Woodworking Content Creators Part 3: Diversification, Authenticity & the Future of Influencing

In part three of our three-part series on woodworking content creation, Anne Briggs (Anne of all Trades), Jimmy Diresta, Jim Hamilton (Stumpy Nubs), Hadeel Khater (Four Rivers Studio), David Morris (Worst Workshop), Marc Spagnuolo (The Wood Whisperer) and Joe Thiele (Boundary Fog Furniture) discuss the different ways they diversify their income, and trust and authenticity’s role in building a community. They also take stock of where things started and the road ahead.

You can check out part one here, and part two here.

The Importance of Diversified Income

“I’ve spoken on stage many times about the 21 sources of revenue that make my business work,” Briggs says. “It was never just one thing and was never just from one place. Some revenue sources only add up to $100 here and there, some are more seasonal than others. Not diversifying revenue streams is where I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs get it wrong, and when it comes to content creation, it’s super important to build an audience on multiple platforms, especially if longevity is the goal.”

Recently, Briggs has shifted her focus away from many of the endeavors that were formerly the bread and butter of her business while still capitalizing on passive income streams she’d established in the years past, But unless they’d heard her speak or teach about entrepreneurship, a social media follower would likely have never seen much evidence of what was actually going on behind the scenes to make ends meet.

“For a long time, I was able to use an amalgamation of multiple skillsets that I developed by doing random jobs,” Briggs says. “I used to do wedding photography, which then led me to be a decent photographer. Then I noticed that a lot of companies needed good product photos, or even woodworking magazines needed photos that weren’t taken with a crappy cell phone with shaky hands in dim lighting. I was able to fill that gap.”

Briggs then focused on developing her writing skills.

“Writing plus photography equaled opportunities to write for magazines,” Briggs says. “Working in marketing helped me develop a skill for copywriting. In the early days, I did ghostwriting for a lot of different magazines so you didn’t even necessarily know it was me writing the article, but I was getting paid to do it.”

Early on, Briggs realized that, when writing paid magazine articles or blog posts, if she just took a couple more photos from different angles, those could be put on Instagram. A few extra paragraphs written to accompany those photos could be a post for her own blog or an email blurb sent out to a growing list of subscribers. She treated every Instagram post, blog post or email like a science experience, collecting data about what worked, what people engaged with and what fell flat.

“At the time, Instagram was just a photo-sharing app,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to build a name for myself per se.”

Seeking mentorship, Briggs says she thought these photos might help her “catfish” some real-life friends with similar interests who might also be willing to teach her some things.

“Because if you build it, they will come,” she says. “So I was like, if I post pictures about woodworking, then other woodworkers might see them, I’d finally find some other folks to nerd out with about the same stuff I was getting really nerdy about, and then, maybe someday, if I focused on helping others a few steps behind me, I might also find a resource for people I could call when I get stuck too. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Before embarking on any new project, Briggs would consider blogs or magazines who might like photographs or an article out of it, in addition to photos and content she could use on her own social media. This led to more and more new opportunities.

“For several years, at the very beginning, I was doing product photography for things like tools on display at big box stores,” Briggs says. “And that paid really well for what it was at the time.”

Years ago, at an event, Briggs overheard someone from a lawn mower company wishing they could have photos of their mowers in actual fields of grass rather than having to be Photoshopped in.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I have a field, I can take a photo,’” Briggs says. “I just had the audacity to introduce myself, quote a price that seemed astronomical to me at the time (but was way less than they were paying a whole team to do the same work I could do at home), show some proof I could actually deliver what they wanted and they’re still one of my absolute favorite companies to work with now, however many years later.”

From the beginning, Briggs has looked at every project through this lens of monetization. For example, one project could be documented on social media, written about in several different publications, used as content on her blog, filmed to create instructional segments for an online course and used in collaboration with hosting websites like Skillshare and Squarespace, companies who eventually turned into long-term clients, too.

“I had my own personal story to attach to them, talking about why the product works so well for entrepreneurs like me, because they were what I’d used to build my own business,” Briggs says. “That led to me working with Squarespace, the website company, for six or seven years.”

Take, for example, a table, Briggs says. If she just builds a table for a client, she can make $1,200 to $1,600 in about two weeks. But if she spends an additional four weeks taking pictures of the build, filming the build, writing about the build, etc., she can make $21,000 in six weeks.

