Everyone’s a writer now, everyone’s on Substack, everyone’s making the same kind of content, recreating the same type of brand, following the same trends, chasing the same sounds and formats and hooks, sharing the same guidance.
I’m not saying that with any judgment—I understand the pull completely. There’s a massive collective shift unfolding, the New Paradigm is only 6 months away. The energy of everything feels chaotic and we’re all trying to do our best to discover who we came here to be, while also trying to pay our bills and live a beautiful life in a system that perpetuates more ‘doing’ over ‘being.’
But we've confused production with purpose. There is so much being made right now—so much content, so many launches, so many products, so many courses on how to grow on a platform—and so little of it is coming from the place it's supposed to come from. So little of it is adding true value, impact, or service.
Most of it is excess information and noise, being made because it should be made, because it might do well, because someone saw it work for somebody else, because there's money in it, or because it’s how we did it in the past.
But something in us is getting more sensitive to it. We can feel it now, energetically—the difference between authenticity and performance, between something true and something borrowed, between a lived testimony and regurgitated information, between flow and force. We might not be able to name it, but our bodies know. We scroll past the one and stop at the other. Sometimes we make something from pure aliveness, and other times it comes out dense and forced, and we notice that too. We watch someone rave about how much money they made and something in us goes quiet, uneasy, without quite knowing why. The only real difference is where it was made from, and we're catching it now because we've become more aware of ourselves.
NOTE: Limitless with Karin Hadadan is entirely reader-funded, which is exactly why I can write it the way I do—no sponsors, no performing, no writing for the algorithm. Just me, writing what’s true, guiding others to raise their consciousness to align with their soul, supported by the people it reaches. If this has ever met you somewhere real, or transformed you, becoming a paid subscriber is the most meaningful way to keep it going.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve been asking myself the following questions every single day:
Is this even true to me? Is this where my energy wants to go? Or am I doing this because I saw someone else do it, because it worked for them, because somewhere along the way I absorbed that this is what I’m supposed to be doing, because this is what worked for me in the past?
It took me a while to really honor and embody the truth of those answers. But through trial and error, I now understand the difference between creating from your mind and creating from your soul. The mind creates from strategy, from what it thinks will work, from what it thinks you should or could or needs to or has to do, as it’s usually fixated on the outcome or rooted in a certain fear.
The soul creates from a completely different place—it makes something because the thing wants to exist, because making it makes you feel alive, because you’d do it even if no one ever saw it, even if you never made a penny from it, even if everyone judged you for it. It also is in no rush—it lives, it expresses, it transmutes, on its own diving timing.
One is engineered, while the other is alive and real. And we can feel which is which, in others and in ourselves.
authenticity through the lens of human design
Depending on how you’re wired, you can build real ‘success’ focusing on the wrong thing or doing it in an unaligned way. Some people are designed with the kind of energy that can push a mismatched dream all the way to money and status through sheer force, execution, or effort. It works for them, at least for a while (typically Manifestors/Generators), until one day they wake up and realize, this isn’t true to me or this isn’t how I want it to feel. They achieve the wealth, the fortune, the recognition, but somewhere along the way they lost themselves, or their well-being, or their soul, leading them to ask themselves, ok, but at what cost?
But I’m not built that way. In Human Design, I’m a Projector—which means I genuinely cannot succeed doing what isn’t mine to do as it simply won’t work. If I try to force something that isn’t aligned to my soul, it either doesn’t go anywhere or collapses, every time. Plus, I typically have to be recognized for my gifts and invited into an opportunity in order for it to be as expansive for me as it is for the people I serve.
For a long time I thought that was a limitation. Living in a Manifestor/Generator world has been incredibly frustrating because the system currently doesn’t support my own energy type. But now I see it as my greatest gift—because it made it impossible for me to get away with building or using my energy on the wrong thing.
I couldn’t fake my way to success even if I wanted to, which turned out to be the greatest protection I could’ve asked for (even if it’s been frustrating this entire year). God won’t let me waste time.
And so my whole year became something quieter—to unlearn everything this world has taught me about purpose, creativity, and alignment. To learn how to embody the rhythm of my soul in order to see, to guide, to help people reorient back toward their own.
my short-lived “wrong” dream" & what it revealed to me
In 2021, I decided to make clothing for ICI ET NU. I wanted to monetize the brand by creating a physical manifestation of it, so I did. I spent months designing sweats, driving back and forth to a screen printing shop in New Jersey, investing thousands of dollars on the products and another chunk of money shooting the collection.
