You Don’t Have to Quit Your Job to Rewire Your Brain

Three years of stolen minutes, and the result I left out of the spreadsheet

“Writers write, creators create, I just work.” ~ Magdalena Ponurska circa 2023

For most of my adult life, that sentence ran quietly underneath everything I did. Work was the one thing I knew how to do, and I did a lot of it.

Last week I showed you my numbers. A year ago, in October 2025, Courage to Create had 984 subscribers, and today it has 10,200. One result didn’t make it into that post because it doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet. I don’t say that sentence (“I just work”) anymore. A few weeks ago at work, I was meeting new team members, and I heard myself say, “I’m an innovation strategist,” and then, without stopping, “and I’m a writer and creator.” The second half rolled right off my tongue, as easily as the first.

I work full time in a FinTech organization. Add the commute, and fifty to sixty hours of my week belongs to someone else before I write a word. Whatever time is left over is where I rewire my brain. Most mornings I write before the house wakes up, and on workdays I squeeze in a few more lines in the parking lot before I walk into the office. The car is my desk at lunch, before school pickup, and in parking lots during my son’s games.

Maybe you’ve decided the real writing starts later, once the kids are older or once you can finally leave your job. You don’t have to wait for that version of your life. My brain changed inside this one.

Where “I just work” came from

At twenty-one, a few months after I arrived from Poland, I handed a boyfriend the poem I had just written. He read it and said, “This is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry?” I threw the page in a garbage can on my way out. That was the last poem I ever wrote in Polish, and I didn’t write again for more than twenty years.

“I just work” grew out of that night. It felt safer to be good at something nobody could call stupid.

His sentence started it, and I kept it going. Every year I didn’t write, I practiced being a woman who doesn’t write, and by the time I came back to the page, that version of me had two decades of repetitions behind her.

What your brain does with repetition

In 2004, a team of researchers taught adults to juggle for three months and scanned their brains before and after. The areas that track motion grew. When the volunteers stopped juggling, those same areas shrank back toward where they started.

I read that study as a story about both of my lives. For twenty years, I was the volunteer who put the balls down. Whatever writing had built in me faded a little more each year, while “I just work” got all the practice. Your brain builds what you use and lets go of what you don’t. It will believe “I am a writer” only after it has evidence, and writing is the only evidence it accepts.

The evidence I collected

Six months after I started publishing on Substack, in March 2025, more people were unsubscribing than subscribing, and I almost stopped. The old sentence was right there waiting, ready to tell me I had been right all along and should go back to just working. Instead, I turned each post into an experiment and changed one thing at a time, sometimes the headline, sometimes the hour I published, sometimes the format.

Somewhere along the way, I started to see myself differently, and I remember the moment it began. I was sitting on the swing in my garden when my phone lit up with a notification that I had my first paid subscriber. His name is Bob Lewis, and I broke down crying right there in the garden. A stranger had looked at my work and decided it was worth paying for. He believed in me before I fully did.

I have written every day for three years. One morning a 102°F fever kept me in bed, too weak to move and half delirious; all I remember is writing one sentence: “I am a writer and a creator, and I write every day.” Then I put the notebook and pencil down, and fell right back into sleep. Even with a fever, that was the sentence my brain reached for, and it counted. It was tallying the rep and had no opinion about the quality.

Your stolen minutes

If you’re the reader who wrote to me about two busy weeks of showing up for 15 or 30 minutes late at night, frustrated that you couldn’t do more, those late-night minutes did for you what my early mornings did for me. You were building the wiring one short session at a time.

And if that wasn’t you, you have a window like that somewhere in your week too. One repetition inside it is enough to start.

Tonight, write down the sentence you’ve been living by about who you are.

Mine was “I just work.”

Underneath it, write the new one in present tense, the way I did with a fever.

Then do one small thing tomorrow that proves it, small enough to fit inside the shortest window you have, and write down what happened.

Tell me in the comments: where are your stolen minutes? I read every one of them!

Magdalena

P.S. If what you write in those minutes keeps ending up in a drawer, the Writing Lab is where we finish it and publish it.

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Once you understand neuroplasticity, you stop waiting to feel ready