# Dafina Smith
> Essays by Dafina Smith on building a life you would choose—across ambition, money, health, family, relationships and the art of living well.
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## Pages
### A little about me
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/on-me/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T21:33:45.000Z
I've been writing on the internet, off and on, since 2005.

Back then, it was a Tumblr called *Covet on a Budget*. Somewhere along the way, I realized the thing I cared about wasn't really the budget. It was the eye — learning to recognize what was right for you, regardless of what it cost, what everyone else was doing, or whether anyone else understood the choice.

I've spent a lot of the years since building.

Businesses. A marriage. A family. A financial life. A home. A body I want to live in for a very long time. A version of success that has changed more than once as I've changed.

And for most of that time, I've been far more comfortable letting the work speak for me than talking about the life behind it.

But when I think about the moments that changed my own life, they often began with someone else being willing to tell the truth about theirs.

Someone describing a choice I didn't know I was allowed to make. Someone questioning a rule I'd assumed was fixed. Someone showing me that there might be another way to build a career, a family, a relationship with money, or simply an ordinary Tuesday.

Those stories expanded my sense of what was possible.

I want to offer some of that back.

So this is **Building a Life Worth Coveting**.

Despite the name, this isn't about constructing a life other people envy.

A coveted life is the one *you* would choose.

Not the life that looks impressive from the outside. Not the one you inherited from your family, your industry, your neighborhood, or the culture around you. And not the one you keep adding things to in the hope that eventually it will start to feel like yours.

I'm interested in something quieter and harder: figuring out what you actually want, and then having the courage to build around it.

I'll be writing across parts of life that I keep returning to:

**The Coveted Life** — cultivating joy and the small decisions that make an ordinary life feel like one you want to inhabit.

**The Coveted Body** — health, beauty, longevity, and what I'm learning about taking care of the body that has to carry all of this.

**Money + Career** — building profitable businesses, financial freedom, ambition, career reinvention, advocating for yourself, and understanding money well enough that it becomes a tool rather than a source of fear or status.

**Family + Relationships** — marriage, motherhood, friendship, identity, boundaries, community, and the complicated work of loving other people without disappearing inside their expectations.

I won't pretend to have all of this figured out; I'll write about what has worked, what hasn't, what I've changed my mind about, and the questions I'm still asking.

There will be business here, because building companies has shaped a significant part of my life. This it isn't a personal-brand rollout disguised as vulnerability or a entrepreneurial pub.

I want somewhere to think. Somewhere to tell the truth a little more fully.

Somewhere to explore what happens when we stop asking, *What should my life look like?* and start asking, *What would I actually choose?*

So as a small thank you for being here, I created a self-guided **Life Worth Coveting Assessment** you can use to apply the same framework I've used to examine my own life to yours.

It is a series of questions designed to help you look honestly at what you've built, what you actually want, and where the two may no longer match — across your life, your body, your work and money, and your relationships.

---

I write here because the women I most want to read aren't writing online anymore. Or they're writing in places where the work gets flattened by the platform. I write here because my father — who I connected to through writing and who read every essay I ever published, who was asking me to keep going right up until he wasn't able to anymore — would have hated to see me stop. 

So I won't stop.

Dafina
### The Covet List
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/the-covet-list/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T22:07:32.000Z
The Coveted Life, the Coveted Closet, the Coveted Body, the Coveted Founder, for the people building things alongside me.

Some links are affiliate. The recommendations are not.

## The Coveted Life

Interiors, objects, and the things that make a space feel inhabited.

## The Coveted Closet 

Timeless, effortless and expressive clothing to encompass every element of my life

## The Coveted Body

Wellness, skincare, supplements, and the tools of operating in a body you take seriously.

## The Coveted Founder 

For the people building things alongside me. The tools, the tech, the stationery — what actually earns the desk.

For the full storefront, including seasonal collections and discount codes, visit [shopmy.us/shop/dafina](https://shopmy.us/shop/dafina?ref=dafinasmith.com).
### Contact
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/contact/
Last updated: 2026-05-10T21:46:05.000Z
I read every message. Reply times vary — sometimes within a day, sometimes a few weeks.

For collaborations, please include the brand, the ask, and the timing. For everything else, just write what you came to say.

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### Explore
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/tags/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T19:58:13.000Z
_No content available._
## Posts
### The Economics of Care
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/the-economics-of-care/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T16:28:19.000Z
There are companies that operate efficiently, and then there are companies that are stewarded. 

You can feel it almost instantly, that subtle but unmistakable sense that someone is still paying close attention.

Even when the founder's presence is rarely communicated directly, it's so embedded in the culture of decisions that you can feel someone at the helm still has emotional proximity to the customer. That decisions are still being made by someone capable of disappointment, pride, embarrassment, conviction, intuition.

And increasingly, that kind of stewardship feels rare.

Because modern entrepreneurship has glorified speed and efficiency above nearly everything else: scale quickly, raise capital, maximize visibility, optimize for growth. Bigger is synonymous with better. Funding is validation. Expansion means proof of relevance.

Yet somewhere in that cycle, many brands stop existing.

We've seen it happen over and over again. Brands arrive bright and magnetic, with a clear point of view and a devoted following. Then something shifts. The founder gets further from the customer. The business takes on pressure, investors, expectations, urgency. And eventually, the thing that made people care about the brand in the first place starts to disappear.

That's the tension I've been examining lately. Not the oversimplified narrative of "founders good, investment bad," but something more nuanced: what actually changes when the person at the helm is still close enough to obsess? What does it cost to care about the invisible details no spreadsheet would ever capture? What does it mean to answer to the customer instead of a boardroom?