“I wish that had actually been an intentional plan that I started with, but it literally just is something that I built over time,” Briggs says. “And I would love to tell you that I did that really well and really consistently on every project and now I’m a millionaire. But here’s the funny thing: I never liked those four weeks of extra work. I liked building furniture, I hated the computer work, making it a tough thing to want to integrate into every project, and the more successfully I was able to monetize my business, the further away I got from the parts and pieces I actually loved.”

This led to a season of extreme burnout, “where I had literally ruined yet another thing that I formerly loved by trying to attach money to it and suddenly found myself no longer caring about or wanting to ever build anything again,” she says. “There were times I felt like I could have shut the door to my shop and never given it a second thought, but … suddenly my income and my identity were both tied to it. Having climbed out of that dark hole, I’ve learned how important it is to find balance and not put so much focus on optimizing literally everything I do.”

In reality, Briggs says all she’s ever wanted to do was grunt manual labor.

“I don't want to do the computer stuff, but it’s also the part that makes the business work,” she says.

Hamilton says his revenue comes from the ads YouTube places on all eligible videos (based upon the viewer’s history), sponsors who pay for the ads he places at the end of every video, affiliate commissions, often connected to sponsored products, that come from links below videos, and sales of project plans and other content, such as a series of upcoming courses, through his website.

“As with any business, it is very important to cultivate multiple streams of revenue because this is a highly competitive industry,” Hamilton says.

From the beginning, Spagnuolo says he and his wife, Nicole, embraced bootstrapping.

“As a struggling young business back in the day, we always had this philosophy of having a lot of balls in the air,” Spagnuolo says. “When you’re in this position of what they now call an influencer, it’s a very fair-weather kind of situation, and we don’t always have control of our own fate.”

Recently Spagnuolo signed a new sponsorship with Woodcraft.

“I’ve got very specific obligations for what I do for them on the Wood Whisperer,” he says. “They’re also sponsoring our audio podcast, Wood Talk. I have new responsibilities there, and we also have The Wood Whisperer Guild with paid courses, which I have to create my own courses for and we have to send our videographer out to travel. … We also have, of course, all the merchandising, the actual building of projects in the shop. All these things are happening concurrently – it can be a mess. But that’s been a big part of our philosophy – do all of these things. And we need all of them.”

Additionally, people in Spagnuolo’s community are getting used to his commercial shop.

“We’re starting to get more and more inquiries,” he says. “‘Can you do this for me? Can you do that?’ And I don’t want the work, but it makes me feel bad not to be helpful to folks in our own community. I’ve been saying ‘yes’ a lot more. So now on top of everything, I’m taking on new jobs that I normally would’ve said no to because they might not be great video. I try to make to a video out of it, but ultimately it’s just another thing I have to do. So yeah, our income is widely varied. I’d say a huge portion of it is from the guild. I don’t know if I would say 50 percent, but it’s close to that. Everything else comes down to sponsorships, advertising, affiliate programs, direct sales and merchandise – my books, things along those lines.”

Diresta says he’s always been a freelancer.

“I’ve always been able to make deals,” he says. “If somebody wants me, that’s fantastic. Then I have the upper hand, and I can say, ‘Give me a retainer and I’ll do whatever you need.’ I make sure it gets done. I always deliver on all my promises.”

Diresta was into product development from 1990 until 2011.

“Those were the golden years of my toy business era when I was just taking in draws from several companies,” Diresta says. “So this company would offer me healthcare and a small salary. And then this company would offer me a salary and free products. I would just take whatever anybody offered. My general number was $5,000 a month to basically be on call. Sometimes that was $10,000 a month. Those contracts would last six months at a time and we’d renew. They were always very flexible and I always deliver. They always got more value out of me than I got out of them.”

While working in toy development, clients would send Diresta to Hong Kong. Diresta would contact other clients and ask if they needed anything while he was there.

“I always gave them the most value I could possibly give them,” Diresta says. “I try and do the same thing now with my sponsors. I’ve always diversified my income because I just didn’t want to work at one company. Maybe it’s just my personality but I don’t like being told what to do and I was never one to be put under someone’s thumb. You see these guys that work at a company for 20 years and then they get fired because somebody new gets hired over them and rearranges everything. But it was never in my DNA to be that kind of guy, so it was never a big decision. Even when I was in college, I worked at a florist, I worked for a construction crew. I always did my own freelance stuff. If anybody needed whatever they needed from me that I could provide at the time based on my skill level, whether it was just small little renovations or even logos, graphic designs, I was always freelancing in some capacity.”

