Archive

From Barista to Writer: Building a Business out of Thin Air

posted 20th October 2011    Written by: Dusti    CATEGORY: All Posts, Dusti, Job/Career/Work, Season 5

I never had any intentions of being an entrepreneur. Really I didn’t.

I thought I was just starting blog. Harmless, really. Then, it was a month-long course on blogging. No biggie. Then, I made my first affiliate sale. Oooh, that was pretty exciting. Then, I was writing and marketing an ebook.

Okay, so it was a slippery slope.

Who am I kidding? I showed all of the telltale signs of the would-be entrepreneur.

The inability to stay at a job I couldn’t stand and couldn’t change. (Seriously, I’ve had 36 jobs.) I had to stop participating in student council, because I blew a fuse or ten when I realized all they did was fundraise for parties and dances. So much for wanting to get the curriculum updated and get the school more active in the community. That may have also been why I was voted most likely to be a politician… in 8th grade.

I joke about it, but honestly, stepping into this new role has changed my life in ways I struggle to describe.

Let’s jump back to the summer of 2010. I was working at a Starbucks, slinging coffee out a window to people more or less unhappy with their lives. (The only notable exception to this was Phil Knight and his wife, two of our regulars.) Life was okay. Except that I knew I was handing a false answer to their problems out the window.

When I wasn’t making coffee, I was online. I’d started blogging in my spare time, downsizing my life, and doing more of what I loved. And what did I love? Writing. Sharing. Even when only an hour of my day could be devoted to this secret passion, it lit me up like the 4th of July.

When I first got started, I did it all for the love of writing. All of these thoughts and ideas had been building up with nowhere to go, and when I started blogging, it was like the floodgates opened. My heart soared every time I penned something. Little pieces of me scattered online and throughout the world.

Now it’s October 2011, and I have built myself a job and the makings of a business. In the past year, I’ve written about half a million words. No exaggeration. Between college, writing for pleasure, and writing for business, the flow of words has been more akin to tsunami force than that of the steady river metaphor I had considered using there.

With no qualifications, I wrote ebooks that real people bought. I offered my services as a branding coach and a copywriter – and real people paid me with real money. Danielle LaPorte says the universe speaks in cashflow, and it certainly did to me. The whole thing still blows my mind.

It’s amazing on so many levels, but entrepreneurship is not easy, especially if you’ve got workaholic tendencies. It feels like your work is never done. There’s always this inner conflict going on. How should I be spending my time? How much time with my daughter is enough? How many hours a week should I work? How many would I like to work? How many do I actually have to work to pay my rent?

We take the structure a workplace provides for granted. The thing with being the one calling shots is just that – you’re the one calling the shots. There’s no one else to blame. It’s all on you. Every decision you make about your schedule, your rates, everything. I’m a fan of bootstrapping, but now I dream of the day I can hire my very own virtual assistant. (I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the heavens will open up and angels will sing.)

Have you considered starting your own business? I’d love to hear about your ideas, and if you have any questions about how I made the transition, I’m happy to answer them! (Molly and Hannah, I want some input here from you guys, too!)

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Universal Love and Committing to Joy

posted 22nd September 2011    Written by: Dusti    CATEGORY: Dusti, Family, Job/Career/Work, Season 5

The universe is trying to tell me something. I’m convinced.

After a summer of stressing over getting someone to rent to me, I applied to a random Craigslist housing ad. I found a nice two bedroom within my budget. It was a little further out than I wanted, but there was no application fee – which *fingers crossed* meant no credit/rental check.

It’s like the universe wrapped its arms around me and gave me a hug. She rented based on character, not background. And she was one of the nicest ladies I’ve ever met! You just don’t meet people like that anymore.

Then came the cherry on top - the best writing gig EVER lands in my inbox. Cue me dancing a jig! I can’t give details yet, but it’s with a company I would sell my left boob to work with long term.

A place to live and steady income. Did I just achieve some stability? Why, yes, I think I did. Count this as me exiting fight or flight mode. Unless I’m crazy, that should mean I make better decisions for a while.

At the end of this five months, I’ll be ready to pop. As in, the brand new baby boy will be making his arrival like a soda can exploding in the freezer. I’m so excited for him, but I’m afraid for me. My doctor said I have a high likelihood of getting extreme PPD again.

