Entrepreneurial Roots

Entrepreneurial Roots

Entrepreneurial Roots

I’ve never been much of a salesperson. I’m quiet, not pushy, and if someone declines politely I generally never ask them again. However, for most of my childhood I didn’t have an allowance, and for a good portion of my adulthood I didn’t have a full-time job, so when it comes to making money, I’ve learned to be creative. Here are a few things I’ve done over the years:

Household Chores

My siblings and I each had our own list of chores growing up, but there were a few things we could do above and beyond those to earn cash. For a bit, it was ironing. I could iron 12 pieces of clothing for a dollar. Needless to say, I did not get rich off this.

Bread Business

While I’ve never been a great cook, baking has always come easily to me, so in high school I started selling bread to earn a little cash. I sold a bit to people at church, but the majority to my dad’s coworkers. I would spend most of a day baking, and Dad would cart the boxes into his office and come back with the money I’d earned – usually around $20 after I’d paid my parents back for ingredients. In retrospect, I should have raised my prices, since the same people were going to buy a loaf or two regardless if they were $2 or $4.

Selling on eBay and Amazon

Pretty self-explanatory. I dealt mostly in used books, so I generally didn’t make much.

Online Research

This is one clear case where more assertiveness could have led me down a completely different path in life. I did some work online for a recruiting company – mostly resume mining and database cleanup. A coworker offered to train me to be a recruiter, but barely out of high school me was terrified of talking on the phone, especially to strangers. A more writing-based version of recruiting may have suited me, but I let the opportunity pass by and gradually they needed less and less of my help.

Book Reviews and Articles

Thanks to some review opportunities at my local bookstore, I began reviewing books for a couple small magazines. The pay was generally a free book, but the magazine connections did lead to a few articles that actually paid cash. I also started a book blog, and later a TV blog, and made a few pennies in Google Adsense revenue.

Database Work

One of the websites for which I reviewed needed help entering book information into their website database. The owner received the first chapters of books in Microsoft Word from the publishers, and needed help formatting each one for the web. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first coding job, as I manually inserted HTML tags throughout the text before uploading it and some metadata to the database. And this and my resume mining job were my first taste of Virtual Assistant work – though I don’t think the term had gained traction at that point.

Magazine Writing

My experience and connections in the book industry led to one of my most lucrative ventures to date – writing for an online magazine as a contributing editor. I was in charge of two different genres, and I interviewed authors via phone or email and created an article from the interview. It was awesome getting to talk with some of my favorite authors, and I would generally try to read some books by the authors I didn’t know before the interviews. I also gathered industry news into another column, and several times was asked to write an additional feature piece.

Avon

I sold Avon for a while in my early 20s, then stopped since I wasn’t making money with it. Some coworkers encouraged me to sign up again more than 3 years ago, and I’m still selling it. Most of what I make is due to one steady customer, so if they stopped purchasing, I likely wouldn’t make a profit and discontinue selling it. As it is, I make a little for my travel fund and get clothes and beauty products at a discount.

 

What jobs have you done in the past to earn money? Can you use the skills you’ve learned from them to help create a location-independent business for yourself?

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Language Learning

Language Learning

Language Learning

One consideration when traveling to a different country is that the people of that country may not speak the same language as you. As an English speaker, I am fortunate to know a language spoken in many parts of the world. But even if most of people you encounter on a journey know your native language, it’s helpful to at least learn a few words in the local language to be considerate and in case you come across someone who doesn’t speak your language.

It’s also good to invest in learning at least one other language. While it doesn’t give enough training to make you fluent in a language, Duolingo is a great way to start learning one. You can even try out several different languages if you’re unsure which one you want to learn.

I have been learning German with Duolingo for almost a year now. I have studied it quite casually, taking just a couple minutes a day, and I now know over a thousand words.

I chose German because of my family history. Most of my heritage is Germanic – from Germany to Prussia to Bavaria to Switzerland. My dad’s family were among early colonists to Pennsylvania in the 1700s, and my mom’s family immigrated to the US in the 1800s.

And it just so happens that I will be visiting Germany for the first time on my next trip! Germany is also one of the European countries more friendly to creative freelancers from the US, and offers a freelancer work visa.

Do you speak more than one language? What other languages do you know or want to learn? Do you have any special reason for learning that language?

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BB Design Skills Course: Module 4

BB Design Skills Course: Module 4

BB Design Skills Course: Module 4

Module 4 of the Bucketlist Bombshells Design Skills course introduces students to logo design. This is the module I was most excited about while I was considering purchasing these courses, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

This module consists of 7 videos for well over an hour of instruction. It starts off with an introduction to logo design, then provides several tutorials on how to find fonts and colors for your logos.