One of the brands I think about a lot in this context is [Aviator Nation.](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aviator-nation/?ref=dafinasmith.com)

What I love about Founder/CEO [Paige Mycoskie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/paige-mycoskie-17a9b56/?ref=dafinasmith.com) is how much she seems to trust her gut and how little interest she has in doing what you're “supposed” to do. Her team is made up of people she likes, people she vibes with, people who understand her vision and know how to execute it. I met some people from her team before I really knew much about her, and what struck me was how clear they were on what she was building. There was no confusion about the point of view.

That matters to me.

Because when a founder's vision is clear enough, it starts to travel without her having to explain it every five minutes. The team understands it. The stores understand it. The customer feels it.

Aviator Nation is also unconventional in ways that would probably make plenty of traditional operators uncomfortable. The company makes its products in the U.S., even though financially that may not be the obvious choice. Their stores reflect things Paige actually cares about. She loves live music, so that gets baked into the business. Some of the stores have spaces where musicians can play. Her friends can come in and do sessions. The things she personally loves are not being stripped out in the name of efficiency. They become part of the brand.

> Because care is expensive.

Not just financially, but psychologically. Care requires restraint. It requires attention. It requires saying no to things that might make sense on paper. It requires the discipline to prioritize what matters most instead of what looks most impressive.

Which leads to a stigma worth naming here.

Founder-led gets mistaken for feelings-first. For vibes over vigilance. For someone so emotionally attached to their vision that the spreadsheets become an afterthought. And that assumption is wrong, and honestly, a little condescending.

Caring deeply about a customer and caring deeply about profit are not in conflict. In fact, the second one is often what makes the first one possible.

That's another reason I find Aviator Nation so interesting. Paige has built a company that is highly profitable and has remained self-funded. She owns the business. She owns the stores. She has resisted the idea that growth has to mean giving up control.

What gets confused is the difference between emotional care and operational care. They're not the same thing.

Emotional care is knowing your customer. Knowing that a stylist is standing behind a chair, her reputation on the line with every install. Knowing that a bad experience doesn't just affect the client sitting in front of her, it affects the stylist's craft, her confidence, her relationship with a client she may have been building trust with for years.

I have that proximity. I think about the specific, human weight of every decision I make.

But operational care is something different. It's knowing what actually matters and what's just performance. It's understanding the difference between what feels like caring and what actually protects the thing you built.

Obsessing over keratin melt points and water chemistry and root comfort, that's care. My team and I do that. And none of that is cheap or accidental. It requires profit to sustain.

Profit isn't the thing that compromises the mission. It's the thing that funds it.

A founder who prioritizes profitability isn't abandoning her customers. She's protecting her ability to keep showing up for them. On her own terms. Without someone else's timeline attached.

And I think that is part of what allows a founder like Paige to stay so deeply in the details without apologizing for it. She's passionate about the product. She's passionate about the experience. She's highly involved. And rather than treating that as a failure to “step back,” that proximity seems to be one of the things that has allowed the brand to remain so consistent.

She could also make herself the center of the brand if she wanted to. She fits the aesthetic. She could be everywhere. But she isn't.

> And I think that's important because **founder-led does not necessarily mean founder-famous.**

The founder does not have to be the face of every campaign or turn herself into the product. Sometimes the founder's presence is most visible in the consistency of the decisions.

Someone is still there deciding what fits and what doesn't. What the company will spend money on and what it won't. Which opportunities are worth pursuing and which ones would pull the brand away from itself. Someone is still capable of feeling pride when the company gets it right and embarrassment when it doesn't. Someone still feels personally responsible for the promise.

To me, that is part of why founders matter.

It isn't simply that founders care more. It's that, at their best, they can provide a continuity of judgment that is incredibly difficult to manufacture.

So I think this is ultimately a reframing of three things:

First, **care as an operational discipline**. The ability to remain attentive enough to notice, refine, protect, and preserve what matters.

Second, **profit as the thing that makes that care possible**. Not the enemy of intention, but the protector of it. Profit gives a founder the patience, independence, and perspective to keep showing up on her own terms.

And third, **the founder as a steward of consistency**. Someone at the helm who remembers what the business promised in the first place and is still willing to make decisions in service of it.

Because when a business is profitable, it buys itself time. It buys the founder the ability to move slower, stay independent, protect quality, and resist the pressure to become bigger simply because the market demands it.

A profitable founder-led business may not always look the flashiest. But it endures because of that someone at the helm willing to say no. No to the celebrity campaign, the weekly floral subscription, the six-figure email agency, or whatever else looks impressive but does not actually protect the thing you built.

Sometimes what matters more is the product. Faster shipping. Better ingredients. Ethical sourcing. Reliable support. And actually listening to customer.

To me, that is stewardship.

Being a founder means holding responsibility for the value you set out to create and protecting the trust your customers placed in you.

This is not a romantic rejection of ambition or a deterrent to growth. I’ve just been thinking a lot about the economics and operational realities of care, profit as protection, and why having a founder at the helm who still feels responsible for the original promise may matter more than we give it credit for.
### Businesses Have Quarters. People Have Seasons.
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/businesses-have-quarters-people-have-seasons/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T16:27:47.000Z
I run my businesses by quarters but I have stopped expecting myself to live that way.

I own businesses, so I understand the usefulness of quarters. First quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter. Revenue targets. Budgets. Sales goals. Strategy sessions. Annual plans. KPIs. There is something very practical about dividing a business year into four equal parts and asking each one to produce something measurable.

Businesses need that kind of structure. They need deadlines and forecasts and ways to know whether what you are doing is actually working. But somewhere along the way, I think a lot of us started applying that same logic to ourselves.

January arrives and suddenly we are all supposed to be ready to go. New year, new goals, new routines, new body, new business plan. Wake up earlier. Lock in. Hit the ground running. *And I have just never really felt that way in January.*

Part of this may be because I grew up in brutally cold Minnesota and now live in the Northeast. I think living somewhere with real seasons conditions you to understand that nature has different expectations of you at different times of year.

