Part of Female x Finance's Smart Girl Summer — a series where the women we admire share how they're investing in themselves while everyone else is slowing down.
In this week's edition of Smart Girl Summer, we got inspired by our icon Dua Lipa: the one who sells out concert tickets and tours but still makes it back home in time to read.
Alongside the music, Dua built Service95: a weekly newsletter, a podcast, and a monthly book club where she personally picks the read and interviews the author. She's a working case study in the thing we keep coming back to on this series: that "having it all" isn't really about doing more. It's about being deliberate with the hours you already have.
Which got us thinking: what if the fifteen minutes you'd normally spend refreshing something went toward the same kind of inputs Dua reaches for instead? Not another feed. A stack of Substack articles, podcast episodes, and books you actually finish smarter than you started.
So we built a media diet for wherever you are in your journey right now. Whether you're dreaming up a business, feel stuck in your career, want to get better with money, or just want to feel like a slightly different version of yourself this summer.
If You're Thinking of Starting a Business
The gap between "I have an idea" and "I started a business" is rarely talent. It's usually information. Not knowing what the first real step looks like, or assuming it has to look like someone else's.
Listen: Grace Beverley's conversation with Marie Forleo on Working Hard. Worth knowing before you even hit play: Beverley isn't a host who talks business, she's the founder of TALA and Shreddy, two genuinely successful companies she built before 30. Which means sitting down with an episode of hers is closer to free business advice from someone still in the trenches than a typical podcast interview. In this one, Forleo (who turned her life-coaching practice into a broadcast empire) breaks down her "everything is figureoutable" framework with Beverley pushing her on the actual how.
Read: Helena Di Biase's "I've Worked in Venture Capital for Over a Decade. Here's How I Decide If a Business Has Legs" on her Substack, Really Rich. She lays out the five filters investors actually run on a pitch before they've even taken the meeting (is the problem real, does the timing work, can you reach the number) and shows how to apply the same checklist to your own idea before you sink a year into it. It's the opposite of the "just start" advice everyone gives; it's how to know if starting is even worth it.
A book to add to the pile: Start With Why by Simon Sinek, for the "before you build anything, get honest about the reason" step everyone wants to skip. And Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley, for the "here's how to actually build it without burning out" step that comes after.
Our honest advice: Before you touch a business plan, run your idea through just the first filter from Di Biase's piece. Is there a real, paying customer attached to this problem, or are you planning to "educate" people into wanting it? That one question kills more bad ideas than a whole afternoon of research.
If You Feel Stuck in Your Career
"Stuck" rarely means you're bad at your job. More often it means nobody ever taught you the skills that get you unstuck: negotiating, asking for the promotion before you're already resentful about not getting it, knowing when the plateau means change roles versus change companies.
Listen: "Becoming Hot Smart Rich" with Maggie Sellers Reum. It gets into why women are still underpricing themselves in business and what it actually sounds like to ask for more instead of settling for the first offer — every episode has the energy of your most ambitious friend giving you the debrief after her own meeting.
Read: "The Career Ladder is Dead, the Career Garden is Here" by Erin McGoff. Her argument: the old climb-the-ladder model is collapsing, and what replaces it isn't chaos. It's something more like a garden you cultivate, made up of skills, side projects, and a professional brand instead of a title. If "stuck" has been feeling like a personal failure rather than a structural shift, this reframes it.
A book to add to the pile: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Two Stanford design professors apply actual design-thinking methodology to the problem of a career that isn't working. Useful specifically because it doesn't ask you to have your five-year plan figured out before you're allowed to start.
Our honest advice: Stop auditing yourself by title. Spend one episode or one read's worth of time listing the actual skills you'd bring to any room, industry aside, then notice how differently that reads compared to your job title.
If You Want to Get Better With Money
Most of us didn't get a money education so much as a series of vibes. Some fear, some shame, some "just don't think about it too hard." Undoing that doesn't take a finance degree. It takes better inputs than the ones we grew up with.
Listen: Friends That Invest with Simran Kaur. Investing content has a reputation for either dumbing things down or drowning you in jargon designed to make you feel like it's not for you. This is the rare show that explains it like your smartest friend would: assuming you're capable, not assuming you already know the vocabulary.
Read: Mia McGrath's "The Art of Saving" from Frugal Chic. Her angle is refreshingly unmoralizing: becoming a saver isn't a punishment or a January reset, it's an identity you build in small proof points. It's about intention, not restriction. Which, unlike most personal finance content, doesn't leave you feeling worse about your last grocery run.
A book to add to the pile: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Less a how-to and more a look at why smart people still make bad money decisions: because most financial choices are driven by ego, fear, and story, not math. It reframes money as a behavior problem before it's a numbers problem, which is usually the actual issue.
Our honest advice: Don't try to overhaul your finances after one podcast episode. Pick a single number, such as your savings rate, your subscription total, whatever the episode made you curious about, and just go find it. Curiosity you can act on beats a full financial plan you'll abandon by August.
Bonus: If You Want to Reinvent Yourself This Summer
Not every “stuck” feeling is about your job or your bank account. Sometimes it's quieter than that. You're just not sure you recognize the version of yourself that's been on autopilot for a while.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle. It's less a self-help book than a permission slip for wanting something different than the life you built to please everyone else, and for treating that want as information instead of a problem to manage.
Start With Yourself by Emma Grede, for what comes after the permission: her framework for identifying the "Old Thoughts", like inherited rules about ambition, money, and what you're supposed to want, that are quietly running your decisions, and swapping them out on purpose.
Steal this from Dua herself: join her Service95 Book Club for the monthly pick. It's the easiest possible way to borrow someone else's taste for a month instead of defaulting back to your algorithm's.
Reinvention doesn't require a plan. It requires one uncomfortable question, asked honestly: if no one was watching, what would I actually change first? Sit with the answer for a week before you act on it. Most people skip the sitting and go straight to a plan that doesn't fit the real answer.
The Actual Smart Girl Summer Move
Nobody's saying delete the apps and go live in a cabin. Some scrolling is just rest, and rest isn't something you need to optimize.
But the fifteen minutes you were going to spend refreshing a feed that makes you feel slightly worse about your life? That's fifteen minutes you get to decide what to do with. Spend it on something that's still working for you a year from now. A business idea, a skill you finally named, a savings habit, a version of yourself you actually chose.
Same scroll time. Different return.