I wish that Cassie had explained a bit more about font permissions for students that might not be aware of the differences. She downloaded a free font in the tutorial but didn’t mention that it was for personal use only and therefore would need to be purchased for client projects. This is especially important in logo design. Also, the font installation instructions only applied to Macs, so they might be confusing to PC users unfamiliar with the differences.

After that, there were two longer videos where Cassie demonstrated her exact process for creating both a simple and a more advanced logo. It was very cool to see her turn some sketches into a full-fledged logo. Her process was truncated a bit for the tutorial, as she generally tries out more options and gives clients a choice between several variations.

I was hoping that the advanced logo would have a bit more icon creation instead of just adding ornamentation to a simple logo. I wanted to see more of how Cassie used the various drawing tools in Illustrator, and it would have been also neat to see some text manipulation. In future updates of this course, it would also be helpful for students to hear some of the thought process behind the sketched ideas and how Cassie narrows down her selections before presenting to the client.

Some of the super helpful takeaways I got from this module:

1. Always design in black and white first before adding color. That helps you see if a design can stand on its own. Cassie even presents the black and white logos to clients first so they won’t be distracted

2. Never throw anything away as you’re designing! Just drag it off to the side so you can refer to it later if needed.

3. Textures can add beauty to a font or image.

4. Walk away from your work and come back to it later. You’ll see things you missed and get a better feel if the design is actually working.

5. You don’t have to be great at sketching to be a great designer.

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Do One

Do One

Do One

About a month ago, I received an article in my inbox that stuck with me. Paul Jarvis referenced the iconic John Hopkins teaching method of “See one, do one, teach one”, and explained that most people are too quick to pass over the middle step – do one. He noted that it’s especially visible within the booming online courses industry, where people learn something new and sometimes immediately churn out a course of their own on the subject.

It caught my attention because I love to share new knowledge I’ve gained, and I was trying to figure out if I could create my own course based on what I know. My brain is stuffed full of all sorts of things, but it was hard for me to come up with something that people would actually pay me to teach. I thought perhaps it was a lack of confidence in my own abilities, but in fact, it was a lack of experience (a la my last post, Confidence and Courage).

I’ve never been much of a doer. As a print learner, I grasped things best by reading them passively. I shared them with others via writing. It means I generally do well with text-based things. But if something doesn’t have the thrill of learning something new, or the thrill of helping someone figure something out, I lose interest. Which is why I can be very smart but also very insecure about my abilities.

So, right now I’m trying to work on the doing part. It’s why I’ve committed to writing a blog post every day in May. It’s why I’ve set aside the idea of creating a course, for now at least. It’s why I’m taking these skills courses – even though more learning fits in the “see one” box, all the mini projects and the whole setup of a service-based business is about doing.

Yes, doing is the boring bit of the journey that most people skip over. ***insert training montage here*** But doing is going to give me the confidence to get to the exciting part!

What is something you need more practice doing?

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Confidence and Courage

Confidence and Courage

Confidence and Courage

As part of their 7-day challenge, Bucketlist Bombshells founders Cassie and Shay recently shared a live video discussing confidence and courage (you can watch a replay within the private and free to join Facebook group, Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe).

They described confidence as coming from experience. You can be confident in your ability to do something when you’ve done it before. I absolutely love that. This view of confidence also explains why confident people aren’t as fazed by setbacks. If you are baking bread and have done a decent job at it 3 times, but the 4th time it flops, you don’t consider yourself a failure at baking! You try to figure out what you did differently this time or what outside circumstances affected the outcome.

This also means that when you are doing something new, you aren’t supposed to feel confident about it! You don’t have the experience to give you the confidence yet! For something new, what you need is courage. Courage to step out and take the risk of failing so that you can gain experience. Because if you don’t try something new, you will only have the chance to be confident in the things you are doing now.

So what do you want to be confident about? Traveling to a different country? Working with a client? Giving a public speech? Leave your answer in the comments!

But what if you don’t have the courage to make that leap into doing the thing you want to be confident about? Here’s a secret – your confidence doesn’t have to come from exact experiences. You can “borrow” confidence from related experiences, add in a little courage, and move closer to your goal!

That’s what I’m doing with travel. I traveled with friends to NYC and ended up being the person who figured out how to navigate the city, which gave me confidence for other large English-speaking cities. So I added that confidence to some courage – courage to try solo travel and international travel. Now I’m taking the confidence I’ve gained from my trip to the UK and adding a little courage to visit Germany and France!

While breaking down leaps of faith into smaller steps can be helpful, don’t use the steps as an excuse. If you keep doing similar things to build experience/confidence, but there is no courage involved, you are falling into a rut. Sometimes you need to jump.

Action is the key principle here. Look at where you want to be. Can you leap there now with the courage you possess, or do you need more confidence/experience? If you can, leap. If not, take a smaller step of courage to something that will build your experience, give you confidence, and set you up for an even greater jump.

As one of my favorite movies says: “Keep Moving Forward!”

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