When it is freezing outside, you wear a coat. When it gets dark at four-thirty, your life changes. You spend more time inside. Your energy changes. Your appetite changes. The things you want to do change. You cannot pretend it is July because the calendar says you should be productive.

So I think I have always had some intuitive understanding that there are times to expand and times to contract. Times to push and times to recover. Times to go out into the world and times to come home to yourself. I have just gotten much better at honoring that as I have gotten older.

> Businesses have quarters. People have seasons.

**And I think part of building a life you actually like is developing enough sensitivity to know which season you are in, and enough confidence to stop demanding that every season produce the same thing.**

## Winter is not nothing

January has never felt like my New Year.

December is probably the most exhausting month of my year. My entire immediate family has birthdays in December. There are holidays, hosting, gifts, corporate gifts, parties, endless school events, and all of the invisible work that somehow appears around making the holidays feel like the holidays. Then there are the end-of-year obligations of running a business.

By January, my social battery is dead. I do not want to go to a party. I do not particularly want to reinvent myself. I want the quiet permission of darkness and cold. I want to be in my own house.

For a long time, I think there was a part of me that believed I should fight that. January is the beginning of Q1\. Serious businesspeople are supposed to come roaring back. There is almost a moral quality attached to how quickly you can get yourself “back on track.”

But I own my company. It is self-funded. I have more control over how I structure my life than most people do. Why would I use that freedom to force myself into a rhythm that does not actually work for me?

One of the gifts I have given myself is letting winter be winter.

The calendar tells me January 1 is a beginning. Nature tells me something very different. Look outside in January and almost nothing appears to be happening. The trees are bare. The ground is hard. Sometimes everything is covered in snow. But because I grew up around real winter, I know that nothing visible happening is not the same thing as nothing happening.

Things are dormant. They are conserving energy. They are repairing. Underneath frozen ground, things are preparing to grow again even though there is absolutely no evidence of it yet.

That rhythm makes much more intuitive sense to me than deciding that because the number at the end of the date changed, I should suddenly become the most productive version of myself.

Winter is when I naturally want to read more, think more, write more, and look back at the year that just happened. I want to understand what worked, what did not, what needs repairing, and what I might want to do differently. I do not stop working. I just stop expecting the same kind of work from myself. *There is a difference.*

And I think that distinction matters because we have become very bad at recognizing invisible progress. If there is not a launch, a metric, a transformation photo, a new goal, or something we can point to and say, “Look what I did,” we assume nothing happened.

But sometimes the work of a season is not visible. Sometimes the work is thinking, recovering, deciding what you no longer want, or getting quiet enough to hear yourself again.

There will be a time to push. For me, winter is not it.

## Spring is when I want to move

Then spring comes and something changes. You start seeing bulbs come up. There are these little peeks and promises of color. The days get longer. People start emerging from their houses again. Everything begins stretching toward the light.

And I can feel the same thing happening in me. I get more focused, more ambitious, more interested in getting things done. So I lean into that too.

This is where I think honoring seasons is very different from simply giving yourself permission to do less. I do not want to do less all year. Sometimes I want to do a lot.

When the energy is there, I want to use it.

Spring becomes a really good time for me to push, execute, launch, make decisions, and get difficult things done. And part of the reason I can enjoy that intensity is because I am not pretending I am going to maintain exactly the same level of intensity for twelve months.

I know myself well enough to know what comes next. I want to play in the summer.

That knowledge actually makes me more disciplined in spring. There are things I want finished before summer. There are things I want launched. There are things I want off my desk because I know I am going to care less about sitting behind a computer when the sun is out at eight-thirty at night.

I think this is where some of our ideas about consistency become unnecessarily rigid. Consistency does not have to mean sameness.

I can be consistent about what matters to me over the course of a year without expecting myself to approach it with exactly the same energy in January, April, July, and October. Why would I expect that from myself when almost nothing else in nature works that way?

> Maybe consistency is not producing at the same speed all year. Maybe consistency is staying in relationship with what matters, while allowing the way you tend to it to change.

## Summer is for playing

Summer is a completely different kind of rest for me. It is not quiet. It is not particularly restorative in the traditional wellness sense. Honestly, sometimes I am exhausted. But it is playful.

My kids are out of school. For the past few years they have gone to sleepaway camp for part of the summer, and we have increasingly used summer for longer stretches of travel as a family. I love the late sunsets. I walk more. We are outside more. We eat later. There are more spontaneous plans.

And I especially love spending extended periods in another country because it forces me to use a different part of my brain. Everything is just unfamiliar enough. You are figuring out where to go, what to eat, how people live, sometimes trying to speak another language. There is novelty everywhere.

And I have realized that novelty is incredibly important to me.

For someone who spends so much of the year thinking about businesses, solving problems, making decisions, and being responsible for outcomes, there is something very useful about being somewhere where I am not trying to optimize anything.

I am not sitting at a café in Spain trying to have my next great business idea. Actually, the opposite. I want to stop trying to have the idea.

> I do not believe all of our best thinking happens behind a computer. Mine certainly does not. Sometimes the best thing I can do for my work is get far enough away from it that my mind starts wandering somewhere else.

That is a different kind of productivity, although I almost hate calling it that because it turns play back into work. Sometimes play should just be play. Sometimes the value of a summer is that you were in your life. You saw things, you laughed, you stayed out too late, you wandered, you were interesting to yourself again.

Our company leans into summer too. Business naturally slows down. People are away. The media business gets quieter. We have summer Fridays every other week.

And yes, as someone who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in the Northeast, I remain suspicious of whether my friends in Los Angeles and Miami have earned summer Fridays. You have had summer all year. This is our time.