Khater diversifies by working as a nurse 24 hours a week.

“It’s two nights a week, and I try to keep it on weekends so that I’m available during the day [she and her husband have three young children] and the woodworking gets done at night after bedtime,” Khater says. “The woodworking is supplementing our income and depending on how hard I’m willing to work, I can make basically whatever amount of money I need.”

Khater says everything she learned about affiliate marketing and brand partnerships has been from influencer friends who have gotten $60,000 deals from one brand or made just as much from affiliate links during one Black Friday weekend – and none of them are woodworkers.

“Woodworkers are probably the worst at taking advantage of different revenue streams that are available to us through social media,” Khater says.

Khater regularly talks to influencers in the fashion, DIY and home lifestyle scenes who have broadened their niche allowing more people to engage and invest with them. These influencers would never say ‘yes’ to a free product in exchange for content.

“To them, it’s unfathomable,” she says. “And it’s even insulting that a brand would ask. Whereas woodworkers get so excited – ‘Oh my God, this brand is sending me a tool.’ Which Is cool if you need the tool. But you can’t pay the bills with it unless you’re making your own product with it.”

Khater says she always tells people who are interested in getting paid from brands that even if they have no following at all, there are different ways to do it.

“There are different approaches that you could take with brands that could be effective,” she says.

Morris and his wife have two kids who are 12 and 14.

“My wife, she loves her work,” Morris says. “She’s very career driven, and so she works probably an 80-hour week. … We send our kids to a hybrid school, so there’s homeschooling involved that I take care of … I’m driving them around to dance and church … that's actually a lot of my day. I have several streams of income, and my wife and I run a few businesses together, so I do a lot of work there, but my schedule is pretty flexible, and it allows me time to do the YouTube stuff. My day is pretty chaotic and just I squeeze in the YouTube stuff whenever I get a chance.”

Drive, Dedication & Success

“When I got started with all this in 2012, just for a little context, most of our food was coming from the food bank,” Briggs says. “I had to save up money to buy enough gas to put in my truck to ride the ferry one way to be able to visit my woodworking mentor. And that was a challenge.”

In the early years, Briggs bought broken tools on Craigslist, fixing them and reselling them to slowly gain access to better things. Intentionality went a long way, too – she’d only buy wood for a project if she had a way to finance it.

For Spagnuolo, drive comes from a fear of failure.

“I really enjoy what I do,” he says. “There are some things I don’t enjoy, but I do love the craft of woodworking. I love the variety of things you can do within that sphere. There’s always something new to learn or I can rely on the stuff I’ve been doing for a long time and still feel good about what I accomplished that day.”

Spagnuolo says early on, a lot of his drive came from needing to prove himself that leaving his career in science “was a smart thing to do and not a really dumb decision,” he says. “I think the drive continues to evolve and morph.”

This was especially true for Spagnuolo when he had kids. Now much of his drive comes from ensuring he can afford insurance and be a steady provider for his family.

Morris says any success he has isn’t the result of luck. And a viral video turned out to be of the most difficult things in his YouTube career.

“For the next six months, I kept trying to repeat that success and asking myself what I was doing wrong with the videos that weren't that successful,” Morris says. “Everything was at a new level. My videos were getting more views than they’d ever gotten before, but they weren’t getting the kind of views that one video did, and that’s sort of torture to the soul when that happens.”

Analytical in nature, Morris dissected his viral video and its comments. He made a series of videos that emphasized different facets of his viral video’s success.

“I believe strongly that when somebody is in the early stages of YouTube, they need to just experiment and not be afraid to make mistakes,” Morris says. “I think the biggest mistake that people make is thinking it’s the algorithm’s problem. If your videos aren’t getting views, it’s your fault. It’s nobody else’s fault. You have to own that, and you have to be willing to do some crazy things to find where you’re going to fit, especially in woodworking because woodworking is an oversaturated niche. There’s no more room. We don’t need anybody else in it. So if you want to have any success, you can’t just do what the people you love are doing because they’re already doing it. In order to be successful in woodworking and YouTube right now, you don’t have to be as good as the people you’re watching. You have to be better.”

