Stop Moving the Goalposts: Your Momentum Is Enough

Reclaiming the Beauty of the Baby Step

There is so much heartbreak in ambition and it doesn't come from failure, but from never letting yourself arrive.

You hit a goal and before the ink even dries on the checklist, you’re already redrawing the map. Maybe the launch went well, or the client said yes, or your content finally resonated, but instead of savoring it, you shift your attention to what’s next. You up the stakes. You raise the bar. You move the goalposts.

This is the unspoken cycle of modern entrepreneurship. It’s the energy beneath every Slack ping and investor email. A loop we enter unconsciously, reinforced by culture, capitalism, and the myth of “overnight success.” It is especially potent in industries like beauty and wellness, where so much of our work is about transformation, be it of skin, of self, of brand. We internalize the belief that we, too, must constantly be transforming in order to be worthy. That stillness signals stagnation or contentment is complacency. That pausing to celebrate is self-indulgent.

But what if the opposite were true? What if the moment you’re in right now, this exact one, was a moment worth honoring, not escaping?

As you already know, no journey is linear. Not in business. Not in brand-building. Not in becoming. Yet we continue to act as if there’s some definitive arrival point that will finally deliver the clarity, confidence, and creative satisfaction we’ve been promised. The perfect rebrand. The sold-out launch. The article in Glossy. The investor term sheet. The big box retailer who finally sees your vision. The inbox full of inquiries. The team that just gets it.

Genuinely, every milestone leads to a new threshold. If you’re always recalibrating the metric of success before you’ve allowed yourself to inhabit it, you’ll spend your entire career chasing a horizon that keeps moving.

That’s not momentum. That’s just exhaustion disguised as ambition, babe.

This isn’t to say that ambition is inherently bad. Quite the opposite. Ambition is what powers the extraordinary. It’s what allows a solopreneur to launch a skincare line from her kitchen or a creative to leave the agency world to become a one-person studio. It’s what fuels innovation and resilience and the audacity required to believe that you have something worth building.

Ambition without grounding becomes a kind of spiritual erosion. It disconnects us from the joy of the work, from the purpose that pulled us in to begin with, and from the very wins we once longed for.

Take a moment and think back to where you were one year ago. Not just in your work, but in your sense of self. The version of you that existed then was likely dreaming of something you now take for granted. A client, a product, a partnership, a creative breakthrough, a sense of direction. How often do you let yourself remember that? How often do you recognize that progress doesn’t always feel like progress when you’re inside it?

So many founders, freelancers, and marketers are building the thing they once literally prayed for, and yet we feel perpetually behind. Why?

Most likely it’s that we’ve convinced ourselves we’re not allowed to be impressed by our own growth. That staying hungry means never stopping to taste what we’ve already made. The pressure to keep producing, scaling, and optimizing — even when the initial goal was simply to get paid to do what we love.

There is a profound difference between evolution and escalation. Evolution is organic. It’s responsive. It allows space for rest, for curiosity, for surprise. Escalation is relentless. It feeds on itself. It makes you forget your “why” because you’re too busy chasing “what’s next.”

This industry is particularly brutal in the way it frames success. There’s a sameness that’s emerged in how we perform our wins. The perfect founder photo shoot. The choreographed in-store activation. The popup that looks like a Pinterest board. The rebrand that, while technically beautiful, loses the very soul that once made it magnetic.

The language of growth has become aesthetic. Strategic vulnerability. Carefully curated authenticity. A playbook that makes it nearly impossible to discern whether someone is thriving or simply performing the appearance of thriving.

Growth is not a grid. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s not a pitch deck. I’m writing all this to remind myself as much as I hope to remind you, btw.

But real growth messy and cyclical and often invisible. It happens in the hours no one sees. The day you somehow rest instead of spiral. The brave and necessary choice to raise your rates. The boundary you enforce. The email you don’t send. The post you write from your heart, not the mapped out calendar. The version of the product that finally feels right, even if it took six failed iterations to get there.

We must return to a slower, more reverent relationship with our own progress. We must learn to recognize that momentum is still momentum, even if it’s not explosive or externally validated. Even if it looks like a baby step. Especially if it looks like a baby step.

Building a business is not about constant growth. It’s about sustainable direction. About showing up, again and again, even when the metrics don’t reflect the magic yet. About trusting that the small, nearly invisible efforts you make today are laying the foundation for something more aligned tomorrow.

The beauty industry is changing, whether it wants to or not. Retail is in flux. Influencer culture is shifting. Consumers are craving depth, story, culture, and soul. There is more room than ever for nuance, for weirdness, for imperfection. There is more space for your voice, texture, and take.

In order to step into that space, you must first believe that where you are is worthy. Not once you raise more money or hit 100K followers or when your brand finally lands on that one coveted shelf you’ve been manifesting since 2020. Right now. In your current form. In your current effort. With your current resources.

Celebrate what you’ve built. Acknowledge what you’ve survived. Honor the tiny, unglamorous wins. The days when you didn’t quit and vision you’re still refining. The parts of you that are still brave enough to try again. Those are everything.

You are allowed to be proud. You are allowed to be enough. You are allowed to feel joy before the story is fully written.

This moment is not a stepping stone, but truly a destination in itself that’s worth celebrating. Stop moving the goalposts. You’re already on the field.