Ever wonder what it takes to make your side hustle your full-time hustle while working a graveyard shift, publishing New York Times Best Selling Books and raising two kids? If you’re looking to create work in a way that inspires you while still helping the community you serve without selling out who you are, then this episode is for you.
In this episode I get cozy with Michelle Tam.
Michelle is the creator of the Saveur Award winning food blog, Nom Nom Paleo. Together with her husband, Henry Fong, she also produced a two-time Webby award winning cooking app, authored two New York Times bestselling cookbooks, and was nominated for a James Beard Award. Michelle has a degree in nutrition and food science from the University of California at Berkeley, and a doctorate in pharmacy from UCSF. For over a dozen years, she worked the graveyard shift at Stanford Hospital and Clinics as a night pharmacist before her side hustle, Nom Nom Paleo, became her main hustle.
We talk about her new Paleo-Friendly sauces featured in Whole Foods, how to talk to your kids about the food we eat, her unconventional way of writing books, and the journey to building a blog into a business.
“I think you have to stop playing small all the time and just try to do the things that scare you.”
– MICHELLE TAM
What you'll hear (and don't want to miss!)
What’s new in Michelle’s business and the process she went through to hire her new team member [5:05]
What Michelle was told she was doing “wrong” in her business, and why she decided to keep doing things the way she was doing them [7:50]
How Michelle has been able to get to a place where she isn’t concerned about what others think of her as a public figure [12:35]
The hesitations she initially faced and overcame starting to live a paleo lifestyle [15:15]
What approach Michelle and her husband take when creating recipes and other products, like their app [20:25]
How they presented paleo to their kids to allow for them to become aware of how food makes them feel [22:59]
Michelle’s pivot from being a full-time pharmacist, after 4 years of juggling her career with her side hustle and a busy family life [29:05]
What she’s done so well to build her online community and what didn’t work so well for her [34:21]
The ways that she stays creatively connected to her work after creating content for such a long time [38:53]
Why Michelle doesn’t try to keep up with every online trend – or even maintain an editorial calendar for the business [41:47]
The reason she says that her book writing process is unlike anyone else’s [47:10]
How her line of paleo sauces came to be created, and for sale, in Whole Foods [50:54]
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