But the larger point is that I do not want to spend July fighting July. I have done that before. I have tried to impose the exact same expectations on every month of the year. At this point, I do not really understand what the prize is for winning that fight.

## If you have done summer right, you eventually want your life back

This might be my favorite part of the cycle.

By late August, I am usually done. I have traveled. I have played. I have stayed up late. I have eaten out too much. Half my routines have disappeared. I have had enough novelty. **And suddenly I want my house, my schedule, my routines, the kids back in school. I want to work.**

I actually think there is something really beautiful about reaching the end of a vacation, or even an entire season of play, and realizing you do not want to escape your real life indefinitely. You miss it. That feels important to me.

Because so much of the way we talk about a “good life” is built around escape. The vacation. The weekend. The sabbatical. The fantasy of not having to work.

> But one of the questions I am increasingly interested in is whether you have built a life you eventually want to come home to.

If you have done summer right, vacation is wonderful. And then your real life starts sounding pretty good again.

That is why Labor Day has always felt much more like my New Year than January 1\. By September, I am ready. Not because someone told me this is when I should be ready, but because I actually am.

## Fall is when I lock in

Fall is probably my favorite working season.

Everything comes back at once. School starts. New York comes alive again. People return from vacation. Events start. There are dinners and conferences and back-to-school things and birthdays.

It is probably my most social season too, which somehow works because after summer I have the appetite for it again. And professionally, I want to get shit done.

But even then, I do not think of fall as a period of indiscriminate creation. If I am going to continue abusing the gardening metaphor, fall is harvest.

By October, I usually have a pretty clear understanding of what kind of year we are having in the businesses. Most of the year is booked. Barring some enormous surprise in December, I can see where we are going to land.

That is why I love doing strategy sessions in October. What grew? What is ripe? What worked? What is making money? What did not work? What needs to be tweaked? What do we absolutely not need to do again next year?

This is probably where I differ from some of the constant-innovation culture around business. I do not think fourth quarter is necessarily the time to invent a bunch of new shit. *Do what works.*

Focus on what is making money. Finish what you started. Tweak what is not working. Get back into the routines that make the business run well. Harvest what you spent the rest of the year growing, then start thinking about what you might want to plant next.

There is a kind of maturity in not needing every season to be about beginning something. Some seasons are for finishing. Some are for collecting the return on what you already built. Some are for noticing that something worked and having enough discipline not to ruin it by immediately replacing it with something new.

## My life has seasons too

Once I started seeing my year this way professionally, I realized I was already doing it everywhere else.

My social energy is seasonal. I can happily have a dinner, an event, a school thing, and another dinner in the same week in October. Ask me to do that in January and I will resent everyone involved.

My relationship with technology changes. There are seasons when I am interested in new tools and using technology to help me execute more efficiently. And there are other times, especially when I am traveling, when I want to block as much of it as possible and keep only what I need to navigate my life.

My movement changes. My eating changes. My clothes change. The books I want to read change. Even the way I think seems to change.

For a long time, I think I saw some of those shifts as inconsistency. Now I mostly see them as information.

This is how I work.

And once you know that about yourself, you can actually plan for it instead of being perpetually surprised by yourself.

That, to me, is one of the real benefits of paying attention to your seasons. It gives you information about your own life.

Maybe you are not lazy. Maybe you are depleted. Maybe you have not lost your ambition. Maybe you are in a season that is asking you to turn inward. Maybe the thing that felt effortless six months ago genuinely requires more energy now because your family changed, your health changed, your work changed, or you changed.

And maybe instead of immediately trying to correct yourself, you can ask a better question: **What does this season require of me? And just as importantly, what does it not require?**

## I do not want to run my life like a corporation

I think this is the part that bothers me most about the way we talk about productivity now.

So much corporate language has quietly infiltrated our personal lives that we barely notice it anymore. We have quarterly goals and KPIs and optimization and efficiency and performance and growth. We measure our sleep. We measure our steps. We measure our output. We turn hobbies into side hustles and morning routines into performance systems. Somehow even rest has become something we are supposed to optimize so that we can come back and produce more.

**And listen, I am not anti-any of this. I have goals. I track things. I love systems. I literally run companies. *But I do not want to become one.***

> I do not want the only measure of whether January was valuable to be how much I produced in January. I do not want a summer spent traveling with my family to register in my mind as a productivity decline. I do not want to look at a period when I am reading and thinking and not producing very much and assume that nothing is happening.

Sometimes nothing visible is happening. That does not mean nothing is happening.

I think one of the privileges of being a human being is that we get to respond to something more organic than a calendar. We get to notice our energy, our families, where we live, the weather, our bodies, what season of life we are actually in.

> Maybe the goal is not to overcome all of those things in the name of consistency. Maybe the goal is to build a life flexible enough to respond to them.

## I would rather live in a cycle than on a treadmill

The older I get, the more interested I am in working with these rhythms instead of constantly trying to override them.

Winter gives me permission to go inward. By spring, I am ready to move. Summer pulls me out into the world. By fall, I am ready to come back and work. Then it happens again. There is something reassuring about thinking about a year this way because it means I do not have to demand everything from myself at once.

If I am tired in January, I do not need to panic that I have lost my ambition. If I am distracted by travel and my children and beautiful weather in July, I do not need to engineer a more disciplined version of summer. If September makes me want to reorganize my entire life, make lists, start projects, and lock in, I can use that too.

I am not lowering my expectations for myself. I am getting better at understanding when different versions of me tend to show up, and then building my life around the reality of that instead of the fiction that I should be exactly the same woman 365 days a year.

**And I think that is what I want you to take away:**

Not that your seasons have to look like mine. Maybe January is when you come alive. Maybe summer is your most productive period. Maybe you live somewhere without dramatic changes in weather and your seasons have nothing to do with temperature at all.

