about sidewaysWho this is for Most people are not stuck because they are doing nothing.
They are stuck because they are doing the obvious thing over and over.
Save more. Work harder. Follow the plan.
On paper, it makes sense. In practice, it does not always work.
Sideways exists for that gap.
Sideways is a place to think through money, business, and life differently. Not for the sake of being different, but to make decisions that actually work.
This is not theory.
It is built from real situations. Running businesses, managing money, and navigating decisions that do not come with clean answers.
Sometimes the direct path works.
Sometimes it quietly breaks things.
Sideways is about knowing when to follow it and when not to.
This is for people who: feel like they are doing everything right, but nothing is compounding,
want to understand money without becoming consumed by it, are building something and realizing it is more complex than expected, know there is a better way, but cannot quite see it yet.
HOW TO USE THISwhy this existsYou can read.
You can think.
Or you can bring something real.
If you are working through something, money, business, or life, bring it here. A decision, a problem, something unclear.
I will break it down sideways. That is the point of this.
Over time, this becomes a collection of real decisions, real tradeoffs, and how they were worked through.
Not perfectly.
Not universally.
But in a way that helps you see what you might be missing.
Most advice is built for clarity.
Life rarely is.
This is a place to work through the in between.
Where decisions are not obvious and outcomes are not guaranteed.
I do not have all the answers.
But I have spent enough time inside businesses and balance sheets to know where things quietly go wrong and how small shifts can change everything.
Most people are closer than they think.They are just looking at it the wrong way.
This is where that shifts.
Ellen Collins is a strategist and writer interested in how systems behave under pressure.Her professional background spans finance, operations, communications, and hospitality leadership, alongside creative work in film and media. Across those environments a consistent pattern emerged: the same dynamics appear in very different places. A restaurant dining room, a corporate structure, a relationship, and a film narrative often respond to pressure in similar ways.
Understanding those patterns became the foundation for the essays in Sideways. Her writing focuses on perspective, decision making, and the subtle forces that shape outcomes in both personal and professional life. When not writing, she can usually be found near the water, in a restaurant dining room long after closing, or quietly observing the small signals that reveal how systems actually work.
Unless otherwise noted, the photographs on this site were taken in the same places where many of the essays began.