If you are reading this, you signed up at some point in the last few weeks for a newsletter you had almost no information about. I want to start by thanking you for that, because that is a lot of trust to extend to a person you have only seen in pieces.
This is the first letter. I want to use it to tell you, plainly, what this is going to be — so that you can decide, now, whether it is what you actually want in your inbox once a month. I would rather you decide that with a real picture than with a guess.
Why this exists
There are three honest reasons, and I want to tell you all of them.
The first is that I want to be the resource I did not have. There is a version of me from ten years ago who would have benefited from finding letters like the ones I am about to send — letters from someone a few steps ahead, written down on purpose, not gatekept. I am writing the newsletter she would have wanted to find. If some version of you is at the place I was then, that is who I am writing to.
The second is that I want to build a life — for myself, for my husband, for the people who come after us — that holds because it was designed, not because it was forced. Most of what I have learned about how that gets done was learned in places where nobody was writing it down. The conversations after the meeting ended. The mentors who explained the thing nobody had explained to them. The years inside the industry where the actual lessons happened in the margins of the official curriculum. I want to write some of it down before it becomes the kind of thing you forget you ever had to figure out.
And the third is that I want to leave something behind that compounds. A body of work, a way of thinking, a category I am helping to define — something that outlasts the credentials that produced it. Credentials open doors and then they retire. What you have written down, honestly, in your own voice, has a longer shelf life than any letter after your name. I would like to spend the next decade quietly building one of those.
That is what this is. One letter a month, from me. About what I am noticing, what I am building, what I have come to believe, and occasionally what I have changed my mind about. It is not advice. It is not a coaching program in disguise. It is a letter. The way letters used to work, before everything became a funnel.
Who I am, for the people who do not know yet
My name is Malika S. Coleman. I am a senior client associate in the wealth management space here in Chicago. I support multiple financial advisors in the day job, and I am also involved in several extracurriculars at the firm beyond client work — the kind of involvement that does not show up on a business card but quietly shapes the career underneath it. I hold the SIE, Series 7, Series 66, and a life and health license. I finished my MBA this month, with a concentration in banking and financial services. I have two classes left in a Master of Finance program after that. After the Master of Finance, I will begin working toward the CFP. The credentials are intentional and they are almost done.
In my spare time, I’m building a body of work around what I see as a missing discipline, designing personal operations they way that we design professional ones. More on the specifics as they become real.
My husband Kemon and I live in the Chicagoland area. He shows up in these letters from time to time, because half of what I have learned about building a life I learned with him, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. He is the morning person; I am the midnight one. He does not plan; I plan for three. The household runs on both of us, in ways I am still learning to articulate properly.
Family and friendship sit close to the center of how I have organized my life. The people I came up with, the people who came up with me, the people my family is to me and the people my friends are to me — those relationships are not a thing I do around the edges of the building. They are part of the load-bearing structure. The Sunday call to my parents, the friends I have known long enough that we no longer have to catch up so much as continue, the cousins and the chosen-family and the church relationships and the ones from school that stayed — those are how I know the building still works. The credentials and the businesses are the visible architecture. The relationships are the foundation underneath them. I would like the newsletter to reflect that proportion accurately, because most professional publications make it sound like the career is the building, and that is not how my life is actually arranged.
Outside of all of that, I read more than my schedule says I should and less than I would like to. I travel when I can, and I have an honest relationship with documentaries — the slower the better. I love trying new restaurants with people I love; if there is a good crab cake on the menu I am ordering it, and a strawberry lemon drop is, for my money, the only correct cocktail. I am also, for the record, an Aquarius with a chronic preference for pink — I tell you these things in the spirit of full disclosure rather than as a personality.
What I am, underneath the résumé
If you want to know me beyond what the credentials say, the things I would tell you are these.
The values I run on are not complicated. Integrity, which I mean structurally — the systems I run for myself match the standards I would apply to anyone else's. Loyalty, which I have spent a long time learning to apply carefully so it serves rather than depletes me. Discipline, which I have come to understand is mostly design, and which I will write about often. And resourcefulness — a value I did not choose so much as inherit. I come from people who built things out of what was available, and that lens has stayed with me. If I have a single most defining trait, it is probably that one. I do not wait for resources. I become one.