Your seasons might be defined by motherhood, building a company, grief, healing, falling in love, caring for someone, having very little money, finally having enough, wanting to be everywhere, or wanting to disappear for a while and make something.

There is a kind of self-trust in being able to say: **this is the season I am in, this is what it is asking from me, and I am going to stop fighting it long enough to see what it has to give me.**

My businesses still have quarters. They have budgets, goals, forecasts, KPIs, and deadlines. I need them to.

But I do not need to be one.

I have seasons.
### What my body was screaming to me
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/what-my-body-was-screaming-to-me/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T16:27:03.000Z
You try to ignore it or pretend you can accept it. It's part of getting older, it's not as bad as it seems. But I could tell... this was something more.

I have reconciled my dramatic turn into gray hair. It started at 23 and it progressed in bits and spurts and all came crashing down along my hairline these past two years. This, my recent hair loss was different. It had started with a missing cul de sac of hair on my right temple. Then it continued with increased dryness and breakage along my hairline and an increased thinning that receded my hairline a good 1".

I'm a beauty founder & CEO. I sell gorgeous hair, I certify national salons on how to offer gorgeous hair and I no longer had it.

I think the most frustrating part about aging hair is not understanding or really being able to isolate just what is causing the breaking, the thinning, increased shedding. Is it just stress, from what though? Environmental, work, family responsibilities? Is it not enough sleep? Is it a vitamin deficiency, if so how do I know? Is it perimenopause, what does that even mean, low estrogen, low testosterone? Is it just a texture change because my hair is more grey? Like what the fuck is happening to my hair. Is this my post covid reality of less hair…

I knew that my hairline wasn't as thick as I deluded myself. But it was an off the cuff CEO interview in my office one day that punched me in the gut. The lighting in my office is truly perfect. There basked in studio perfect lighting I could see that my entire right side of my temple was basically hanging on by a thread and my hairline in general was overall thinner and further back.

And let's be clear, this isn't the pursuit of perfection, just the dry, textured consistently stuck at my collar bone hair that I've known for the past 10 years. It felt like something deep inside trying to tell me something isn't right.

## So off to TikTok I headed

Rosemary Oil, massaging my hair nightly upside down, this serum, that peptide, pumpkin seed oil, banana clips, iron pills, MaryRuth's. It wasn't for a lack of trying to think of any and every non medical approach to address what was clearly something deeper that my body had been trying to scream at me to listen.

And that's why I'm so frustrated with the American system of health care.

## A ferritin level of 7

This past February I was in the Swiss Alps for an extended 3 week ski trip. I had not been feeling well the weeks prior and I believe I had what was a rebound illness. I decided to visit Medi Verbier just to make sure it wasn't an infection. I had been extremely light headed, with a severe cough and absolutely no energy. This could have been ascribed to a million of things including altitude sickness, sinus infection or a miserable combination of all 3.

But it wasn't.

It was my first time sitting down with a doctor who cared just as much about wellness as she cared about illness. I met with Dr. Sabine who spent hours with me to discover a multitude of issues some of which were easy to fix but after thorough blood testing we realized I had a ferritin level of 7\. That's low, extremely low and she said have you had any inklings?

Yes. My hair.

It suddenly made sense, the cul de sacs of lost hair, thinning and breaking along the hair line and a stunning decrease in density over a few months. That coupled with I had just lost 10 lbs in 3 weeks during my 3 weeks vacation in France. I'm the face of brand that literally sells the idea of perfection in hair and my hair was literally falling out.

## Things that pissed me off when we looked at my blood markers

I've been to two different dermatologists in the US. Harvard-trained dermatologists and a fancy Westport dermatologist where I had paid consultation specifically for hair loss and was not asked any of these questions and I had a blood test done which showed signs that I might have low ferritin but no further testing was explored. Not even a questioning about my menstrual cycle, my dietary habits, my lifestyle and stress.

You know what I did get? A suggestion for a PRP treatment that was about $5,000 with a kind promise that it's indeed painful and may not be that effective in the end.

The second doctor pissed me off more because she suggested after my blood panel results that although my testosterone was in normal to low levels that I should start a Pellet program for Testosterone, even though that is known to accelerate hair loss in women. It is a lucrative and recurring source of income though for Medical Practitioners and Med Spas.

I've been to my hairstylist and she's incredibly sweet and kind but she suggested Rogaine. She did the best she could and at least she had been one of the first people to notice, but she hadn't been given the skills or diagnostic tools or referral networks to even know where to get more information and help.

I've been to a general practitioner years ago when I felt super low energy and exhausted just by the idea of life and she dismissingly said I was just a mom of twins and just get used to it.

It was not until I was talking with Dr. Sabine that I felt truly cared for. She acknowledged I deserved more than just not being ill, that I truly deserved a life of complete and holistic awareness, and she affirmed for me that:

> What is often dismissed as cosmetic concerns is often diagnostic signals for deeper issues.

## I felt like Iron Man

She ordered an immediate iron transfusion via IV and then had me return in 8 weeks to retest. She also advised that I do a stool sample 6 weeks before so that we could also analyze if there were gastrointestinal issues. She advised that I might have tenderness or feel flu like symptoms over the next few days. I did not have any of these symptoms.

Over the next few days I felt like I was literally Iron Man.

Was this psychosomatic? Highly likely. Was this validation of my humanity and being seen as a fully dimensional patient? Yes.

Over the next few weeks, my TikTok feed was scarily flooded with truly predatory and misinformed TikToks suggesting low iron was a precursor for colon cancer, a slew of gastrointestinal diseases and if I've learned anything from this process… there are limits to what you should be consuming on TikTok and algorithmic media. It's designed to flood the zone, scare you and take you down spirals that often lead to a quasi snake oil solution available on their TikTok Shop.

