itself.

And it worked out because I have integrity. As I’ve sharpened my thoughts and ideas, it’s never come at the expense of others. I don’t punch down, I don’t offer salacious details about others. And it’s worked for me.

Because sometimes the personal brand is actually a liability before it’s a strength. Many people build distribution before they have anything worth distributing, and dilute themselves in the process. We’ve all seen this from a certain kind of influencer — the one whose entire angle is tearing people down. Minority communities sometimes see this as horizontal aggression, where people dismantle their own. It’s attention. It’s not distribution. It’s not power. And it’s much harder to translate into something meaningful. I have actually seen a few influencers try to move from the hater space to becoming a social media or business consultant. It never works, despite audience size.

Recently, someone invited me to speak on a panel with a hater-turned-business-consultant. This particular hater showed horizontal aggression, and was especially nasty towards women in our shared Muslim community, but recently cleared her feed to remove all evidence of her hater origins into fame. I declined. It takes years to build a reputation and moments to kill one, I don’t take risks with proximity. Molly McPherson explains my gut instinct effectively. She’s a PR exec who does an incredible job talking about reputation on Substack and TikTok. Molly says that reputations break down when your audience identifies your trust promise and you deviate from it. Do people trust you because you share enemies? Or because they think you’re good at something? If it’s the former, and you move to becoming a social media consultant, your audience will measure the gap and call it out. She refers to origin story drift as a red flag for reputation — you became known for one thing and then tried to reframe it as soon as the narrative stopped fitting you.

Everybody’s story evolves — my first foray with virality was a music video where I skateboarded in a hijab and heels, far from my content today. Trust doesn’t fracture in evolution. Trust fractures when integrity is in question.

CLARITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF A RUT: WHY YOU’RE IN A RUT

Speaking of evolution, someone recently asked me how I know what to post. The honest answer: I figured it out over years, and it continues to evolve. If something would have been helpful to younger me, I post about it. If you don’t know what to post — or what your thing is — you’re in a rut for one of three reasons:

Unclear goal
Unclear path
Disinterest, which can be an emotional dysregulation you’re mistaking for a strategy problem

In order to stay in flow, all three have to be clear. My goal is clear: I want to expand access to power, I take pride in teaching others (often women, often minorities) how to ascend. My path I discussed above: I produce content on IG, TikTok, Substack — and soon, a book. And the third: I don’t let my mood get in the way of my plan. I have a posting schedule, etc, etc, and it happens when I am in a good mood or a bad mood.

But I have lacked a goal and a path before. And I have certainly been disinterested before. While it’s easy to diagnose that you don’t know what you are doing or how you are doing it, diagnosing disinterest is the hardest. Disinterest feels like laziness. It presents like procrastination. But underneath it, something neurological is happening. Motivation is not a personality trait. It’s a chemical prediction. Your brain’s dopaminergic reward pathway is constantly running a forecast: if I do this thing, will something good happen? When the goal is unclear, the forecast fails. When the path is wrong, the forecast fails. When you’re afraid of being seen — afraid of trying publicly and losing publicly — the forecast fails. And when the forecast fails, the drive signal collapses. You don’t feel like doing it because your brain has already run the numbers and returned an error. Doomscrolling isn’t weakness. It’s your brain choosing the one thing in the room with a guaranteed dopamine return.

Ruts are like muddy puddles at best, muddy waterfalls at worst. Ruts can cascade. Recently someone told me she had been onboarding at work — and three months in, her boss was dragging her feet on getting her trained. “She’s too busy,” my friend said. “No, she isn’t. You are not a priority. And it’s extremely dangerous.” This friend had been out of work for a long time before finally landing a role. I didn’t think her new job would last long without a serious intervention. If she didn’t find a way to work on the company’s needs and execute the boss’s strategy, she was going to fade into irrelevance. “Every Monday morning, send her your 3-5 goals. Link those goals to the company needs. Ask her if you are correct or if anything should be shifted, and put 10 minutes on the calendar to discuss. On Fridays, report progress. Force her to lead you. Manage up.”

Ruts compound. You miss one week of posting, and then two, and suddenly you’re three months in and the gap feels too large to close. You miss one quarter of putting work in, and your boss doesn’t consider you for hard problems. What’s happening underneath that isn’t a motivation problem — it’s a default mode problem. When the brain isn’t actively engaged in a task with a clear goal, it doesn’t go quiet. It turns inward. The default mode network — the set of brain regions most active during self-referential thinking — takes over, and it is not kind. It runs loops. It revisits failures. It generates the specific flavor of anxious, circular thinking that feels like reflection but produces nothing. The antidote isn’t inspiration. It’s a specific enough next action that your brain has something to execute against.6

My POV: her boss was in a rut — unclear goal, unclear path, or maybe she thought she made the wrong hiring decision and was avoiding correcting it — and my friend’s boss’s rut became her rut.

And this issue is painfully common. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace consistently finds that roughly 60–70% of workers are disengaged. Most people’s ruts aren’t strategy problems, they’re motivation and clarity problems.

Ruts don’t break with motivation. They break with precision.

IT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US

Like I said earlier, I have lacked a goal and a path before. And I have certainly been disinterested before.

I do Friday AMAs on my IG @laylool, this question was especially relevant and sparked the thoughts for this article

I’ll never forget when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I walked into a meeting dead in the eyes. My soul had been sucked out of me. It was early in the diagnosis — I hadn’t shared much with my peers. The figuring-it-out-stage can take months. And time is slow, painful, and draining as new pieces of the diagnosis puzzle become revealed. When I wasn’t actively googling my way into depression, I was in a haze. My advisor immediately clocked my shift and asked: “Layla, what’s up? It looks like someone took you and shook everything out of you upside down and flipped you back over.” She wasn’t wrong. I knew my goals. I knew my path. I was just disinterested. Anxious. Upset. Depressed. I didn’t really care about much.

YOUR BASELINE IS YOUR BASELINE

Around the same time, I was chatting with a colleague. “Layla, listen — I’m not sure what to say, because there’s nothing I can say that will make your mom’s cancer go away. But what I can tell you is that I know you, and your emotional baseline is solid, and it will be a reliable companion.” She went on to explain a concept known as the hedonic treadmill. The TL;DR is that we cultivate certain emotional baselines. Maybe we are always joyful, or anxious, or unsettled. And research has shown that people who go through euphoric highs or extreme lows bounce back to their baselines.

You could win the lottery tomorrow and be euphoric for a while — but at some point, you will return to your emotional baseline, for better or worse. Or you can go through a devastating loss — and while you may view the world differently or tactically shift how you move, your emotional baseline will eventually return.

Your emotional baseline may or may not be a gift — but it is definitely a ceiling. And you have to be aware of it. The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways. The same mechanism that pulls you back from despair also pulls you back from exceptional drive. The highest performers don’t just return to baseline — they engineer a new one.

THANK YOU for making it to the end! Leave a comment or a like, I love your comments — they also help me evolve my thinking as I am writing this book. On a personal note, check out my absolutely stunning baby sprinkle last weekend.

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