Opening One New Door Could Change Everything — Just Ask Shireen Eddleblute
A former Wall Street portfolio manager didn’t burn it all down in midlife. She opened one new door, and it led her to building something sustainable that mattered far more.
I used to believe that change had to be dramatic to count. That if you were going to do it, you did it all the way.
You made the move, you left the job, you drew a clean line between who you were and who you were becoming.
I didn’t just move out of town at 18; I moved across the country, from Ontario to Jasper, Alberta. I didn’t just leave factory work in my early 20s; I went back to school, learned something new, and built a writing career from scratch.
There’s a certain clarity in those kinds of decisions. A before and after that makes the story easy to tell.
But life doesn’t always ask for that kind of disruption, and more importantly, it doesn’t always reward it.
Right On Time is our weekly series of lessons in courage, clarity, and change for those rewriting their story — in two minutes or less.
I’ve been thinking about that lately, especially through the lens of James Clear’s Atomic Habits — the idea that real change is built through small, consistent shifts rather than sweeping reinventions.
It’s not that big moves don’t matter, but they’re rarely the whole story. What really changes things is what you do next, and then what you do consistently after that.
That’s why Shireen Eddleblute’s story has stayed with me.
She had already built what most people would consider a complete career: senior roles in finance, managing portfolios, working at a level where the metrics are measured in billions. The kind of trajectory that signals you’ve arrived.
Then, she stepped away from it for more than a decade to care for her children and her mother.
ICYMI:
It was an entirely different chapter; one that didn’t look like progress in the conventional sense, but as she later described, it was a different kind of investment. In family, in values, in the things that don’t show up on a balance sheet.
And when that chapter ended, Shireen didn’t try to recreate the life she had before. She didn’t burn everything down to chase something entirely new, either.
She started writing children’s books about money.
And to be clear, that’s not a small change, but she didn’t start there. What stands out isn’t the outcome; it’s how she built her way into it.
She treated it like a new beginning that expanded outward from where she was, with everything that had come before. Financial literacy wasn’t random for her. As she later shared with VoyagePhoenix, those ideas had been planted early by a father who believed deeply in education, saving, and investing.
So while moving into children’s books felt like learning an entirely new language, she wasn’t starting from nothing. She was building from a solid foundation.
It started with one project, then another, learning the craft as she went, long before it became a full identity or a business.
It’s a quieter kind of reinvention, and maybe a more realistic one.
It’s the kind of big change that starts with a nudge. The kind that doesn’t need a catastrophe like divorce, job loss, or a major health scare to kick it off.
Because most of us aren’t standing at the edge of an empty life, ready to rebuild from scratch. We’re in the middle of something that already has weight and structure and responsibilities attached to it.
You don’t have to dismantle all of that just to move in a new direction. In fact, thinking in such absolute terms can be enough to keep you exactly where you are.
What Shireen’s path reflects so well is that change doesn’t have to come from subtraction. You can build it through addition. Because as she told VoyagePhoenix, your past experience doesn’t become irrelevant when you change direction; it often becomes your advantage.
That approach builds something different… not just a new identity, but options. Flexibility. The ability to shift when you need to without everything falling apart.
And in a world that feels increasingly unpredictable, that kind of adaptability is its own form of security.
If there’s something you’ve been circling — an idea, a skill, a direction you haven’t fully stepped into yet — it doesn’t need to become your entire life overnight.
It just needs a place to exist. Maybe that’s just a few hours a week. A small commitment. Something you return to often enough that it starts to grow.
That’s how doors open. Not all at once, but gradually, until one day you realize you’re no longer standing where you started.
If something here is nudging you, don’t overthink it. What’s one small change you could start this week?
Set a reminder for three months from now to check back in and see what has started to take shape.
✌🏻 Miranda
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