The lie of entrepreneurship is that it will change your fortune. The truth of entrepreneurship is that it will change you—and in ways that far exceed your balance sheet.
This happened to me. It happened to Kat Norton. It’s why she wants to talk about “energy transmissions.”
We’re on Zoom, discussing something that may seem decidedly low-energy, outright boring even: Microsoft Excel. But that’s only to the uninitiated. Kat Norton is an Excel ninja. During demos, her proficiency with the application literally leaves managing directors speechless. Her love of Excel has made her, of all things, an influencer: dancing on TikTok and Instagram while highlighting Excel functions under the name Miss Excel. Millions love the videos; roughly 1.4 million people follow her across both platforms. It shocks Norton herself, a 29-year-old who once saw her geeky crush on the old-school application as a somewhat shameful secret. “Like, I would never go to a bar and say, ‘Oh, man. I love Excel.’”
A lot used to shame Norton. She lived in unholy terror of how she might screw up while walking down the streets of New York. She sat silently in meetings at the consulting firm that employed her. She refused to speak up “unless I was so sure I knew the answer,” she says. “Just uncomfortable in my own skin.”
Almost two years later, she’s dancing alone to Top 40 and hip-hop tracks while performing Excel functions. In her videos, she wears an infectious smile on her inviting face, her blond hair whipping from side to side, having quit that consulting job to make up to $100,000 a day—yes, a day—from the Excel webinars she offers.
What explains all this?
Energy transmissions.
you should know that Norton is not alone in her mystical theory of success: Studies routinely find that entrepreneurs are drawn to “magical thinking” at a higher rate than the general population. Second, you should know that what’s coming next will sound a little woo-woo. Norton calls it “woo-woo,” which is both reassuring—how crazy can she be if she acknowledges how crazy she sounds?—and intriguing. The woo-woo of the energy transmissions and the “quantum field” she now believes in have transformed her from who she was at her consulting gig—living with her parents, anxious, occasionally bawling—into who she is today: smiling, confident, and, at the time we chat, renting
