Business 2.0

It's time to make a change.

Sharmadean Reid

19 Oct 2025 — 6 min read

This Toteme dress is everything.

I've found the last couple of months really tough. Honestly, I've not been all that happy, and I feel...out of control. I feel like I'm being swept away from here to there, and my time is not my own. It's a familiar feeling. Part of it is just my natural cycle of restlessness, and part of it comes from past wounds that I need to resolve.

You might have noticed, because I wrote this:

and this:

But after two confessionals, something has to be done.

Let's recap what happened:

From age 28 (My Saturn's Return in 2011) - 38 years old, I embarked on a period of extreme self-discovery. I wrote essays, I held weekly Zoom sessions on everything from neuroscience to meditation, and eventually I published my book.
Although I was having a hard time, I was incredibly productive, full of forward motion and achieved a lot.
At 39 (in 2023) I felt like I'd reached a period of peace. Until...
After seven years of start up life, and feeling extremely burnt out, I left London in March 2024 to pursue more creativity and writing in my life.
It's now been 19 Months, and it has been bliss. Running this experiment has taught me that writing brings me the most joy. I like pottering around, being near my family and living in nature.

However, in the last two months, I've felt torn between my old self and my new self. Launching 39BC is an echo of my past self - workaholic, obsessive, anxious, and growth-focused. The result? I look terrible, I feel exhausted all the time and my mind is noisy and on fire. I'm not happy.

So it's time to make a change.

I always judge myself not on whether I have negative feelings or not (I'm only human) but on how fast I can get back to equanimity and be at peace once more. It's been a few months of misery, so now it's time to make a change.

This newsletter is part of that change. When I started writing this, pretty much a year ago, I had no particular plan or intention; I just knew that I enjoyed sharing my journey through writing. Over the last year, I've written a bunch of random things, series, and lists, and now I've decided to make this newsletter very specifically a Founder's Diary. So that each Sunday it will be a long read of all the types of posts I do - What I'm doing for my business, What I did, Where I went, What I thought, What I read etc - rolled into one with a recap and lessons from the week as well as my recommendations.

What do you think about that?

Why A Founder's Diary?

I stopped self-development

Part of my misery has been that I've stopped my process of self-discovery over the last few years. Ages 39-41 have been about resting, stillness and relaxation. I read NOVELS for the first time in years versus non-fiction and business books. I even completely stopped listening to the news. It's very typical of my personality to swing from one extreme to another. And that served me well while I wasn't building a business. It gave my mind the open spaces to create and ideate.

But in the launch/grow/scale phase, things need to be different.

Another reason for my misery is that I truly enjoyed sharing the business lessons and personal growth methods I learned with my community on Zoom. The problem is that when I started doing it, back in 2016 with FutureGirlCorp, the online world was not as saturated with self-help as it is now. So that turned me off a little bit, which is sort of ridiculous because we can all do things our own way. I hate doing what everyone else is doing. It really irritates me, but I know I can find my own style, hence, Founder's Diary emails.

RSVP to our Founder Session tonight at 7.30pm GMT live on Zoom

So instead of being torn between two worlds, I'm going to consciously go back to the old me, while also knowing that I'm doing things differently this time around.

Old me, new world.

I'm going to take the best parts of the "old me" such as

Reading to improve myself
Sharing what I read (aka New Methods)
Having productive routines and schedules for optimisation.
Maintaining my weekly spirituality sessions
Staying on top of business news.

While also remembering the "new me"

I'm not building a business to prove myself to anyone.
I'm not alone; I have an amazing, capable team
I'm not an outsider in a white and corporate tech world; I'm at home in beauty.
I've never had a product-based business before; the margins are higher than for a service.
I'm not being pressured to have hyper growth by anyone. I can grow sustainably by moving one step at a time.

Hopefully, I will find a way to exist in this new era of life.

Being okay with change.

All we know in this life is that change is inevitable. So you can either lean into it or fight against it. My friend Grace Ladoja is always so good at moving forward with the times, whereas I often like to be stuck in the past. I've cried several times this week out of fear and doubt that I will "return to my old workaholic self and have a breakdown again" If you've ever come out of depression, you might also feel hyper vigilant and full of fear that it might come back.

Well, you know what? Maybe the old me wasn't all bad, and actually, I can decide what I want to take with me to the next era and what I want to leave behind.

Just remembered I did an entire series on change. Click to view the deck.

I really enjoyed writing my Brand Building Diary every night. It felt very real and raw and made me feel connected to my audience. So next week, I'll begin my Founder's Diary. Is there anything you specifically want me to include? Let me know.

Rightio! Time for a bath and a reread of Things That Make Me Happy.

Have a great Sunday x