Let’s Toast To That : Toast Empire in Progress (ft. Half Launches, Full Feelings & Million Dollar Weekend)

📖 Book Title & Author

Million Dollar Weekend by Daniel Priestley

🔥 The Toast Moment

“Creators have courage. The courage to ask, to start, to keep going.”

🥂Why It Deserves Toast

Man, this book came for my entire soul.

I opened it expecting to casually annotate with a few sticky notes — but within three pages, it was dragging my internal monologue into the light like a spotlight-snatching stage mom.

• “I don’t have any good ideas” ← literally my catchphrase every time my mum asks why I don’t own a business

• “I need to read more, do more research, build a Notion empire before I can start” ← excuse me while I return the $200 worth of books I just impulse-bought last night “for research”

Honestly, I didn’t approach this book with a hopeful heart. I came armed with cynicism and a half-charged highlighter, ready to poke holes. Because in theory? Everything always sounds easy.

In reality? Dopamine fades, dread kicks in, and you spiral into a philosophical hole about whether blogs still matter in a world that runs on reels and ADHD.

I’ve committed to the Instagram economy. I’ve created one post for each Toast, bless their crunchy little souls.

And the moment I saw my first blog post nestled under its perfectly colour-coded Toast character, I felt it. A dopamine spike so potent it lit up every fiber of my being.

For one brief, beautiful second—I was happy.

And then? Existential whiplash.

What I’m Spreading on This

I haven’t been sleeping well. Not in a poetic, tortured-artist way—in a literal wide awake at 2:30am for five nights straight kind of way.

The darkness calms me. But it also fuels my anxiety.

Each night I lie there, half-proud of what I’m building, half-convinced it’s doomed. It’s not even the big fears that get me—it’s the small comments:

“I couldn’t find your blog.”

“It’s so confusing, I wasn’t sure where to stop scrolling.”

These weren’t attacks. They were honest. But they echoed every unspoken doubt I’ve been wrestling with.

Is this too chaotic? Too much? Too niche?

Do people even read anymore, or am I out here reviving a dead medium with pastel jam and pure vibes?

The book reminded me that the goal isn’t perfection. It’s momentum.

That small experiments done consistently are the secret to transformation in business—and in life.

And maybe that’s all the Toast Empire is: a bunch of weird little experiments, done out loud.

Teaching Moment

One idea from the book stopped me cold:

“Once you reframe rejection as something desirable, the act of asking becomes a power all on its own.”

That line sat with me.

Because what if launching isn’t about confidence?

What if it’s about tolerance—for failure, for silence, for the cringe?

Dennis Field said it best:

“After working on something too long, you’ll start to feel like it’s not as good as it once was. But for everyone else, it’s still a first impression.”

Execution doesn’t need certainty. It just needs audacity.

Perfectionism, it turns out, is fear in a spreadsheet.

Psychology Today says it often stems from a deep fear of being judged or shamed. We chase control because we’re terrified of exposure. But that control costs us something: creativity, peace, momentum.

Here’s the thing though—most people wouldn’t even peg me as a perfectionist.

I come off more like Lexie Grey in that Grey’s Anatomy episode. You know the one—where all the other residents are fake-playing attending during the hospital merger, looking grown, polished, almost powerful.

And then there’s Lexie.

Alone. Disheveled. Spiral-eyed.

That’s me. That’s the energy I give off.

So no one expects me to be calculating hex codes or obsessing over line spacing in Canva at 2:48am.

But beneath the chaos? There’s precision.

And it’s exhausting when no one sees it.

💬 Final Crumb

👣 Start small. Stay consistent.

📢 Rejection isn’t failure — it’s feedback.

🎬 Launch the thing. Let it flop gloriously. Then launch again.

Maybe your million-dollar weekend isn’t about becoming a millionaire.

Maybe it’s about building the muscle of creator courage—

The kind that asks. That starts. That keeps going.

Even when it’s 2:30am and you’re spiraling in your notes app.

Even when the hex codes are slightly off.

Even when you feel like the only person blogging in a TikTok world.

Still… you go.

Because courage doesn’t need an audience.

It just needs a launch button.

Let’s toast to that.