I was working in Advertising at the time, where I spent 9 hours in my office and another 2.5 commuting to and from. The day I launched, I came home at 6:30pm, quickly ate dinner, and turned my living room into a fulfillment center as I had to pack 50 orders.
As I printed each packing slip, sifted through each box for the right sizes, I quickly realized that I hated it. Not the vision—the reality of it. The production, the packing of orders, the logistics, the inventory. None of it was me and it drained me completely. I remember thinking on the first day of sales, “Karin, can you really see yourself doing this forever?”
Now, I was very proud of what I created, I stood behind it, everyone who bought it loved them, I still wear my pieces at home myself, but I simply didn’t like how I felt in that moment. And that was all that ever mattered.
But here’s what was interesting: the designing lit me up. The idea of my inner world becoming something physical—that part was real. It was the specific form that was wrong, not the desire underneath it. So after a few months of going back and forth on it, I swallowed my pride, I let the merch go, and I went all in on writing—the thing that had always felt like home. Within that year, my words found the right people. A year later, I’d written a manuscript and gotten published at 25 years old.
I wrote about this exact experience in my latest book—that season of following what you think is the dream, doing everything right, and slowly sensing this isn’t working. Not because the dream was faulty, not because you weren’t capable, but because there’s no real reward if you’re not deeply fulfilled by what you’re creating. Even if you’re making immense amounts of money—if a voice inside says this doesn’t feel right, no check, no deposit, no sale will satisfy your being.
But what I discovered from that experience is that when you create something that isn’t wholly aligned to your soul, or you’re creating it in a way that doesn’t feel good, it’s not because that thing wasn’t meant for you. It was meant to show you what you’re capable of. The merch taught me I could bring something out of nothing, that I was disciplined enough to follow through, that I could execute a vision, that I am listening to and executing the ideas being given to me by the Divine. The purpose of following the “wrong” thing was to prepare me for the right one.
So then the real question becomes: what is the right one? What did my soul actually come here to make?
your soul’s dream and God’s dream for you are the same dream
Not your mind’s dream nor your ego’s—the one seeking validation or security, the one that needs it to look a certain way. Your soul’s dream.
Because your soul and God are one; God is expressing Himself through you. So when you follow your soul’s dream, and you actually birth it and bring it into the world, you’re not just building something.
You’re revealing God more deeply by expressing the truth of Who You Are. The thing only you can make is the thing God is trying to make through you.
That’s why it feels alive and that’s why it won’t leave you alone and that’s why you can’t replicate someone else’s version of it.
I recently had a 1:1 intuitive session with a client who’d built a beautiful business in the skincare industry over the years. She’d loved it all this time, but something about it now felt off. She couldn’t pinpoint what—only that the business felt empty to her. Walking into her office, promoting her products—it all felt like force. She told me she was stuck. I disagreed, “You’re remembering who you are beneath the doing,” and gave her a few questions to sit with.
The thing hiding in those answers was her soul’s whisper. She already knew it—what she wanted, how she wanted it to feel, what’s been missing, what’s been keeping her stuck. She, just like many of us, was just too busy consuming other people’s lives or ways of doing things, or too afraid it had to look a certain way, to let herself hear it.
And then she asked: okay, but what do I do now?
the strategy that can’t be taught, only lived
I’m a 3x author—three books in three years. I wrote a feature film without ever going to film school, and it’s now nominated at a festival and being passed around by a few directors. I’ve built a body of work that’s creating lasting impact, that people feel in their souls, and I did it without following a single trend—for a long time without even understanding why I was doing what I was doing. I started writing at sixteen. I started building what became my brand at 23. I never once imagined it would become what it has: speaking, teaching, stages, an app, raising other’s consciousness (imagine telling that to 23-year-old Karin, ha). I just followed my soul, and look where it led.
But what my client was feeling is something I’ve felt all year too—the ickiness of social media, of the very platforms I use to share my gifts, of me feeling energetically mismatched in the rooms I once felt comfortable in. Back in June, I even caught myself saying, “I f****** hate writing.” Imagine the heartbreak of that.
I then went to my artist residency in France, disconnected from everything, barely wrote beyond my morning pages, experienced God in a deeper way, and truly understood what “being the light” means. When I came home in July, I got off social media for a few weeks to give myself a break from the Golden Cage I’d built for myself, in order to find my why again.