Overall, I slowly felt like I had more energy, more vitality to my skin tone but no signs of improvement to my hair or balding cul de sacs.

## Heavy cycles, and other things no one ever defines

I returned to Switzerland 8 weeks later for a stool and follow up blood test. Dr. Sabine advised that while an infusion was necessary it was more important to understand what could be the contributing reasons for such low ferritin levels. The common culprits are:

- Heavy menstrual cycles
- Not eating meat
- Gastrointestinal issues

As we started discussing my lifestyle, I realized that there aren't a lot of clear indications or benchmarks for any of this. What is really and truly defined as a heavy cycle? I've had a truly consistent cycle throughout the years and not one doctor, nurse or practitioner has really ever explained to me what is precisely the definition of a heavy cycle and thus I've just self designated as having a normal cycle.

I stopped eating meat and poultry and basically became a pescatarian 10 years ago. It wasn't until I was at a Summer Camp at The Wing and casually brought this up that a nurse discussed with me that I truly was going to have to make a dedicated effort to seek the best method of absorbing vitamins and minerals and proteins from my food if I was choosing to forgo dairy, poultry and meat. Even in that casual discussion no one ever discussed with me exactly how to supplement the iron deficiency from a nutritional standpoint other than telling me I should eat red meat occasionally. I had gone to two nutritionists but even that never quite discussed or addressed the total self. It didn't involve a full blood testing work up and a vitamin and mineral test.

As for gastrointestinal issues, I've definitively been aware of how important it is to your health. And…if I'm completely honest, outside of eating fermented foods and taking a probiotic occasionally I don't know if I really understand how I would approach or understand how to investigate if this was the issue. But I do know I've received an insane amount of ads on leaky gut and still can't define what it is.

And so in this one small mountain clinic in Verbier, one doctor approached the issue with patience, time and an holistic and comprehensive manner.

I returned in April and we discussed and examined the updated blood panel first. The good news: my Ferritin levels were now at 215\. Which is incredibly high… and would take time for my body to use the iron stores. The stool sample also showed a completely healthy GI system. We isolated that the combination of both my cycle and not eating meat was a likely contributor to the low iron levels. We made a comprehensive and preventative plan to keep my iron levels high that will most likely include some sort of iron IV infusions once a year or every other year.

## The body is the operating instrument

I'm not one to just put so much of my medical history on the internet. Trust. But… I felt compelled to speak on this because I see so many people that I know who are frustrated with their skin, their hair, their weight and genuinely feel dismissed by the traditional medical establishment as a cosmetic concern. Alternatively they can get trapped in the expensive and sometimes predatory world of med spas and supplements and non traditional medicine that takes advantage of the gap in our health care system especially in the US.

It's designed to treat illness. And I truly acknowledge and admire the advances and incredible system that we get to the privilege to complain about until the day we truly need its innovative and best in class surgeries and treatments. Like hard full stop. It's incredible and I'm so thankful for the entire healthcare system and professionals who allow us the ability to seek wellness.

And yet, when it comes to wellness it feels as if the fragmented and specialization by practice area has led us to where many of us don't have a single place to go that allows us to look and feel like our best selves, medically informed, personalized and progressive form of wellness.

And what I realized through this process, and why I want to share it and why it's worth divulging so much personal information on the internet, is that my body is the operating instrument. It's my only one. As I get older and as a founder and as a CEO and a mother, you realize how many things are reliant on it.

In a world where your time is super fragmented and you're already driving your kids to orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, or the pedics and the pediatrician, and you're trying to go to your gynecologist, your body is being stretched among so many fragmented places holistically. You need to be able to listen to your body.

I now realize that when my body is screaming something and not just physically in my physical form, when my hair is thinning or my skin is looking weird or there are dark circles under my eyes, I think that is nature's way of communicating and screaming to us. We'll stop when we see the visual manifestation of what's going on inside. That we should advocate for ourselves.

That is what I want to scream to all women: we need to have a framework for self-advocacy, for places to go to that holistically address and treat and discuss with us. Give yourself permission to advocate for yourself, get to know your numbers, even if you're coming out of pocket, even if you have to fly to Switzerland (which hopefully you won't have to).

Don't let your body scream. Start listening to your body's whispers.
### Bullet Journaling | The System I Keep Coming Back To
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/the-system-i-keep-coming-back-to/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T18:48:59.000Z
*How I've used a bullet journal for nearly a decade to organize my businesses, my family, my ideas—and the general chaos of being a person.*

Every year, Labor Day feels a little like New Year's Day to me.Summer is when I loosen my grip. I travel. The kids are out of school. Routines get a little fuzzy. I play more. **Then September comes, and I want to lock back in.**

I run two businesses. I have a family. There are holidays coming. There are things I want to build, things I need to remember, things I want to read, money decisions to make, appointments to schedule and an astonishing number of tiny pieces of adult life that seem to exist solely to take up space in my brain.

> A girl needs a system. And despite all of the technology I use—and I use a lot of it—one of the systems I keep returning to is almost aggressively analog: a notebook and a pen.

**I've been bullet journaling for nearly ten years.** I still have the old journals. I label them by year and archive them. I choose different colors depending on whatever energy I'm feeling when I start a new one. They sit together now as a strange little physical record of my life.

And that has turned out to be part of their value.

> The best system isn't the one you follow perfectly. It's the one you can keep returning to.

## Why a bullet journal survived all my other systems

I have always been a notebook person—and, unfortunately for my wallet, a planner person.

For years I would buy separate things for separate parts of my life: a gratitude journal, a calendar, a planner, another notebook for ideas. I loved the idea of all of them. What I didn't love was trying to make my actual life conform to someone else's preprinted pages.

There was never enough room where I needed it and always too much room where I didn't.

