Eni Popoola left her law firm job to pursue content creation full-time after her brand deals exceeded her salary
NEED TO KNOW
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She initially created content as a hobby during law school but built a community that supported her career shift
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Her style and content evolved after leaving law, reflecting her new lifestyle and creative freedom
For years, Eni Popoola worked tirelessly to achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer — but once she got there, her dreams started to change.
The 31-year-old grew up in Queens, N.Y., before attending Harvard University for her undergraduate degree. From there, she spent a couple of years teaching before transitioning to law school at Columbia University.
Around that time, she started creating content and sharing her outfits on Instagram, under theusername Eni Given Sunday,inspired by a friend's comment on one of her weekend posts, "Oh, it's Eni given Sunday."
"I started creating content more seriously, but also more so just as a hobby while I attended law school, and things started to take off so much that I grew a community," Popoola tells PEOPLE.
As her account started gaining traction, she landed a job at a law firm. When she started accepting brand deals, however, she quickly realized she would have to leave her Big Law career.
"My law firm had an outside of work activity policy that said that we could not do any work — whether it was legal or non-legal — any work of any kind outside of work, and they viewed my partnerships with brands as a form of work," she explains. "I was at a crossroads, and I decided to leave that job because it wasn't really making me happy."
"It also seemed like the brand deals weren't the main issue. It seemed like the brand deals were the formal issue that got me, but that being a public figure online wasn't really something that the firm vibed with," she adds.
Popoola says that when these conversations were taking place, it "was the longest week of my life."
"I felt a level of certainty. I knew I had to leave the job right there in the meeting," she shares. "My first reaction is, 'Oh, this is it. I have to quit my job. It's happening now.' I say that because I had been a little restless and was having conversations with some of my friends about not being happy and wanting to do something I was actually excited about."
So, Popoola followed her gut and took a bet on herself — and it paid off.
"I stepped on faith and have been creating content for the past three years full-time," she says.
While she felt confident in her choice on a personal level, she was admittedly "nervous" because some of the identity she had built online centered on her career.
"I was very anxious about the fact that people were going to view my decision negatively, that I was going to lose the community that I had built, that people were going to be upset about yet another influencer leaving their full-time job to become a content creator," she shares. "Thankfully, I was proven wrong, and there are gonna be people who don't support your decision in any case, but the reaction was overwhelmingly positive."
While working in law, Popoola notes that she wasn't giving "career coaching advice," but instead was giving a glimpse into the "lifestyle as someone who works a really time-consuming, really demanding job."
"When I was in law school, I was telling people about my lifestyle as someone who was in law school without getting into the nitty-gritty of what I was learning in class," she explains.
However, since the bulk of her content was still lifestyle-based rather than rooted in the actual practice of law, she says that it "made the transition a little bit smoother."
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"My lifestyle looked a little different now that I wasn't spending 10 hours a day in an office. Now I was creating my own office at home and figuring out how to balance working for myself with also having time to do some of the things that I would wanna do outside of work," the content creator shares.
The first few days were admittedly tricky, as she wanted to be the one who told her community about the big change. Hervideo announcing that she was switching careerswent viral, for both good and bad reasons, and Popoola says she had to take a few days away from social media.
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When the chatter died down, she was able to "get right back into it."
"Working that job really impacted my ability to film, to work with brands, to do all of that fun stuff. Now that I was free, I was like, 'Oh, I'm hitting the ground running. I have this time now to film my videos, to do beauty tutorials, to do fashion videos,'" she says. "Everything that I felt like I didn't have time to do because I had to prioritize a full-time job, I immediately dove right back into it."
Popoola makes it clear, however, that she was already bringing in income from brand deals before quitting her job.
"If I were not in a position financially where the deals had exceeded my yearly salary, I would not have left that job," she tells PEOPLE. "At the time that I left my job, in March of 2023, the number of deals that I had contracted for up until that point had exceeded my yearly salary at that job."
She had also been turning down events and campaigns due to her job, so she felt confident that there would be even more opportunities to earn.
Now, she says, "24/7, I'm working on something."
"The issue was never working. I actually like to work. I don't have a problem with working. I have to like what I'm working on," she explains. "It's funny because people are like, 'Clearly you left Big Law because the hours are grueling and you would be working all the time.' It's the case now that I'm still working all the time."
"I wake up in the morning, and I'm thinking about content that I might have edited the previous night, and is there something that I could have done better? I'm always thinking about content ideas, editing, drafting or filming. So there is always work to be done."
Since leaving her law firm, Popoola says her content has evolved, specifically her fashion.
"My lifestyle has changed. When I was in Big Law, my lifestyle was focused on the classic business casual. My wardrobe wasn't very exciting," she shares. "Even if I could make business casual exciting, at the entry level at a large corporate firm, you're taught not to draw attention to yourself. So you don't wanna wear the bright colorful suits or the fancy things because you just wanna lay low and get the job done."
Now her wardrobe is "a lot more colorful, and I don't just mean that in a literal sense."
"I mean that in terms of the types of pieces that I can have and what I can wear and the outfits that I can put together and how I can style things. And as a result, I have a lot more fun in my wardrobe, but also my style has evolved to match the lifestyle that I'm living now," Popoola says.
Read the original article onPeople
