5 ways to get dangerously ahead in your 20s

The EXACT traits that helped me leave my 9-5 and generate over £100k+ profit in my first full year as a creator

Hey! So glad you could be here at Frugal Chic, where financial intelligence meets taste. Today we are discussing crucial traits that have helped me get ahead in my 20s.

First, what I have been consuming instead of doomscrolling:

• Passenger princess x m.iles from SIGNET: how Miles created his ecommerce brand Signet before he left his 9-5. Super interesting and I was really inspired to not just treat content like the product itself - to have a different source of income and focus.

• The Koe Cast: is value based content dead? Really helped with my edutainment niche. Basic educational content is dead, because AI can replicate it at scale. The future will be about taste - discernment (v onbrand !!)

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: guys, officially one of my favourite books about entrepreneurship even though it’s not written by Naval, it’s a great summary of his work and it goes deeper than generic money/business books.

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Deep dive

If you want to get dangerously ahead in your 20s, it’s more simple than you think. Simple doesn’t mean easy, but it does mean that once you fill the knowledge gap and develop the right habits, getting wealthy in your 20s becomes inevitable.

I’m 25 now, and I have made £100k+ from building a personal brand online in my first full year and built a following of over half a million. I built this while at a 9-5, working mornings, evenings and weekends. I now work for myself, and have total time, location and financial freedom.

I talk a lot about saving money. Frugal Chic is built on the idea that saving on what doesn’t count rather than spending on excess can give your clarity and aid in your journey to financial freedom. However, saving alone won’t make you wealthy. At some point, you have to become entrepreneurial in how you think and act.

But first, we have to ask, why try to ‘get ahead’?

Because right now, there isn’t really another option. We’re living through a cost of living and housing crisis. It’s becoming more and more unaffordable to work a regular job and still have surplus money once rent and bills are paid. When you really sit with that reality, striving for a life of freedom and autonomy stops being aspirational and starts becoming necessary.

Getting ahead doesn’t mean another status game, it’s not a competition as the tagline would suggest, rather the pursuit of something purposeful for you. For me, being ahead in your 20s means a contentment with your work, how you spend your free time, and havign the income to support a life you deem as ‘rich’. That could look different to everyone.

That’s also why I think your 20s aren’t about “relaxing” or “finding yourself” in the way people like to romanticise. The people who say your 20s are for living your best life with no concern for the future are usually not going anywhere in life or are massively privileged. If, like me, you don’t come from money or don’t want to move back home, taking a year out to chill isn’t really an option.

I want to own a home one day, take my parents on holiday without worrying about money, be work optional before 40. This all takes a huge amount of money and autonomy, which I believe I have the power to build in my 20s, when I don’t have kids or any meaningful responsibilities.

The life I wanted to avoid became painfully clear when I was working my 9–5. I became deeply unhappy with how little time I had. Spending an hour a day of my own time commuting, squashed up next to a stranger’s armpit. Being given chaotic tasks and then having to pretend I was busy in quiet periods. The job itself wasn’t even the worst part. It was the feeling that this was the expected path. That this was what would make my parents proud.

A lot of people might read and think ‘well that’s just what most normal people have to do’ and yes, my view might sound audacious. The key word there is normal, some people just don’t want normal and that’s ok. I was grateful to have a job, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be fetching people water bottles forever.

The worst part was seeing how even senior colleagues weren’t happy. It meant that even grinding for the next 20 years meant I could still have that same miserable, trapped look on my face at the end of it. I dreaded it, and every day as I turned to the key to unlock the office, I kept asking myself ‘when are you going to quit?’. This was the catalyst to me finding a creative outlet online where I could share my interest in personal finance.

I knew that I had to make a change, and the brutal truth is, it wasn’t an overnight choice, it was showing up everyday to create something of my own, eventually giving me the choice to work for myself.

These are the key traits I adopted in this process.

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5 Rules to getting dangerously ahead

Rule 1: Anti-vision: Become deeply dissatisfied with where you are now

The harsh truth is, you won’t be able to make meaningful change in your life without pinpointing what it is you hate about your current circumstances. For me, this was being at the whim of a boss (rather 10 bosses, as I was Junior in the fashion industry), being assigned tasks I didn’t care about, having such little time for what I valued. The solution is to get crystal clear on what you don’t want, then write how you’re going to avoid it.

Often we remain in a situation because we’re comfortable, not quite unhappy and not quite happy. We think that no change means no harm done, but there’s an opportunity cost to staying where you are - that’s time that could’ve been spent in your ideal scenario.

