#204 - Three Months, Three Learnings

Unlike most millennials, I've never really had the "entrepreneurial spirit" that so many of my peers seem to have naturally cultivated.

I'm much more of a, "Huh, somebody should really fix/invent [that thing]." type of person.

Someone smarter than me, potentially with like a degree in engineering or whatever. Someone else. I like to be given a set course and approximate amount of time it should take me to clear it.

Watch me soar around that track babeeeyyy! I've never missed a deadline as long as it's been set by someone else!!

But then...idk I kind of tried this thing with The Meeting Medic and ended up really enjoying the meetings I was having. People wanted workshops, so now I do workshops!

Which has also lead me to writing this! Three things I've learned in the last three months because who needs perspective when you've got plucky observations?!

(Begging for the interrobang to break through so we can finally combine ?! 2gether4ever.) (🎶 I know my calculus, it says you + me = us 🎶)

#1 - Say "yes" first, figure it out later

During my Unemployment Era I invested in the Regal Movie Pass and was seeing a movie most days in Union Square (it was honestly a really fun time despite the fact that my soul felt heavy with fear every single day when I wasn't in a dark room watching a giant screen) and one of the movies I saw was the Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary.

I don't know much about the band (and the doc was like...fine? Idk it didn't feel like a Theatrical Release was warranted but it's perfectly adequate if boring and then becomes somewhat psychedelic with concert footage at the end so that was jarring) but there's a scene where John Paul Jones is discussing getting booked as a gig musician and one day someone asked if he did compositions.

And he said yes because you don't turn down money and then he figured it out on the fly and went on to become like very very good at composing music and arranging all the various instruments. It's not a new lesson but for whatever reason (unemployment, it was the unemployment) it stuck.

So when I was asked if I would be up for running some 20-minute workshops, I said yes! I know how to create agendas for workshops, I've seen them run well dozens of times, and hey we'll take the chance and see how it goes. Why not! The worst thing I can do is run a "bad" 20 minute workshop in which case...oh no! Not a whole 20 minutes!

It's okay if they start rocky, because the only way to improve at all is to do them.

#2 - Just Do It

This one came from Nike (famously) and also my sister (slightly less famously). I got really caught up in creating the perfect website, in having bank accounts open and companies Registered before I had even had my first meeting.

The checklists aren't going to be the same for everyone, but getting the pilot-version of a product/service out there turned out to be way more important to figuring out what the actual business is than the peripheral admin tasks.

& the admin is important! Don't take money without tracking it! But like, I wasn't even sure what the business WAS and now that I've got three months under my belt of doing it, the website I had initially thought I was going to build looks a little different!

The best feedback will come from the actual experience. Understanding myself and expanding the offerings naturally based on what people were interested in/requested has been a huge boon in terms of giving the people what THEY want.

This company isn't about me, it's about figuring out what's most helpful for me to do FOR MY CLIENTS. If they want resources, I should make them. If they want a digital co-facilitator to be there during workshops, I can be that, for sure. If they want me to figure out ways for them to subtly nudge their boss towards better facilitation habits I'll write them a whole article about it.

In order to see what sticks, we must first fling the pasta at the ceiling.

#3 - It's Not Easy For Anyone

There's been this nasty tendency I have to assume that things are easy for other people but difficult for me and then I end up resenting it both being difficult and other people for being "naturally better" at it.

It's one of those completely mental pitfalls that I got in the habit of falling into over the years when things were difficult as a way to alleviate my own feelings of guilt/shame around not Being Good at something (especially if I have to work really hard to improve a skill). It's unhealthy and it's both like...mean and untrue.

It's mean to assume that other people aren't just...trying harder than I am. It's untrue that if I tried hard I wouldn't improve. The thing is, improvement is difficult and humbling and I was avoiding "feeling bad" about myself for a long time because idk I was fucking up the definition of healing and also focusing way too much on myself rather than tuning in to others and what they need and how they were operating through their lives.

The guilt/shame I felt for so long was so overwhelming that I started to combat it by trying to interact with it combatively so that I could think of myself in a static sense as a "good person" but the fact is, it's my actions on a daily basis that I can evaluate and not this like overall identity I've got cooked up in my brain that might have some truths but will mostly just make me feel defensive and unhealthily protective of my past-self. Not my past-actions! But who I thought I was at the time.

Anyway, realizing that everyone who is out here trying is succeeding in their own ways (even if it's not the ways they originally intended or thought they would) has been a really cool perspective to gain. I'm not owed anything by anyone and I have to do my best to make the most of the opportunities that come my way.

Which includes learning how to actually fucking network and respond to emails within a polite time-frame and not make promises that I don't want to keep because it's actually really annoying to commit to shit business-wise that's technically an over-deliver but will make me feel pressured/guilty whenever I see it on my to-do list. Like say yes but also sometimes learn how to say no or "I actually charge ___ for that service if you're interested" but boundaries ARE hard and they are a skill and I'm not great at enforcing them when I'm in the middle of a conversation because I tend to get ahead of myself.

But I'm the only one looking out for me in this company so I better get better at it!

It's not easy, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. It just means it (like everything for everyone) takes work.

Okay! That's my self-indulgent spiel about what I've come to understanding in new ways the last three months. Did I end up finishing this blog mostly because I have some emails I should be sending but I'm not exactly sure how to word my responses and therefore am procrastinating?

You BET!

But idk this feels like a better use of time than my other favorite form of procrastination where I sit down and play Red Dead Redemption on Live so that I can do fun target racing on digital horseback. Y'know?

So. I've started a thing, we'll see how it goes, I'm trying not to fall into sheer panic/terror at the thought of being actually responsible for myself and caring about the outcomes of my daily actions and getting over the habit of saying "I'll do that later" or "that'll only take me x amount of time so I can put it off for now" because AAAHHH no I won't and also yeah babe everything takes time which is why it's important to use time wisely.

Anyway. In the midst of all of this I've somehow managed to stay caught up on Love Island USA a show I have many thoughts on but would like to just say: we gotta start casting mid 30's millenials for dating shows I have 0.00 interest in these incel-lite 24 year olds talking about "body count" and declaring they're "high value individuals" and they all speak to each other like they're leaving instagram comments just absolutely at each other and not to/with each other. It's weird! But all reality tv is now just Influencer Tryouts and like YAWN omg influencers are the most boring people to watch navigate the world because they're so inauthentic in how they carry themselves!! Because they're not a person they're A Brand & A Person combined and in captialism the brand half is more important to them! Also what is the last book any of these people read in full?

Okay that's it byeeee!