i'm back (after four months...oops)
perfection is the enemy of progress
Sooooo. Hello, world.
To recap - back in January, I quit my job in vintage fashion, moved back to NYC from London, accepted my spot for Harvard Business School, and set out on my Active Interlude / Analogue Living / Gainful Funemployment journey. At this point, 2025 was new, my old employer had let me keep my MacBook Air 2022, and I held this romantic vision of strutting into a year of growth and wonder and documenting it all here along the way.
There were so many reasons to do this - to document my thoughts in a format that would require at least some level of editing (I’m a habitual handwritten diary-keeper, but whenever I read those entries back to myself, I realize they’re barely coherent), to hold myself accountable by doing so publicly, to participate in a rising content format that felt more substantive than posting my little OOTDs and lip combos on TikTok in this digital age, and to sharpen my woefully dusty synthesizing and writing skills before running it back to the HBS classroom. On that last point - my thinking was something along the lines of, if I can’t keep up with sporadic Substack posting for my seven whole followers, how the hell am I going to keep up with whatever school and life will throw at me?
The last time I posted on here was in February. March, April, May, and now June flew by. In fact, I attempted to write this in May and in June, and have had to keep editing the title as the count of dry months ticks up one by one. I could say that life got busier than anticipated, that I set out with dozens of goals but have winnowed down to quality of execution over quantity, etc. I think those are both true, but I also have managed to post daily or even twice daily on TikTok and accidentally go viral for spending ten minutes discussing the pros and cons of silver nail polish, so a lack of free screen time is not the culprit per se. I have so often wanted to write something, but waited for the right topic, or felt overwhelmed by how many topics had piled up, or wanted to write at the perfect cafe with the level of ambient noise, or wanted to start on Monday, or first of the month. I keep a daily to-do and the “Write on Substack” box has been pushed at infinitum, day over day, week over week, and now month over month.
Starting clean, being consistent, and doing things perfectly has always had a chokehold on me. I’m the girl that made sweeping NYE resolutions, broke them in the single-digit days of January, and then decided the resolution was shot. In seventh grade, after being really good at math for my entire academic life, I got a 4, not a 5, on the AP Calculus exam and decided that the numbers life was no longer for me. I waited and searched for things that would be my proverbial perfect round of golf.
I look back at the past six months (!!) and I can genuinely say, in response to all that extreme thinking, that my time off keeps trying to tell me one thing. It’s this: Perfection is the enemy of progress. (Voltaire or Churchill, take your pick.) This feels especially relevant to me in the digital age and the era + privilege of knowing about a million and one things you could be doing but equally feeling that every choice comes at the cost of a million alternatives.
So here I am today, at Variety Coffee in FiDi. The wifi is kind of bad and it’s not the dark academia writing location of my dreams. Also there is very loud punk music playing in the background. This isn’t my finest writing sample, but I’m really happy to be writing anything at all.
A recap of some things that have happened since January -
I went to Miami, Los Angeles, Puerto Rico, and the Hudson Valley with friends and family
I started consulting part-time for some cool vintage stores in New York and have gotten to put on some very fun events
I realized that having a steady income is very nice. I do not currently have a steady income.
I gained about 10,000 followers on TikTok and have have crises about not growing enough and then about growing too much
I accidentally went viral when 2 million people watched me talk about my favorite silver nail polish for ten minutes
I intentionally went (less) viral highlighting some of my favorite, sustainable, affordable slow fashion brands and we sold out their stock in a day (yay!)
I went to London and Mallorca for two weeks each and got to see old friends and coworkers, make new friends that have randomly come to play in my day-to-day life, and practice my emergency room Spanish at 2 AM. Perfection is the enemy of progress, necessity breeds it.
I navigated health insurance, tax returns, apartments in Boston, car rentals in Mallorca, and my first actual brand partnerships
I went to art galleries, live music jams, brand events, and dinners in Spain alone and loved it all
I lugged three industrial clothing racks around the city sold about a hundred pieces of my vintage collection at four markets in NYC in three days and met so many kind people in the process
I became deeply entrenched in the world of niche perfume, both online, in the NYC community, and in a more global community <3 and now I have, like, three dozen bottles of perfume that I need to move to Boston
I started some HBS pre-work and realized I know nothing about financial accounting
I saw my grandfather for the first time in two years!
I have cried and worried about airline crashes, tariffs, education cuts, international conflicts, ICE, and the health of family members
I have cried and gotten excited about engagements, voting in the NYC mayoral primary, cherry blossoms, meeting online friends IRL, getting to wake up in the mountains in Deía, graduations, five-year reunions, and the kindness of strangers on trains in Manhattan
I actually have kept up with reading a book a month and added a few to my list of all-time favorites
All of this happened even if I didn't write about it on Sustack or take pics for my camera roll or TikTok
Return to the coffee shop. The sun is peaking out from the scaffolding in this badly-lit corner of FiDi, the punk music has changed to Olivia Dean, and I’m taking all of this as a good sign. More to come!
-Amanda
7th July 2025
FiDi