CUT YOUR TEETH is for those who sit at the intersection of taste, ambition, and business—because no one told you it's okay to be all three.

You drink the dopamine gold as if it were the finest wine.

What glitters on your social feed imprints on your brain. Yet another over-edited stranger on LinkedIn selling you a $27 course promising you’ll find “inspiration” through their half-baked, AI-generated garbage. Trends dominating the ads flooding your breaks in-between videos, podcasts, and personal writings are telling you to buy! Share! Review! Join our cult community!

Everywhere you look… there’s hell.

Noise. Signals. Lies. (Lazy) storytelling.

The more you consume, the less cognizant you become about what you consume. You stop paying attention to what you’re eating. You start losing sight of why you wanted to eat that thing to begin with.

Over time, you realize what a horrible mistake you’ve made, but once you realize what’s happened, it’s already too late—and you have no one but yourself to blame.

A grim tale, yes.

But, there’s more to this story than the foundations.

As someone who works in brand narrative and advertising, I don’t fault what advertising is meant to do—persuade you to buy things.

Or, more accurately, remind you of why you needed specific things to solve your problems to begin with. How it’s done can be tasteless and poorly motivated.

(But, in the right hands, it can be beautiful)

Now, here’s what I do fault:

The over-reliance on drinking in what’s spiraling through your everyday interactions like the aftermath of opened floodgates. The practice of completely letting yourself loose and wild in the trenches of overconsumption, because you’re—whether you admit it or not—more interested in escaping into a world someone else made, rather than planting your feet in a world of your own design.

You’d rather scrap your way onto Escapism Express than indulge in the makings of Originality Island.

If you disagree, that’s good.

It means you’ve been in that place before, and you’re fighting against it.

Or, it means you’ve recently realized the horrible place you’re in, and you’re tired of walking the same steps as everyone before you. Or, it means you’ve wasted an insulting amount of time trying to be liked instead of listening to the fragments of inner storytelling that shape you into an uncopyable someone. Or, it means you’re in a very confused—and very delusional—state, where you’re knee-deep in this bullshit, and you can’t see you’re just seconds away from drowning.

Some were not lucky enough to raise themselves on daydreaming, getting lost in their head, and letting their imagination play.

A tragedy that writes itself.

I’ve always been a daydreamer. A girl with her head in the clouds. My only fond memories from my childhood and teenage years was rooted in the stories and characters I created from nothing. I discovered a love of writing in kindergarten. No one taught me that. I just knew it. I just did it. I followed it, and it never stopped.

I never realized how much of an advantage being a daydreamer—a person who loves being in her own thoughts—would become as an adult in her early thirties.

I also never realized how important it would be in my line of work, and how listening to my early mentors was one of the worst mistakes I could’ve made as an inherent, intuitive storyteller. But, that’s a story for another time.

What I do think is vital to point out is how depressing it is that most people are so terrified of the effort it takes to look deep inside themselves and carve out the uncomfortable, the beautiful, the ugly, the terrible, the disastrous, the life-changing, and the moments in-between that make them irreplaceable.

This matters, because these are the ingredients behind truly original work. If you consume too much—if you barrage your mind with the thoughts, opinions, creations, and inspirations from other people—you slowly (but surely) lose your sense of self, and you sacrifice what makes you unique for the rush of some shallow “trend” that convinced you it was the right thing to do.

Write this down if you must:

To be original is a choice.

Most people give up before they truly try.

They would rather consume, instead.

They would rather fall victimhood to the brainwashing of cycle after cycle, social post after social post, news after news, celebrity after celebrity, gossip after gossip, announcement after announcement, and so on and so forth—instead of taking a very serious, and very challenging, and very rewarding, bet on themselves.

They would rather kiss the sugary-sweet promises of Everyone Else, rather than sculpt their passions, interests, and the blueprint of their soul into something remarkable.

Those tasks, the monumental ones, take time. They take time and blood and sacrifice. They require pain and delusion and recklessness. They ask you to sharpen your fangs to break into their world and whimper in the face of their masters. They ask you to trade what you can so you can finally see What Could Be.

They ask you to eat at their table. Sometimes, you do. When you recognize masters, you want to greedily mop up what’s on their plate. Sink your teeth in. Rip the flesh off the bone. Look into the eyes of the feast-bringers and raise your hackles. You have entered their domain. You will win. You will do what it takes because you’ve learned what conscious consumption should do—fuel the original stories within you.

Stories you then channel into work.

Into art. Into business. Into relationships.

Understand this, my friend:

You are not meant to be insignificant.

You are not an overconsumption slave.

You are meant to create.

So go.

Eat with intention.

Devour the world’s most beautiful things.

Consume what the masters made so your palate emerges refined and glorious and untouchable.

Then, abandon all caution…

And fucking create.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in exploring what I do for clients, hunt the White Stag.

See you soon,

Taylor