Then I discovered bullet journaling.

The basic idea is wonderfully simple: instead of buying a planner that dictates the structure, you create the structure as you go.

That flexibility is probably the single biggest reason I'm still using one.

There are periods when I'm extremely disciplined and I'm in my journal every day. There are other periods when life is full and I barely touch it.

This summer, for example, I did a midyear reflection, planned a month, wrote in it for a few days in August and apparently opened it exactly once in July.

And nothing happened.

There were no sad abandoned pages labeled JULY 17 waiting to remind me that I had failed at my productivity system. When I was ready to come back, I turned the page and started again.

I increasingly think that is what a good system should do.

It should accommodate a life—not demand that you organize your life around maintaining the system.

## The notebook itself is intentionally boring

I use a **Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook**. I prefer the dots to lined pages because I draw, make lists, create little bookshelves and generally want the freedom to use a page however I want.

I once bought the official branded Bullet Journal version and didn't find that I needed it. The regular dotted notebook works perfectly well for me.

The numbered pages matter, though.

So does the table of contents.

Every time I add something I may eventually want to find again, I put it in the index. Without that, you don't have a personal operating system. You have 200 pages of thoughts you'll eventually have to hunt through.

And I always keep a pen with it. My current favorite is a Muji pen. During particularly committed periods, I've even bought those little adhesive pen loops so there is literally no excuse for the notebook and pen to become separated.

I like stickers, too; *productivity does not have to be ugly.*

## The first pages aren't a to-do list

Every new journal starts with my **mission and vision**.

They don't change every year. Every few years I revisit and rewrite them, but I want them physically near everything else I'm planning.

Because otherwise it is surprisingly easy to become extremely efficient at doing things that don't actually matter to you.

More recently, I've added a personal manifesto: what I believe, why I do things the way I do, how I want to work with people and things I know I need to keep working on in myself.

Then the journal gets much less profound.

There is currently a **glow-up tracker**.

That might include a chemical peel, something I want to investigate for my skin or some other completely superficial thing I've decided I want to do.

Both belong in there.

That's another thing I like about having one notebook instead of a collection of specialized planners. My life doesn't divide itself neatly into *important things* and *unimportant things*.

Neither does my journal.

> It is surprisingly easy to become extremely efficient at doing things that don't actually matter to you.

## My family memory log

I also keep a family and core-memory log.

This isn't elaborate journaling. When something happens that I really want to remember, I write down a line.

That's it.

A funny thing one of my kids said. Something we did together. A small moment that I know I don't want swallowed by the hundreds of other things that happened that month.

Sometimes productivity is remembering to do something.

Sometimes it's remembering what already happened.

## My personal library

This may be my favorite section.

I draw bookshelves and keep a record of what I'm reading. Over the years I've created my own categories: fiction for fun, literary fiction, personal development, business systems, personal finance and whatever else I happen to be trying to learn at the time.

I also keep a running list of books and podcasts people recommend.

Some years the shelves get very full.

This year? Less impressive.

That's useful information too.

The point isn't to manufacture evidence that I'm a person who reads. It's to have a record of what I was curious about at different points in my life.

## The chaos list

This may be the least glamorous and most useful thing in the entire notebook.

I call it my **chaos list**.

It's where I put all of those tasks that don't belong anywhere but nevertheless need to happen: put something into a trust, renew a passport, find a boat captain, complete a background check.

The administrative debris of adult life.

I don't necessarily schedule all of it immediately. I just need somewhere trustworthy to put it.

Then, when I unexpectedly have a pocket of time and enough energy to deal with annoying things, I know where to go.

There is something psychologically calming about taking a cloud of vague obligations out of your head and putting it on paper.

> Cataloging the chaos makes it feel less chaotic.

## I plan in seasons, not quarters

This is one of my more idiosyncratic planning habits.

I own and run corporations. I understand quarters.

I just don't particularly enjoy thinking about my *life* in them.

I live in the Northeast, where the seasons actually change, and I've realized that seasons are a much more intuitive unit of personal time for me.

So four times a year I do a seasonal check-in.

- What worked?
- What isn't working?
- How am I feeling?
- What needs more attention?
- What does success look like at the end of this season?

Then I set a few intentions.

There is something much more human to me about saying *this fall* than *Q4*.

Businesses have quarters, people have seasons.

## The rule of three

From there, things get more tactical.

At the beginning of each month, I write down key dates and choose my priorities: my personal top three, the top three for each company I run, and a small number of financial goals—sales, savings, investments or whatever needs my attention that month.

I repeat the process weekly and sometimes daily.

Three keeps appearing because I have learned something about myself: a giant to-do list does not make me more productive. It mostly creates a very detailed record of everything I failed to accomplish.

Three meaningful things is different.

If I accomplish three important things in a day, that's a good day.

If I move three genuinely important things forward in a week, that can be a very good week.

The constraint creates a guardrail. Instead of constantly experiencing myself as behind, I have a reasonable definition of done.

My weekly pages also have extremely practical buckets:

**Do. Buy. Research.**

I meal-plan there too.

Nothing revolutionary. That's rather the point.

> A giant to-do list mostly creates a very detailed record of everything I failed to accomplish.

## Why I still write things down

I haven't abandoned technology.

My calendar is digital. I use AI. I have a Remarkable. I use all sorts of tools that I'll write about separately because each solves a different problem for me.

My bullet journal isn't competing with any of them.

It does something different.

Sitting down with a pen and a blank page removes the noise. I have to decide what matters enough to physically write down.

Maybe part of it is simply the feedback loop I grew up with: hand, pen, paper, thought.

I don't see any reason to optimize that out of my life just because a newer technology exists.

## The unexpected value of keeping them

I originally kept my old journals because I'm a person who keeps things.

Now I think the archive may be one of the best parts of the practice.

