The Unglamorous Truth About Doing Something You Love
The Unglamorous Truth About Doing Something You Love
I’m going to tell you something that nobody’s Instagram grid will ever show you.
Three nights before my launch, I didn’t sleep. Not because I was nervous, not because I was excited, but because I was sitting at home making bath salts by hand. Hundreds of them. Freebies for my first orders. Just me, a kitchen counter, and the quiet, slightly surreal reality of what building something from scratch actually looks like at midnight.
This is that story.
The Lie We All Believed
When I decided to start Maully, I had a version of this in my head. A beautiful, soft-lit version where I was my own boss, working flexible hours, building something I loved on my own terms. I’d seen the founder content. I’d read the interviews. It all looked so... intentional. So curated. So free.
I grew up watching relatives who ran businesses. They were always on their phones, at weddings, on vacations, at dinner tables. I used to wonder what could possibly be so urgent, so consuming, that you couldn’t just put it down for an hour.
Now I know. And I have become that person.
The Work Nobody Sees
Here’s what building a brand behind the scenes actually looks like from the outside: nothing.
You’re not going to an office. You don’t have a title people recognise. You can’t point to a task and say, I did that today, it’s done. You’re just... building. Quietly, relentlessly, invisibly. Testing formulations. Travelling to manufacturers. Learning things you didn’t know you needed to know. Solving problems that don’t have obvious solutions.
And because nobody can see any of it, people talk.
Not maliciously, mostly. But there’s a particular kind of discomfort that people around you feel when you’re doing something unconventional and taking a long time to do it. And that discomfort has a way of finding you, in the questions that sound like concern but feel like doubt, in the comparisons to people who took safer paths, in the silence that says more than the words do.
I heard it. For two years, I heard it.
The thing about a business is that it doesn’t show you its progress the way a job does. In a job, you finish tasks. You can see them done at the end of the day. In a business, everything you do takes months, sometimes longer, to bear fruit. You plant, and you wait, and you plant some more, and you keep waiting. And from the outside, it just looks like nothing is happening.
From the inside, everything is happening. You just have to be patient enough to let it.
From the outside, it just looks like nothing is happening. From the inside, everything is happening.
Your Business Is Your Boss
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being your own boss: you’re not.
Your business is your boss. And unlike any manager you’ve ever had, this one is available twenty four seven, lives rent free in your head, and has absolutely no respect for your personal time, your sleep schedule, or the fact that you just wanted one quiet Sunday.
I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. Not because I was anxious, but because the moment I’d close my eyes, the ideas would start. What else could I do? What did I forget? What needs to be fixed? And then I’d think, let me just jot this down so I don’t forget it tomorrow. Phone out. Notes open. And just like that, it’s 2am and I’m researching fragrance ratios instead of sleeping.
It’s a vicious cycle. And it’s completely unglamorous. And I wouldn’t trade it, but I want to be honest about what it actually is.
Nobody Tells You About the Problem List
In a job, you have a to-do list. You show up, you know what needs to get done, you do it, you go home.
As a founder, you don’t have a to-do list. You have a problem list.
Every single day, you wake up and there are things that need to be solved, not completed, solved. And you often don’t know how to solve them. You’ve never done this before. There’s no handbook, no manager to ask, no colleague who’s been here. You just have to figure it out, make a call, and hope it was the right one.
I’ve always struggled with being indecisive. Building Maully has cured me of that, not because I became more confident, but because I simply had no choice. The decisions don’t wait. The manufacturers don’t wait. The labels, the logistics, the MOQs, the packaging, none of it waits for you to feel ready. You just have to decide, live with it, and move on to the next problem.
It is equal parts terrifying and the most clarifying thing I’ve ever done.
The Skills Nobody Warned Me About
In a job, you’re hired for one, maybe two, maybe three things you’re good at. You have a role. A lane.
As a founder, your lane is everything.
I have had to learn marketing, brand building, social media, content, editing, logistics, operations, financial planning, vendor management, label regulations, GST compliance, and approximately one hundred other things I did not anticipate needing to know.
Because here’s the reality: even when you hire agencies or vendors to handle things, if you don’t understand what they’re doing, you cannot evaluate whether they’re doing it well. And if you can’t evaluate it, they can take you for a ride.
So you just keep learning. Every day, something new. Something you didn’t know you didn’t know.
The Part That Was Actually Hard to Swallow
I’ll be honest about something that took me a while to make peace with.
I was never very comfortable putting myself out there on social media. Not my face, not my voice, not my opinions. It felt exposed in a way I wasn’t used to. And for a while, I thought, maybe I don’t have to. Maybe the brand can speak for itself.
And then a friend said something to me that I needed to hear: you can’t complain about this one. You’re a founder. This is how you build a brand. You either do it or you don’t get sales.
Hard pill. Swallowed.
Because that’s the other thing about doing something you love, you don’t get to opt out of the parts that make you uncomfortable. You can’t say, I’ll do the fun creative parts and skip the rest. The rest is the job. All of it is the job.
What I Wish Someone Had Said
Not to scare you. Not to make this sound like something you shouldn’t do.
But because I think the truth is more useful than the highlight reel.
Building something you love is not easier than building something you don’t care about. In some ways, it’s harder, because every setback is personal. Every delay feels like a loss. Every moment of doubt is about more than a business, it’s about whether you were right to trust your instincts in the first place.
What it is, is worth it. Deeply, completely, exhaustingly worth it.
But it looks nothing like the Instagram version. It looks like three nights without sleep making bath salts in your kitchen. It looks like a problem list instead of a to-do list. It looks like learning things you never wanted to learn, making decisions before you feel ready, and becoming, slowly and without realising it, someone who can actually handle all of it.
That person surprised me. I think she’ll surprise you too.
Samriddhi