For Morris, success has been videos that are primarily entertaining.

“In my most successful videos, you won’t learn anything,” he says. “You might pick up a tip or two, but it’s not Norm Abram and it’s not any of the big YouTube channels in woodworking. They’re teaching stuff – they’ve got that mostly covered. How many people do we need to tell you how to make a mortise-and-tenon joint? Of course I can do that, and of course I can teach that, but that video’s already been made a thousand times. What’s more, with the incoming AI revolution, I don’t think we’re too far away from me being able to go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Make me a short video on how to make a mortise-and-tenon joint and it just spitting it out. So if all you can do is teach, I think your days are numbered. You have to learn how to entertain and understand that most people who are watching your video, they already know how to do the thing you’re trying to do. Figuring out where you fit into that picture is big.”

Recently, Khater posted a funny and random video on TikTok.

“TikTok is where I feel like I can be the most unhinged, so it’s really easy for me to just post a random video,” she says.

The result? Carhartt reached out and asked to send her some of their Spring 2025 collection.

“You need personality,” Khater says. “It doesn’t have to be a specific kind of personality. Humor goes a long way, but so does being a genuine person whose sharing: ‘These are my struggles. I am having a hard time dealing with this.’”

Diresta finds success when he’s funny.

“And you never want to be controversial,” he says. “I never talk politics. You want to remain neutral, and you want to just be a good person – fun, easy to be with. I had a manager in Hollywood for a few minutes. His name was Barry Katz, and he does a great podcast called Industry Standard, which is all show business related. And Barry always said, ‘You want to be undeniable and you want to be a good hang.’”

Trust, Authenticity & Community

Early on, Spagnuolo built up a community by doing giveaways.

“The giveaways became a little bit of a double-edged sword because you have what we call giveaway hounds,” he says. “It’s basically just people who know that these giveaways are out there and all they do is enter giveaways. They’re not woodworkers. They have no concern for woodworking at all. They just found a giveaway and they want to participate, and that's real. That sucks. I don’t like doing that. And that’s actually one of the reasons we stopped doing so many giveaways.”

So, to connect with his community in a different way, Spagnuolo put a button on his website that said “Ask Marc,” inviting woodworking-related questions.

“This was probably well before I should have even felt entitled to be answering people’s questions,” Spagnuolo says. “But I don’t shy away from things I don’t know. And if someone asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, I never bullshit people. I’m always telling people I either know this or I don’t, and this is opinion or this fact.”

This, Spagnuolo says, helped build community and trust. With too many questions coming through, the “Ask Marc” button because unsustainable. However, the experience helped Spagnuolo be comfortable fielding questions live, which he and his wife do on The Spag Show.

“It keeps me fresh, it keeps me on my toes and it does help establish a little bit of authority, which is very helpful when you're trying to teach people stuff,” he says.

Spagnuolo’s wife and son have recently had some health issues. Sometimes it can be difficult, he says, to be authentic with your community when you just don’t feel like doing a show.

“We’re not actors,” he says. “We don’t pretend. When I’m in a bad mood, it’s better that I just don’t get in front of a camera. I’m not good at faking it.”

But there’s also something wonderful, he says, about taking one hour with his wife to talk and interact with each other and their community.

“We feel better after the show than we did when we went in,” he says. “It’s almost a little bit like going to the gym or a therapy session where it might be hard to get there, but once you’re done and you leave, you feel better for it.”

Morris, on the other hands, does theatre, and sees the impact acting and a big personality has on his videos.

“In my last few videos, I have focused more on education and it’s hurt me,” Morris says. “So in the videos that are coming out over the summer, I'm trying to go back to just entertaining people.”

Morris looks back at his videos with a critical eye, noting how often he moves and the dynamics in his voice as he connects with his community.

“If I want to differentiate myself, I have to make big choices and I have to be willing to do the things that nobody else is willing to do,” Morris says.

This includes airing his mistakes.

“People love that and people relate to it,” he says.

For Morris, Patreon has also been an important community-building tool, including its free tier.

“I love Patreon,” Morris says. “I love it because that’s where you get to meet with the people that care enough to invest in what you’re doing. … It’s also a place to put things that I would never put on YouTube. When you put something up on YouTube, it needs to be your absolute best work because it’s going to influence your reputation moving forward. It’s going to influence future brand deals. They’re going to be looking at average views for your last three to five videos. But if you have something that you just want to show people, Patreon is a great place for that because it’s people that kind of love you anyway.”