Last time, it destroyed my life. This time, I have a much better support network. I have a wonderful doula, and I’m not in a relationship with someone I can’t stand – progress, right? (In fact, he makes me quite happy. And makes trips out when I get cravings. Yep – he’s a keeper.)

The next several months are going to be jam-packed full of goodness. But, it’s also just jam-packed – you know, crappy airline style where the seats are too close together kind of packed. I’m not crazy enough to hope for balance, but I am dreaming of joy. Even when things go bonkers, I want to feel the deep joy of knowing I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be doing what I’m meant to be doing. To commit to joy, I’m making three goals for my time here at Stratejoy.

My three goals for the next five months are:

To prepare as much as I can for the new baby. Mentally, this means making sure I have a network of wonderful women to connect with. I think Stratejoy is going to help with that a TON. Physically, it means yoga and setting up the nursery. (Because you KNOW it’s fun.)

To write my manifesto. Because I can’t write it until I understand all of the in’s and out’s of what I think. This is me committing to self exploration in away I haven’t before.

To open as many doorways as I can for my writing career. This means getting coaching, applying to grad school, working with amazing clients, and doing whatever I can to propel my writing to the next level.

It’s a good thing I like challenges, because this one is going to be one tough mother.

 

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In Defense of the Millennial

posted 5th April 2011    Written by: Amanda    CATEGORY: All Posts, Amanda, Life Lesson, Season 4

I’ve often thought of our generation as lazy, selfish, and self entitled.

I’ve never been more disgusted with the laissez-faire attitude toward rape and sexual assault as I am when faced with young men my own age. The fact that homophobic slurs like “fag” and “gay” are now part of everyday derogatory vernacular makes my skin crawl. That television shows like Jersey Shore persist and flourish is a testament to our own self indulgent nature.

We’re portrayed — sometimes unfairly — as petulant and utterly lost behind our curtains of hair.

And then, I started to think about it.

As twenty (and thirty) somethings, the bar is set very, very high. We often look up at these outstanding men and women in our niches and industries, only to compare and fall vastly short. We long for and seek out meaning in our vocations — not because we believe we’re entitled to it, but because we know that a life without meaning is a life not worth living. We’re not working for the weekend. We’re not even working for retirement.

Our deep-seeded desire to challenge the status quo and change the world doesn’t come from self-entitlement or peerenting (wtf, really?). It’s because the world is broken and we want it to be better. Not just for ourselves or our parents or siblings or friends but for everyone. Thanks to the deluge of information on the internet, we watch as disasters and violence and worse befall the world. We donate. We start charities, like Katharine did, but we ultimately end up back at square one.

The stigma remains that young people don’t know anything and that they should leave the big world-altering ideas to the older generations. It’s not like this is new. Every generation that ages thinks that the generation after is useless at doing anything other than being young and self-indulgent and utterly useless.

We get to hear all about how the modern young person is too concerned with having meaning in his/her job. Or that the modern young person mistakenly thinks that they’ll change anything in this world. After all, didn’t we watch Wall Street crumble and take the rest of the world with it?

Oh, but no one went to jail. Oh, and the status quo remains unchallenged.

Whether or not people choose to acknowledge it, the Millennial is an agent of social change, capable of starting revolutions and internet-driven wildfires. The revolution was not televised; it was Twitterized. It wasn’t some stodgy old dude sitting in an office somewhere that said, “Oh, yes. There is an opportunity to connect people all over the world with a social experiment. I think I’ll invent the next big internet… thing.”

Hell no.

It was three young dudes that said, “Y’know what? This is an opportunity to create a social experiment on the web. Let’s get a few people together and make this happen!”

They dreamed it. They worked it. They busted their asses before their experiment took off.

With stories of success like that, it’s no wonder that more and more millennials are leaving corporate and industry long before retirement to do their own thang. The traits that make us unemployable in the traditional sense are the same traits that make us into such an interesting breed of entrepreneur.

Some of us work our asses off to make a few bucks here and there, just because we love what we do. Others expect way too much, way too soon, and end up right back where they started: running reports and praying to the Code Gods that SQL Server won’t fritz out and erase your databases. And still more of us will astound you with how much we can accomplish in one sitting if we’re motivated to do so.

How do you motivate a Millennial?