Rule 2: Set a meaningful goal that is self directed.

For most of our early life, decisions are made for us, where we grow up, where we go to school, even who we date or socialise with. Many continue into adulthood with that same unconscious state of mind, allowing society, a boss, or parents to dictate their goals.

Creating a goal for yourself means truly asking yourself ‘who am I doing this for?’ A choice to go to the gym could either come from a place of ‘I need to look good to impress X person,’ or ‘I need a space to decompress and I want to feel healthy’. One is fixed on the relationship to others, the other focuses purely on the benefit for oneself. For the sake of this letter, this goal should be about striving to create an independent income source.

Find the work that drains others but energises you. Obsess over it. Get so good they can’t ignore you.

Rule 3: Everything is a learning opportunity

A common trait among successful entrepreneurs that I have observed is a curious mind. To be interesting, you have to be interested. For example, with content creation, I truly am obsessed with the topic. I love learning about different types of hooks, what funnels big creators have in place, and how successful people are building their brands. This fascination is ultimately what led me to make a valuable personal brand, because I had such an acute understanding of branding and marketing by studying it in my free time.

The biggest thing that’s helped me is reading. People overcomplicate or are dissuaded from reading, thinking they must read classics in order to be well-read, but first you must enjoy reading. Therefore, it’s more about picking books that pique your interest and not stressing over the volume, or completing them for the sake of it.

Rule 4: Bias to action and high agency

it’s not enough to just wish for a better life, the most successful people have a strong bias to action. They take action as soon as they have an idea.

In the game of content creation for example, it’s the business of ideas, it’s who can immediately execute on an idea well. You can have an amazing idea, but if someone shouts louder than you, who truly owns it?

This is why I had to spread Frugal Chic across long form platforms too, to protect my IP. What makes someone have this bias to action? I would attribute it to being a high agency individual. Not waiting for permission to take action.

Don’t worry if this doesn’t currently sound like you, I believe it’s a skill or muscle built over time. It’s about not asking for advice constantly before acting, it’s a willingness to be messy and fail.

Rule 5: Get addicted to failure.

My life changed immeasurably when I stopped avoiding failure and started chasing it. I know that makes no sense, but hear me out. When we are growing up, we’re taught to avoid failure at all costs. Failure means a mistake, which could mean no attention or punishment. At work, it means making a fool of yourself.

A fear of failure leaves you paralysed by inaction, with the mentality that if you make no mistake, that’s better than trying.

The way I reframed this for myself, particularly as a new creator, was by giving myself grace. I am doing this for the first time, with no experience. I have to learn somehow.

Life is a big experiment, and therefore the people who have “made it” have had to make countless mistakes and have inevitably made a fool of themselves at some point. The key is to see it as a good thing, a learning opportunity.

Many people ask me, “How do I start?” You just start. They’re asking me this because if I’ve been doing it for over a year, there will be things I’ve learned that they can avoid, which is that getting ahead in your 20s isn’t about status or trying to outperform others. It’s about figuring out what you actually want and doubling down on that. Finding a goal that’s genuinely yours, and that helps other people, is how you add value and get paid for it.

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Your 20s are your unfair advantage. Low responsibility. High energy. High tolerance for risk. If you don’t use this decade to build leverage, skills, and independence, you don’t magically get braver later. You just get busier.

The trade off is speed, direction, curioristy and the willingness to look stupid in public. It’s short-term discomfort for long-term freedom.

Action points: 5 ways to actually get ahead

1. Write your anti-vision
   Get brutally honest about what you don’t want. The job. The lifestyle. The lack of time. This becomes your fuel when motivation disappears.

2. Choose one self-directed goal
   Something that builds leverage, ideally an independent income stream. Ask yourself: would I still want this if I didn’t get any external validation?

3. Turn obsession into skill
   Pick a domain you genuinely enjoy learning about and go deep. Read. Watch. Experiment. Pick an idea you found interesting and expand on it, write 1,000 words about it.

4. Act faster than you feel ready
   Reduce the gap between idea and execution. Don’t ask anyone for permission. Publish before perfect using a MVP model. Release into the wild and then reiterate once you have feedback.

5. Collect failures like data
   If you’re not failing regularly, you’re playing too small. Stop treating mistakes like personality flaws. They don’t define you as a person, they’re just feedback.

That’s it for this week

Mia xx

Resources I use as a creator

Stan store → Sell digital products, earn from affiliate income and use DM automations

ShopMy → Earn from recommending your favourite lifestyle products from fashion and beauty

Creator CEO eBook → Learn how I built my social media to 500k and monetise