When Cassian Bellino got laid off, she knew what she should do. Her listeners had been asking for homeschooling materials. The demand was clear. The logical move was obvious: create what people were already requesting.

Instead, she panicked. She built everything at once—courses, communities, guides, funnels—a flurry of products nobody had asked for. She hired coaches, paid for platforms, created a school community that 500 people joined and nobody used. By any reasonable measure, it was a mistake.

But here’s the part worth sitting with:

That was a mistake, but I had to—like, my emotions wouldn’t have settled had I tried the logical thing. I had to do the illogical thing.

This is a strange confession. She’s not saying she didn’t know better. She’s saying knowing better wasn’t enough. The panic needed somewhere to go. The anxiety demanded action—any action—before she could think clearly. The wrong path wasn’t a detour from the right one. It was the only way to reach it.

Bellino doesn’t frame this as wasted time or money. “It got me here,” she says. The community that flopped taught her Go High Level. The VA she no longer needs built the funnel she still uses. The coach who kept her from quitting gave her the steadiness to eventually do the focused work. Each “failure” deposited something she’d need later.

This complicates the advice podcasters usually hear about creative work. Be strategic. Follow the data. Don’t chase shiny objects. Listen to your audience. All of it assumes that the efficient path is available—that you can skip straight to the right answer if you’re disciplined enough.

But what if some wrong answers have to come out first?

There’s a version of creativity that works like a pressure valve. The panic, the anxiety, the desperate need to do something—these don’t disappear just because you’ve identified the logical move. They sit in your chest and interfere with your thinking. Sometimes the illogical thing isn’t a failure of strategy. It’s the cost of clearing the emotional debris so strategy becomes possible.

Bellino describes arriving at a place where she’s “much more relaxed” and can focus on one thing at a time. But she couldn’t have started there. The relaxation came after the frantic overbuilding, not instead of it. She had to exhaust the panic before she could work from calm.

This matters for podcasters because the creative process rarely follows the clean narratives we tell about it afterward. The path from “I have an idea” to “I have a sustainable practice” often includes stretches of thrashing—projects that don’t work, investments that don’t pay off, energy spent in directions that lead nowhere obvious. The temptation is to label all of it as mistakes to be avoided.

But maybe some of those mistakes are load-bearing. Maybe the flailing is how certain creators process their way toward clarity. Maybe the wrong thing sometimes has to come out before the right thing can emerge—not because you’re undisciplined, but because your emotions won’t settle until it does.

This field note references the PodTalk podcast episode “Faith with Cassian Bellino,” published June 12, 2025.