My strengths sit close to those values. I think structurally — I see the architecture underneath things, the systems people did or did not build, the design decisions that produce outcomes everyone is later mystified by. I am analytical and personal at the same time, which is rarer than the industry I work in lets on; most analytical people are not warm with it, and most warm people are not analytical with it. I can hold both. I am good in long, complicated conversations where the answer is not yet visible and someone has to keep the room patient enough to find it. And I am a quiet builder — I have spent the last several years building several large things in parallel, mostly unannounced, and the discipline of that has shaped how I think about almost everything else.
The lens I write through
There is a particular way I look at things that has been forming for a long time, and at some point in the last two years I started to recognize it as a worldview rather than a habit.
I see the architecture underneath things. The systems people did or did not build. The design decisions that produce the outcomes everyone is later mystified by. I notice when something is working because of structure and when it is working because of luck, and I am usually right about which. I think most of what gets called discipline is actually design that someone forgot they built, and I think most of what gets called a character flaw is actually a missing system the person was never given.
I came to that lens honestly. I have spent close to a decade inside the financial services industry, which is one of the most heavily structured environments in modern professional life — and watching how rigor gets built into one room and how the same person walks home into a life with almost none of it has been a long, slow education. I do not think it should be that way. I think most adults are running an unmeasured operation at home that they would never tolerate at work, and the costs of that unmeasured operation are real, even when the bill is invisible.
Most of what I write here will be some version of that observation, applied to different surfaces. Sometimes it will be about how I run a Sunday. Sometimes it will be about something I noticed in a client conversation. Sometimes it will be about what I have come to believe about credibility, or about the systems my husband and I have designed in our household, or about what I have changed my mind about as I have gotten older. Sometimes it will be about the people I love and what they have taught me, because that material is on the table now. The thread underneath all of it is the lens.
What you can expect from me
One letter a month. I picked monthly on purpose, not because I cannot write more often, but because I would rather send you one letter I have actually thought about than four letters I have produced on a schedule. I am building several things at once and I would rather honor your inbox than fill it.
Each letter will be one thing. Not a roundup, not a list of links, not five tips at the bottom — one piece of writing, on one topic, from one person. Sometimes it will be structural. Sometimes it will be warmer. Sometimes it will be about something quietly funny or quietly hard. I will not engineer the topic to a content calendar. I will write about whatever has actually been with me that month.
I will be honest in them. Not raw — I do not believe in confessional writing as a virtue — but honest in the structural sense. If I have changed my mind about something, I will say so. If I do not know the answer, I will say that too. If I am writing from inside something rather than from the other side of it, I will name that explicitly so you can read it with the right scale.
I will not sell you anything in these letters. Not for a long time. There are services and products that will eventually exist in the ecosystem I am building, and when they are real, I will tell you, in their own communications, with full transparency about what they are. This newsletter is not where that happens. This letter is where I write, and where you read, and where neither of us is being asked for anything.
That is the contract. I am going to keep it.
What is coming
In Issue 02 I want to write about the Sunday I built so the week could survive itself. It is the smallest piece of architecture I have ever designed and the one I am most proud of. Most people who hear me describe it think it is excessive. I have stopped agreeing with them and I would like to make the case for why, in long form, with the time a letter gives that a short video does not.
After that, we will see. Some things I am sitting with, in no particular order: what I have come to believe about credibility after a decade inside a credentialed industry; the specific thing my husband does that I have spent years undervaluing and have finally started learning from; what studying for the CFP will begin to teach me about Personal Operations Management that I do not yet see; what changes in a marriage when one of you is good with money and one of you is not; what it is like to be in the quiet years of building something while everyone around you is announcing things; and an honest account of how family and friendship hold a life together in the years when the career is loudest.
Whichever of these is most ready when the next month comes is the one I will send.
One last thing
If you read this all the way through, I want to say thank you specifically. The market for monthly long-form letters from someone you have not met in person is not infinite, and the act of staying with this letter to the end is itself a kind of trust I do not take lightly.
I am glad you are here. I will write to you again next month.
With care,
Malika
P.S. — If something in this letter resonated, the reply-to address goes to my actual inbox, and I read everything. You do not have to reply for this to work; I just want you to know the address is not a one-way speaker. If you ever want to tell me what landed, or what you were hoping for and did not get, or what you are sitting with right now and would like me to write about — that channel is open.