In the age of AI, Briggs said the thing that makes you stand out to your community is authenticity.

“AI is getting ridiculous,” she says. “Next year companies won’t even need singing and dancing monkeys anymore because they can literally use AI to create the same result. But that makes all of the people who are singing and dancing monkeys so much less valuable.”

With authenticity comes trust, and trust has social and economic currency, Briggs says.

“I've made a point to not have my content become super polished,” she says. “That doesn’t mean I’m not doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes that you don’t notice. I really care about audio quality and things like that. But I’m not doing fancy editing that remove steps from what it’s really meant to be, which is, ‘Hey, I’m just a person just like you who struggles but I also have worked really hard and learned a few things, and I want to help you maybe not make exactly the same mistakes.’ I think that is the value of my brand. Over the last several months, I have massively increased my income where I’ve seen so many of my contemporaries struggle.”

Thinking About the Past & the Future

“In the beginning there wasn’t a lot of competition from other channels,” Hamilton says. “Certainly not like there is now. The community was closer. We creators used to get together and hold public events for our viewers because our audiences largely overlapped. It was a good time to come up in this industry.”

Hamilton started in 2012, when YouTube was “a place to have fun,” he says. “That was the goal of my first videos. I didn’t care what people thought, I just wanted to teach and have fun with it. If I ever intended for it to become a career, I wouldn’t have named the channel ‘Stumpy Nubs.’”

Things started to change in the latter half of the 2010s, Hamilton says.

“A lot of new channels started popping up flooding YouTube with content,” he says. “And some of it was really good. Suddenly we all had to compete for the views that had up until then come easy. Many of that early generation of channels could not, or would not, adapt because it meant treating their channels like a business. That’s understandable because many of us had jobs and YouTube was just a hobby. But a few of us decided that this could become a career, and we made the leap. For me, that meant getting more serious about education rather than entertainment. I had to show my viewers that I really did know what I was talking about so I could build the credibility it takes to stand out from the even greater flood of woodworking content that was to come.”

Back then, the goal was to hit 100K subscribers, Hamilton says.

“It was sort of a benchmark if you wanted to be considered among the serious channels,” he says. “That wasn't easy at that time, but nowadays there are a lot more viewers on the platform and the benchmark has shifted to 1 million subscribers for so-called top channel status. But frankly, I think subscriber numbers are misleading. We have all seen channels with huge subscriber numbers that can barely get 10K views per video. Those individual video views are what tell the real story because it’s an indication of how many people actually value your content. Eventually, I did reach the subscriber milestones, but those goals were always secondary to my desire to build a community of regular viewers.”

Hamilton says the biggest change he’s seen is a shift toward clickbait.

“It was inevitable because there is just so much content out there and it has become impossible for even great channels to get noticed by the quality of their content alone,” Hamilton says. “YouTubers live and die by the all-powerful algorithm’s recommendations of their videos. And it’s all about fast clicks. If your video doesn’t attract enough clicks in the first few minutes after posting, the algorithm penalizes it by reducing the video’s appearance in the viewer recommendations lists. Because of this, it has become critical to have a compelling title and thumbnail image that will draw those clicks immediately and will keep them coming, feeding the algorithm like a ravenous beast. This is especially true as channels age since the system favors newer channels, forcing the old ones to rely even more heavily on clickbait to keep its head above water. Sure, some seem to do well without succumbing to it, but in time almost all channels reach a point where they either have to adapt (hopefully by using compelling but not dishonest titles and images) or begin the slow, steady death spiral that has overtaken so many channels from the earlier years of woodworking on YouTube.”

Teaching, Hamilton says, it was he does best.

“It’s what I enjoy and it’s what the core of my audience likes best about the channel,” he says. “While the other stuff (gimmicky videos, clickbait, tool reviews, etc.) have become a necessary evil on YouTube, my desire has always been to teach. Who knows, you may see another shift in my channel in the near future.”

Looking back, Spagnuolo sees a slow evolution.

“The platforms were being developed as we were making content, and we kind of just continued to expand with this expanding environment,” he says. “It’s not like an old-school business where there’s already a playbook. We were part of the group of people who were writing the new playbook, and honestly, we wound up giving a lot of that information to other people.”

