Hey everyone,
I’ve been saying for years that I want to have more fun in my business, that it’s pointless to be self-employed if you’re just going to repeat the same shitty patterns that you fell into when you were in a full-time job, and that if you feel imprisoned by your clients and your work, then what is even the point of all of this?
I’m pleased to say that I’m having more fun in my business than ever before and that every day, decision-making around the writing and the selling gets easier and easier. Money was never my highest value, but I often made logical and sensible decisions based on what would be the most profitable thing to do in my business, even if it sometimes made me feel like shit.
I don’t live like that anymore.
Much like Marie Kondo, I’ve taken to asking, “Does this bring me joy?” If yes, keep it, value it, do more of it. If not, it’s time to thank it and let it go.
I’m not even joking. I’m no longer available to give my time, my energy, and my efforts to projects, people, and situations that do not bring me joy and do not aid in my growth and learning. I have grown up and lived in too many abusive environments to not appreciate that the freedom and agency I now have over my life is also a responsibility to enjoy it and to live it to my highest potential.
To show my son that there is another way.
I cannot teach it if I don’t live it.
The world wants my son to know that he needs to have a job, backup options, enough education that if his career path of YouTube gamer or standup comedian doesn’t pan out, he can find something “sensible” to pay the bills.
I want my son to know that this is scarcity thinking and that scarcity thinking leads to a life of scarcity.
I want my son to know that while I didn’t know a single self-made millionaire growing up, I know several now, that I had a Zoom call with one just last night and that he was able to spend half an hour mentoring me free of charge because my success in my own business would mean more to him than the money I’d pay him for his advice. That this kindness to me, and many other entrepreneurs this man supports and advises, is only possible because he has money (and a good heart), and that if he were struggling to pay his bills, all the good he could do in the world would not be possible.
I want my son to know that money is not inherently good or bad.
That being creative enables you to make more, not less, of it.
That the question should never be “How do I pay my bills?” but “How do I want to spend my days?”
That he may still have to work shitty jobs and take on low-paying work to get to his dreams, but as long as his focus is on loving his life and not just paying bills, his creativity, his discipline, and his good instinct will lead him there.
I don’t send my son to good schools so that he can be trained in how to become a good little employee.
I send him to good schools so that he can learn how to never become one. (Unless working for someone else aligns with the dreams he has for his life.)
The best decision I ever made in my career was turning down an offer to become the editor of a national magazine at age 22 and instead, go traveling around the country in pursuit of a freelance journalism career. I didn’t even tell anyone about the offer because I knew no one in my life would understand why accepting that offer would have gone against everything I believed and wanted.
My corporate bosses offered me a promotion and three times my salary, and were horrified when I handed in my resignation a week later.
But I knew, even at age 22, that the wrong kind of growth would be a trap that I would spend the rest of my life trying to fight my way out of.
Instead, I chased the career that I wanted, that I knew I could love.
It hasn’t been easy. Fuck, some weeks and months, it’s been utterly, insanely hard.
I’d do it all over again in a second, because while the journey may have its overwhelming ups and heartbreaking downs, it has allowed me to build a life on my terms, with belief systems that work for, and not against, me.
It is why I am here, day after day, talking about it with you.
This is not just a career we’re building here, but a life. And I want you to know that yours can, and should, always belong to you.
It is what I always believed about my freelancing, and it is what I now choose to believe about my publishing career.
We became writers so that we could find creativity, freedom, and control in our days. Don’t let your creativity become slave to society’s notions of success and turn into yet another day job that you struggle through to pay the bills.
Cheers,
Natasha