6 Ways to Protect Your Peace When Your Career Lives on an App You Can’t Control

Anna Sitar has been creating content for six years. She has nearly 12 million followers on TikTok, made Forbes 30 Under 30, ran four marathons in the past year, and is currently training for an Iron Man. By every measure, things are going well. But on The Squeeze, she sits down with host Tay Lautner and gets honest about the part nobody posts about: the burnout, the decision paralysis, and the weird guilt that comes with taking a single day off when your whole career lives on an algorithm. 

Whether you’re a creator or just someone whose job lives on their phone, her advice on protecting your peace is worth hearing.

6 Ways to Protect Your Peace When Your Career Lives on an App You Can’t Control

Create for joy, not for the algorithm

Sitar has watched drama and chaos consistently outperform genuine content and she’s choosing not to play that game. “I don’t want to have to be doing something insane in order for [my content] to reach new audience versus being comfortable in my skin, comfortable where I am, loving the people who have already followed me, creating for the joy of it,” she explains. 

The average lifestyle creator’s career lasts about 9 months. Sitar is at six years. The reason she’s still here is because she stopped trying to go viral and started trying to enjoy what she makes.

Reframe rest as something other than laziness

“If I’m not creating, my narrative in my brain is not that rest is a good thing,” Sitar admits. “It’s that I’m not working hard enough. And then it makes me more stressed about the day that I took off. So then I come back just trying to make even more to make up for the time that I lost. It’s like a whole cycle.” 

Many of us have this same wiring where doing nothing feels like falling behind. But running yourself into the ground to avoid feeling lazy is just burnout with a better PR team.

Measure the day by effort, not output

“It’s not about my output, but the effort I put in that day,” Sitar says. “That’s the achievement of the day. It’s not that I made 45 videos. It’s that I put in the effort to make something that I enjoyed. It’s that I thought I was funny. It’s that I had a new idea that I brought to life and not that I just let it sit and fester and never acted upon it.” 

Some days the laundry doesn’t get folded and the content doesn’t get posted. If you showed up and tried, that counts.

Celebrate your wins instead of immediately chasing the next one

Sitar made Forbes 30 Under 30 last year. Her reaction? “I was like slay, moved on. And my goals suddenly shift to the next thing versus basking in the enjoyment of the achievement you just had.” 

We’re all so obsessed with what’s next that we forget to actually enjoy the thing we just did. Her whole philosophy now is treating wins the way she treats birthdays, which she celebrates all month long because “you only get 80 birthdays if you’re lucky” and that’s barely a blip in a lifetime. If you can celebrate your birthday for 30 days straight, you can at least sit with a career milestone for more than five minutes.

Reframe haters as people who just want to be included

“[Haters are] kind of just looking for a way to put their input somewhere because they don’t feel heard in other places,” she explains. She compares it to how some people learned growing up that negative attention was easier to get than positive attention. “They think that thinking outside the box is the right way to [be included in the dialogue].”Not every mean comment deserves your energy. Most of them aren’t even really about you.

Speak good over yourself because the alternative builds the wrong life

Sitar gets emotional talking about a period when she genuinely believed her best days were behind her. The advice she’d give that version of herself: “You speak into existence the life that you want to create. If you’re constantly sitting in this feeling of like, ‘Oh, I feel guilty and I’m not doing good enough and I’m not enough and no one thinks about this and I don’t think about this and I’m not important,’ then like that is the world that you’re going to create for yourself.” She admits she’s still working on this. But even just being aware of the narrative running in the background is the first step toward changing it.

Listen to the full episode on The Squeeze with Tay and Taylor Lautner, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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