The Stolen Moments Entrepreneur: Why Your Best Ideas Show Up in the Worst Conditions

3 real-life stories of building on the margins of life. Brain science says that's the advantage.

I’m sitting in the school parking lot with the engine running. Kids are fighting over who controls the music. The coffee went cold twenty minutes ago.

I’m writing a workshop outline on the back of an envelope because the thought arrived and it won’t wait for a proper notebook.

This is what building looks like for me. Nobody sees a minimalist desk with a ring light. There’s no “I quit my 9-to-5” origin story, and definitely no four-hour morning routine with journaling and cold plunges before the real work begins.

Just a parking lot, a dying pen, and twelve stolen minutes before someone needs a snack.

The napkin version of my life

I work full time as a Business Innovation Strategist at a wholesale mortgage company. Monday through Friday. Benefits, meetings, quarterly reviews. Everything you see from Courage to Create: the newsletter, the workshops, the methodology, gets built in roughly 10 to 15 hours a week. Sometimes less.

The writing happens before anyone in my house wakes up. During school drop-off. On the sideline of soccer practice. In the Notes app with one thumb while stirring pasta with the other hand.

Every minute stolen. Every single one worth it.

Those stolen moments produced things I still have trouble believing when I list them out loud: over 6,000 Substack subscribers. More than 25 live workshops reaching 400 participants across multiple continents and languages. A single post that crossed 6,000 likes and traveled places I’ve never been. A neuroscience inspired methodology: Future Scripting built entirely in the margins of a life that was already full.

But I need to tell you about a Tuesday before any of that sounds like a highlight reel.

5:47 a.m.

I was standing in the kitchen. Half-written Substack draft open on my phone. The sound of feet already moving upstairs, which meant my writing window had just been cut from forty-five minutes to twelve.

The thought that arrived wasn’t an idea for a newsletter.

Who are you doing this for? Nobody asked you to build this. You could stop and no one would notice.

That thought has shown up more than once.

It showed up after workshops where only six people registered. I heard it the weekend I built a landing page that converted exactly zero sales. It got loudest when I watched other creators announce they’d quit their jobs to go full time and I felt that specific sting of wondering whether I was playing at something they were serious about.

Whether the stolen version counted.

I want to name this because I think it’s the thing that actually stops people. The lack of certainty that the time is worth spending: not the lack of time itself.

The voice that says the parking lot version of entrepreneurship is the amateur version. That if this were real, it would look like what you see online: the studio, the team, the full send.

What that voice gets wrong

That voice confuses having the right conditions with actually being committed.

I am fully committed in 45-minute increments. Dead serious about something I build between school drop-off and my first meeting of the day. Conditions don’t determine whether the work is real. The work determines that.

And here’s what nobody tells you about working in stolen moments: the constraint becomes the advantage.

There’s a neurological reason for this. When you write under genuine time pressure, your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for self-monitoring and self-doubt, quiets down. Neuroscientists call it transient hypofrontality. In plain language: the part of your brain that whispers “who do you think you are” doesn’t have time to boot up when you only have twelve minutes in a parking lot. The constraint doesn’t just force efficiency. It silences the editor.

When I only have 45 minutes, I don’t spend 30 of them “getting into the zone.” I sit down and write. I’ve learned to trust the first sentence that shows up instead of waiting for the perfect one, and somewhere along the way I developed a ruthless instinct for which ideas matter and which ones are just noise dressed up as inspiration.

The margins are the filter.

The thoughts that survived the carpool lane, the dying pen, the interrupted flow, those were the ones worth publishing. I didn’t build this despite the margins. The margins are the reason the work is any good.

The stolen moments entrepreneur

At some point I stopped apologizing for how this gets built and started calling it what it is: the stolen moments entrepreneur. Someone constructing meaningful work inside the cracks of an already full life. Not because she’s grinding. Because she refuses to wait for conditions that may never arrive.

Once I named it, I started seeing her everywhere.

Veronica Llorca-Smith built The Lemon Tree Mindset to over 13,000 subscribers from Hong Kong while raising two daughters and training for triathlons. She made her first $10K in subscription revenue from content she built during swim practice. Then there’s Tripty Rasaily from One You Collective, who designed an entire business model: 12 partnerships in 12 months, one per month, each self-contained, around the constraint of limited time. I was her Chapter 01 partner and watched her turn a single month of shared creative energy into opportunities and workshops that keep flourishing.

These aren’t side hustles. These are proof that the margins are enough.

Back to the parking lot

It’s a different Tuesday now. The kids are still fighting over the music. The coffee is still cold.

But the envelope has something on it that didn’t exist ten minutes ago.

That’s how everything I’ve built has started. With a thought that refused to wait and a woman who stopped telling it to.

I used to think I’d start building when life opened up. When the mornings got quieter, the job felt less demanding, someone told me the parking lot version counted.

Nobody told me that.

So I told myself. On the envelope. In present tense. In so much detail that my nervous system stopped knowing the difference between the life I was building and the one I was living.

That envelope was my first Future Script.

I didn’t know it had a name yet. I just knew that the woman I wrote about on that napkin: the one with the workshops, the subscribers, the methodology she is in the process of trademarking, felt more real than the doubt that had been narrating my mornings.

She was right.

The doubt was loud. But the pen was louder.

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Building something in stolen moments and wondering whether it counts? Steal twenty more and write the version where it already worked. Present tense. Specific details. Drop it in the comments what are you courageously building (scripting), I read every single one.

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