What I discovered in that stillness was something so simple: it’s not that I hated writing or using my voice. I just no longer enjoyed the environment writing/expressing had come to live in.
So I returned to the ones where it thrives. I went back to where it all started—my Notes app—and began writing my next book by jotting poems on a whim. I decided to post less, and only after I’ve fully lived something. I started treating social media, including Substack, as a portfolio rather than my business, which immediately let me hold it more lightly and have more fun with it. My soul thrives offline and that is the end-goal, so that’s what I’m making space for and where I’m placing most of my energy. And I honestly couldn’t care less about the risk in that or what I might “lose.”
the purpose of your life is to just be Who You Are
When I reflect on my entire journey from 16-years-old to now, what I can say is this: my only strategy—and I mean this—was presence (which isn’t ironic because that’s what ICI ET NU means).
Because presence is where God is—it’s where God speaks, where the next nudge comes from, where the clarity emerges. So I followed the nudges, I prayed throughout the day for the next right step, I rested—a lot. I learned that stillness and doing less is how you actually receive more from the divine. Everything the world would call my “business strategy” was really just: get quiet enough to hear, then move when I’m moved, stay put when I’m being asked to, resist the noise when it gets loud, walk away from anything that no longer feels aligned.
That’s the New Paradigm way of being that we will all be forced to embody starting next year, whether we’re ready for it or not. Now is the opportunity to begin getting comfortable in it, to discover Who You Are before the rise of AI forces you to.
And that’s the part that can’t be packaged into a course. It can only be lived and experienced. The mind wants a system, a “do this” and you’ll “get this,” a how-to guide that has a linear path you can follow. The soul just wants you present enough to catch what’s already being handed to you, by you.
So if you’ve been asking how do I write the book, how do I know what I came here to make, how do I reorient my business to run in a sustainable way, how do I return to myself—you already know. You just haven’t given yourself a single quiet minute to ask your soul the real questions and hear what wants to be heard:
Why am I here, in this time? What was the point of everything I went through? Why do I have these particular gifts? Why am I feeling the resistance to places and spaces I once felt comfortable in? God—what are you asking me to let go of, and what do you want to create through me instead?
Ask those and then get quiet enough to hear. It’ll come—it always does when you’re willing, ready, and open.
Because we don’t need another everything. You don’t need to be on Substack if writing isn’t where you come alive. You don’t need to become a content creator if being on camera drains you. You don’t need to launch the course, or start the podcast, or build the personal brand, just because it worked for someone else. You don’t need to monetize every gift you have, or turn every passion into a business, or show up in a format that was never yours to begin with. You don’t need to “do” anything. That’s the whole irony of it all.
What the world actually needs is far simpler, and far harder: it needs you to be you. So fully, unapologetically yourself that the rest of us get to receive the one thing no one else can offer. Your actual soul, revealing the God inside it, in a form that feels right to you.
That’s the whole assignment: be so fully you that God becomes a little more visible in the world.
My latest book, When Nothing Makes Sense: Finding God in the Gap Between Prayer & Answer takes you on the journey of remembering and embodying Who You Are. Read the reviews, and you will see what is waiting on the other side of it.
from ‘doing’ to being
Everything I just described—the presence, the nudges, the asking your soul the real questions and getting quiet enough to hear—is exactly what I built PORTAL to hold.
It’s a daily companion for making the thing your soul actually came here to create. Not from strategy or pressure or what the algorithm wants, but from that quieter place we’ve been talking about. It’s not a ‘system’ for your mind, it’s a recalibration for your soul. You tell it what you’re trying to bring to life and it meets you there—with a few minutes each day of stillness, reflection, and small soul-led actions that keep your channel clean enough for the thing to come through you.
To birth it in a way that is sustainable, from ‘being’ rather than ‘doing.’ 10 to 15 minutes, because this was never meant to be another thing to grind at. It’s the same way of being that led to my whole body of work—the process itself, built into something you can actually use.
And, I’ll say this: whatever you think the ‘outcome’ or form is, be open to it manifesting differently once you follow the path your soul is calling you on.
If this essay stirred something in you—my book will take you deeper into the why, and PORTAL is where you start putting it into practice.
xx Karin 🤍
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Thank you for writing this! I've been growing my platform, considering different 'content strategies' and feeling exactly the same way. I agree with you - it's not necessary to turn into something we're not just to get more views and reactions. I love how honest this piece was!
The world just needs you as you are!
This is so spot on Karin 🌟