I can pull out an old journal and see what I wanted then. What I worried about. What I thought would be difficult. What I was trying to build.

Sometimes it's humbling, but more often, it's encouraging.

There are goals in those notebooks that once seemed enormous and are now simply my life.

There are also things I desperately wanted that I no longer care about—which may be equally useful to remember.

Looking backward gives me a way to ask:

**Am I still aligned with the person I thought I wanted to become?**

And occasionally the archive is useful in an absurdly literal way.

A friend recently called and asked if I remembered a preschool consultant I'd used years ago.

I did and more importantly, I still had the notes.

## A system that leaves room for a life

I think I've finally figured out why the bullet journal has survived nearly a decade of new apps, devices, planners and productivity experiments.

It isn't because I've found the perfect system.

It's because the system leaves enough room for me to change.

I can be intensely ambitious in September and barely open the notebook in July.

I can put my corporate priorities next to a book I want to read, something my child said, an investment goal and an appointment for a chemical peel.

That messiness isn't a flaw in the system.

**It's a reasonably accurate representation of a life.**

And now Labor Day has passed.

My notebook is back out.

My Muji pen is attached.

It's time to lock in.
### Happy Money
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/happy-money/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T18:49:16.000Z
Coming soon... my reflection on Happy Money as part of The Covet List. The Letter announces when a new one is published.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### On Paying Attention to Your Own Money
URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/on-paying-attention-to-your-own-money/
Last updated: 2026-10-10T18:49:39.000Z
*Building, Out Loud*

A few years ago, on a Sunday morning in March, I sat down with a cup of coffee and a printed copy of my bank statement.

This wasn't a normal Sunday morning. It was a Sunday morning I had scheduled, deliberately, after months of a low-grade nausea every time I logged into my bank account. The kind of nausea where you don't actually look at the numbers — you look at the corner of the screen where the numbers are, register that they exist, and close the tab. I had been doing that for a year.

So I printed the statement. Twelve months of it. And I went line by line with a yellow highlighter.

By the time I finished, I had highlighted four thousand five hundred dollars in subscriptions, recurring charges, and auto-pays for things I no longer used, no longer wanted, or had completely forgotten existed. A meal kit I had cancelled — apparently not. A magazine subscription from 2013\. A monthly box of something I had ordered as a gift for someone two Christmases earlier and somehow renewed for myself. A premium tier on a service I'd downgraded to free. A gym I hadn't been to since the pandemic.

Forty-five hundred dollars. Annual. Just leaking.

The reflexive lesson here is the obvious one: audit your statements, cancel what you don't use, save the money. That's a finance-blog lesson. I have written that finance-blog lesson before. It is true, and it is not the actual lesson.

> The actual lesson is that I had built a financial life designed around not paying attention.

Auto-pay was sold to me, and to most of us, as a productivity tool. *Set it and forget it.* The framing assumes that the worst-case scenario in your financial life is the friction of remembering to pay a bill. But that wasn't my worst-case scenario. My worst-case scenario was this: a year of slow, unwitnessed leakage, because I had been told that automation was the same thing as competence.

It isn't. Automation is *delegation* of attention. And there are some things you cannot delegate the attention on.

I run businesses. I run them by paying attention. I read every credit card statement that comes through the holding company at the end of every month, line by line, the same way I read my personal statement that Sunday in March. Not because I don't trust my team — I trust them completely — but because I have learned that the act of looking is itself the work. The attention is what makes me a steward of the money rather than a passenger to it.

I cannot tell you how many founders I know who built sophisticated financial systems for their companies and then ran their personal finances on auto-pay because they had been told that's what *adults* do. They wouldn't dream of letting a vendor charge their company's card without review. They are doing it to themselves every month.

This is the gap between financial sophistication and financial attention. They are not the same thing. The first is performative: the apps, the tools, the budgeting platforms with the satisfying graphs. The second is unglamorous and sometimes I dare say shameful...sitting on a Sunday morning with a paper statement and a highlighter, watching where the money actually goes.

After that Sunday I made a rule for myself, and I have kept it for the better part of a decade now: nothing recurring on auto-pay except utilities and the mortgage.

Everything else gets a manual touch every month. The subscriptions I want to keep, I pay on a schedule I run. The ones I'm ambivalent about, I cancel — because if I have to manually decide every month to keep paying for something, the ones I don't actively want fall away on their own. The ones I keep, I keep deliberately.

This is the opposite of what every productivity expert and finance-blog author will tell you to do. Most of them will tell you that automation is the answer to financial discipline. I am telling you that for me, automation was the *problem*. The discipline lives in the friction. The friction is what makes me a person who knows where her money is going.

I want to be careful here. I am not telling you to do this. I am telling you what I do. You may have a financial life that runs beautifully on automation, where you do review the statements, where the auto-pays serve you rather than drain you. If so, keep it.

But if you are like me five years ago — the version of me who closed the bank tab without reading the numbers, the version who felt low-grade nausea every time the credit card bill arrived — consider that the system you have been told is the responsible one might be the one making you irresponsible. 

> The friction of paying attention is not a bug. It is the entire point.

The last thing I will say is this: the $4,500 was not, in the end, the most important thing I found that Sunday morning. The most important thing I found was that I had been afraid to look at my own money for a year. And I had been afraid to look because I had told myself that responsible adults didn't need to look — that the systems would handle it.

The systems were not handling it. The systems had handled exactly what they were designed to handle, which is to keep moving money out of my account on a schedule. They were not handling the question of whether the money should be moving in the first place. That question is mine. It will always be mine.

Pay attention to your own money. Not because you don't trust the systems, but because the attention is the thing.

---

*Building, Out Loud is the pillar where I write about the work, the ventures, and the capital. Not advice. Just the receipts and what I learned from them.*