Show us that our work actually matters. No one likes to feel like their work is being lost in the shuffle. We like to know that what we’re doing actually contributes to the greater good, whether that greater good is in the company or in the world. Yes, we’re confident and ambitious and need all kinds of love to do a good job in our work.

But when we really and truly believe in what we do — whether that’s personally or professionally — we’re capable of great things and great work.

Watch and we’ll astound you.


Image by Michael Lokner.

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The Problem of Comparison OR “So, What About Me?”

posted 22nd March 2011    Written by: Amanda    CATEGORY: All Posts, Amanda, Creativity, Job/Career/Work, Season 4

Working with rock stars is exhausting.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

Working with amazing people is exhausting and not for the reasons you’d think. They’re not divas. They’re not snobbish. They are kind, considerate, beautiful, exhilarating individuals that really and truly shine. I’m blessed to be their friend. I’m honoured to be their aesthetic architect. Dually if I have the privilege of both.

They’re writers and coaches. They’re agents of social change. They’ve inspired many people in their work. They speak and it is gospel. They’ve shaped the futures of countless people just by existing and sharing their stories with the world.

When I sit down to really reflect on the whole “why the living hell would they want to work with little ol’ moi?”, it can be just as empowering as it can be confusing. Here I am — twenty-four years old — rubbing elbows with the biggest, baddest mamajammas (and just plain mamas) online. Really? ME?! Bloody hell, that can’t be right.

I’m the stage manager to their actress; the prop master to their director; and the choreographer to their prima ballerina.

While I may be in charge of crafting things behind the scenes, I can hardly say that what I do is inspiring to hundreds, thousands, and millions of people. What I do is create solutions for problems using design as both my medium and my toolset, where the problem is online aesthetic and visual branding.

In spite of all the inspiration and the unbridled amazing, it can get depressing.

While I’m fairly certain that I don’t require the limelight or for people to pay attention to meeee, working with the online equivalent of rock stars (no matter how clichéd the term has become) is a reminder of how much farther I need to go, both professionally and personally.

Let’s face it: I don’t want to be just a web designer or a mama or a branding specialist or a writer or a gamer or… you get the picture. I don’t want to be just anything. The grand scheme of it is to be as many things as I possibly can be without either exploding or imploding from pressure (be it external or internal).

I’m at least part-way responsible for the online development of these personal and/or professional brands/websites. I’m happy to lift them up and help them shine even brighter.

But it’s hard not to feel left behind sometimes.

It’s hard not to feel insignificant.

It creates a problem of comparison.

I could sit here and rattle off the ways in which I fall short. In comparison. The real problem of comparison creates an ego issue, where my self worth can get tied up in their success. The faster and more expansive their success, the better I feel. The slower and less expansive, the worse I feel.

It’s easy to get caught up in the comparisons, especially when I consider my definition of success: financial solvency and freedom to choose. These are people that can work a few hours a day, travel with their beautiful families (or by their sexy, sexy selves), go to yoga, and still manage to make a significant impact on their worlds.

A year ago, I was busting my ass just to make a cool couple hundred.

Six months ago, I busted my ass just to make a few dollars here and there.

The fact of the matter is this: I am a slave to my own ambition. I’m impatient. I wail and cry and beat on the wall until my hands bleed (no, not really). I beg the universe to give me a sign. Any sign. Anything. I’m often thrown into emotional purgatory as punishment, where I sit in dark rooms and brood about my path for days at a time during Vivienne Westwood retrospectives.

I had to stop comparing.

Shortly after my face-plant in the fall, I did the Joy Equation. I plucked myself out of melancholy and forced myself to recognize joy and to recognize the successes in my own life, not just in others’. I had — scratch that, have — an overwhelming tendency to want to be the best, when the best is often both a fallacy and an impossibility.

And, just like my view of balance, the theory of “the best” is bullshit.

No such thing. You can strive all you want, lovelies, but you ain’t nevah gonna get there. There’s always someone bigger and better than you at whatever you do.

My autumnal face-plant forced my to recognize that.

If I sat back and compared my life to everyone else’s, I would ultimately become a derivative; an unoriginal carbon copy of someone else. I’ve sought my whole life to avoid that. I don’t want to be like anyone. I just want to be myself, whatever that self may look like and whatever that self happens to mean in the grander scale of things.