Now, when people come into the fold, Spagnuolo says there are more defined, but also different, ways to approach it.

“There are people who come in now who far exceed, numerically and statistically, what we are able to do because there are just certain things we’re not willing to do that are part of that new playbook,” Spagnuolo says. “But this is something that I think was a fairly natural evolution over time, but mostly dictated by the changing environment, which we were part of but ultimately didn’t totally have control of. And that has become a sticking point recently. The requirements continued to evolve in a way that we don’t particularly enjoy. And now we have to figure out how to survive in this new paradigm that we don’t always love every aspect of.”

But like Hamilton, Spagnuolo, too, says he’s a teacher at heart.

“I never really thought I was, but once I did get into management in science, I started to have to teach a lot of the new people coming in,” Spagnuolo says. “And once I understand a topic, I found that I was pretty decent at teaching that to other people. So I think knowing that every day I can go in and do a thing I love, which is woodworking, and then do another thing that gives me a lot of gratification, which is teaching other people how to do that thing, that’s a pretty alright way to make a living.”

Briggs says content creation will continue to be the future of marketing.

“That wasn’t a real job back then, but now it is,” Briggs says. “The market has been flooded. Every year I’ve been like, ‘Oh, this definitely won’t be viable for very long.’ And I was totally wrong in that because actually every year it’s gotten more and more viable. The marketplace has changed a whole lot because there’s way more content being produced, which I think is actually great for everyone because it forces people to make better content.”

Briggs says, again, that authenticity and diversification will continue to go a long way.

“As long as you’re looking at it from that standpoint, this is the future of advertising, this isn't going away,” she says.

Khater is focusing on developing her own products so that she’s not having to rely on brands as much. With the state of the world as it is, she says, fellow content creators are feeling as if they’re being censored.

“They can’t say what’s really on their mind because they’re scared of losing opportunities,” Khater says. “I don’t want to be in that position. I don’t want to feel like I can’t say something because this brand isn’t going to pay me anymore and I’m relying on that. I want my money to come from me. And if brands come along that I’m comfortable with, that’s great, but I don’t want to be relying on that.”

Khater envisions a future shop space that is open to the community, one where she can also host classes, have a storefront and hire employees. Until then, she’s holding tight to her vision while enjoying her kids and, as she grows in the future, plans to share that growth in an authentic way.

For Morris, it was always a dream to meet one of the woodworkers he watched on YouTube.

“And then that evolved into what would it be like if I took my woodworking to YouTube, but I never had the guts to do It,” he says, “I got to a place where I realized I had the time, and so I made a little YouTube channel and I didn’t tell anybody about it except my family, probably for the first year. I never told anyone outside of my family that I was doing it. I was making videos. I was experimenting. Instead of investing in tools, like a lot of people do, I was investing in education. I looked for courses that I could take and just tried to learn everything that I could. And before you knew it, I had a YouTube channel. I had one video that really went viral, and it put me on a map. It got me monetized and gave me a platform to stand on. And eventually, gosh, I still don’t even tell most people that I have a YouTube channel. I was afraid to for so long, and finally I just got the guts to at least do it in secret, and now it’s my dream to do this full time. You never know. I’m glad for the opportunities I’ve been given, and I’m grateful that I get to make a new video next month.”

Thiele is simply seeking balance. Right now he’s working on building three beds for clients. In the future he’d like to focus on just one piece at a time while also making videos of the build, earning income from both.

“From the outside, the people who do that sort of thing seem to have a pretty good balance of creative freedom and money coming in,” Thiele says.

Briggs considers time to be our most valuable resource, and moving forward, that’s something she never wants to take for granted.

“I don’t ever want to waste too anyone’s time,” she says. “If I’m going to invite someone to engage with me, I want it to be worthwhile for them. Whether it’s uplifting or teaches them something or makes them feel like something that they didn’t know was possible is now possible. Or someone who looks like them is doing something they never expected that they could do or didn’t think was a possibility. That’s really important to me.”

No one in this field, Briggs says, is an overnight success. But still, she’s thankful for the opportunities that she’s gotten.

“Not to discredit myself – I’ve worked my butt off – but also so many doors have opened for me and I was willing to walk through them,” she says. “And that willingness to walk through them also involved a lot of work. But I also consider myself to just have been afforded an enormous amount of privilege and good favor along the way, and I’m phenomenally thankfully for it.”