When I tie up my own self worth in the success of someone else, I hand over the reins to chaos and uncertainty. By grasping the reins tightly and saying, “This is your stop, love. Go forth and prosper.” — I’ve retained control and managed my expectations of the situation.

The problem of comparison is self-destructive.

Ultimately, my success and self-worth are no one’s responsibility but my own. It’s not up to my clients and friends to take me along for the ride. It’s not up to my husband to build me up when I feel dismal (although, snuggles certainly help). It’s not up to you — my lovely Stratejoy family — to agree mindlessly with the things I write about.

I think that the more I explore the notion of self worth and success, the more comfortable I become with knowing there’s no such thing as stability within either of those concepts. It’s a constant struggle. It’s a battle waged on many fronts.

Most importantly, it’s far more rewarding to smile at my accomplishments and connections than it is to wonder, “What about me?”


Image by eatmeupinside.

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Ten Years Later – From High-School To Right Now

posted 25th February 2011    Written by: Katharine    CATEGORY: All Posts, Events, Katharine, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 4

June 4, 2001 – High School graduation day.

I was wearing a white dress, a white cap and gown, and walking down a cement hill leading onto the track on a rainy evening with 300 of my classmates.  We walked out to a song that wasn’t Pomp and Circumstance (because my school couldn’t get it right), holding index cards with our name written out phonetically on it so the Principal would announce it correctly as we walked across the stage.

It was a day I had been waiting for since my Freshman year, because to me, graduating from High School meant officially entering Adulthood – moving out of my mother’s house and living on campus, meeting new friends, joining sororities and student organizations, scheduling my own classes, going to parties, not having a curfew, and living the independent lifestyle I had been craving since I walked into high-school.

And then it happened.

Fast Forward: Late January, 2011.

I logged into Facebook and saw an invitation to my 10 Year High School reunion.

< insert emotional breakdown here >

“Holy shit,” I thought to myself,“Where the hell did those ten years go?  And how do I get them back?!”

After graduation I had a plan: graduate from college, graduate from law school, work for the Federal Government, travel the world, and get married by the age of 30.

Clearly that was my imaginary plan, because my actual plan consisted of: graduating from college, losing my mother, moving to Philadelphia and drinking my body weight in vodka, sabotaging friendships, getting my heart broken, spiraling into depression three times, and getting bitch-slapped with a Quarterlife Crisis.

We spend our whole lives worrying about the future.  Planning for it.  Trying to predict it.  As if figuring it out will cushion the blow.  But the future is always changing.  The future is the home of our deepest fears and our wildest hopes.  But one thing is certain -  when it finally reveals itself, the future is never the way we imagined it. At least it wasn’t for me.

I thought by now I would have my shit together.  Ten years is plenty of time to get through law school and become a Special Agent for the F.B.I., or finish culinary school and open up my own restaurant.  Yet here I am at 27, single, childless, unemployed and freaking out because my classmates have gotten married, had babies, traveled, and lived these rock-star lives and I feel like I’ve failed miserably.

I’m not saying I need a relationship or a child or a fancy-schmancy ‘Corporate Executive’ title to validate my accomplishments since high school, but I just want to feel like I’ve done something with my life these last ten years that doesn’t involve empty bottles of alcohol, depression, and broken hearts.

Why are we so quick to notice our failures instead of our achievements?

“Look, I did what I was supposed to do – graduated, got a job, and married before I was 30, and now look at me.  Look how well that turned out.  Would you really be happier if you lived the life you planned, rather than the life you’re living now?”

My friend, a successful business man in his late thirties with an MBA, who is currently going through a divorce.  After having a conversation about high school reunions, I got to thinking:

Why do we insist on growing up so quickly and having our lives all figured out by the time we’re 30?  And for those of us who don’t have it figured out right now, why do we feel like we’ve failed?

Truth is, I don’t think I would be happier had my life gone according to plan.  I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and I know there’s a reason why I lost my parents and battled cancer at such a young age.  I also believe that this Quarterlife Crisis hit at a time when I really needed to figure myself out.  Even if I don’t have all of the answers yet, perhaps I’m one step closer to finding them.

I can’t help but wonder – of my high school classmates who are married, have children, and have fancy schmancy jobs, how many of them are authentically happy?

Maybe I’ll find out at my reunion.



{photo credit: Bredgur}

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