Autonomy in how we make money,
Impactful work we enjoy,
On a schedule we choose,
Making plenty of money in the process
Without sacrificing our many passions & creative outlets.
That immediately got me exploring other ways to create freedom in my life and therefore decided to start my first business. I love being a digital nomad 🧳, tiny house lover 🏠, reader 🤓, foodie 🤤, Chicago-style Stepper 💃🏾, and a pursuer of random interests & projects 👩🏾💻 and teaching others how they, too, can use a life vision and organization to pursue all their many passions, dreams & goals!
I’ve grown in wisdom - aka I’ve made tons of mistakes along the way - since 2016 and I’ve learned so much in the process. There’s one lesson, though, that stands out above all the others…
What exactly does that mean? It means that while it was great to “just start”, having a destination is more important than wandering aimlessly and hoping that - by some miracle - things will work out. Once you get started it’s time to circle back around and get strategic! Taking the right actions takes you further than simply doing “more.”
To help you build a life of working less and living more
without being a millionaire, a trust fund kid, or lucky
so you can live your soft life.
I thought I knew what I wanted from life until I got it and realized I hated it. I grew up in a challenged neighborhood and since age 8, I knew I was leaving and never coming back. I just needed to be a good girl, get good grades, graduate high school and college with honors and get a fantastic job.
Like most of us, I thought getting a traditional 9-5, making great money, and buying all the things I wanted = success.
By age 22, my family and all my church-moms were so proud! I was making strides in my career, making good money, and had even bought my first condo. I was successful as far as they were all concerned!
But I felt pigeonholed, boxed in, and unfulfilled — I wasn’t happy.
And I felt a little guilty. I made more money and had more opportunities than others ever had, but I still wanted more for my “great life”.
I was scared to tell my mom I had intentions to give it all up and do something different because I knew I was the embodiment of all my mom wanted for me. But I have a fantastic mom and she encouraged me to pursue each and every dream I could come up with. I didn’t know what “more” looked like, but she was all on board for me to figure it out.
So I went on a literal journey. I sold all my stuff and traveled the world for a couple of years before I realized… I didn’t need more, I just wanted I life I truly enjoyed! And for me, that meant I needed the autonomy to make money on my own terms and have the freedom to pursue all my passions.
💫 I wanted other options to make great money outside of a traditional 9-5.
💫 I wanted work that felt fulfilling, impactful, & allowed me to do something I loved.
💫 I wanted freedom to work & enjoy my fulfilling business from anywhere in the world.
💫 I wanted autonomy to choose my schedule & insert my passions as I saw fit.
💫 Not to mention I wanted the TIME to be able to read a book, daydream, or take a vacation without having to schedule PTO.
💫 And I wanted MONEY to replace and extend my former salary without giving up more time.
It wasn’t about forgoing work completely. I just didn’t want my time, money, & identity to be defined solely around work. There’s more to me than my work & I wanted to live (and work) like it.
I questioned what that looked like and if it was even possible…
Frankly, no one around me was living the life I was seeing in my mind. I had no blueprint to follow because models like the American Dream, Flashy Fashionista, Stay-at-home Mom and my current model of Work-a-holic Dreamer didn’t fit.
If I looked at my desires from a really practical perspective, it seemed like a had some really great ideas but no tangible plan. Did you notice how many bullets I had on that list up there?! If there are only so many hours in a day, how was I going to do all of that without burning out?
All of these desires are a part of me and it wasn’t like I could just pick some and let go of others. It seemed like an impossible mixed bag to account for, but fortunately, I love a good problem, riddle, or challenge to solve!
Lemme say… I’m a COMPLETE proponent of just getting out there and getting started when you don’t know what to do. So, I started researching how people with big dreams and tons of passions do it all. I learned that I needed a better way to map out where I was today and all that I wanted to accomplish in the future because it was like putting a destination in a GPS - it gave me clarity so that I could make better decisions based on my end goal rather than what was going on in my current situation. I could see that it would give me a method for prioritizing and maximizing each action I took so that none of my time, money, or effort was wasted.
As I’m sure you can imagine, that’s easier said than done. It took a lot of time and effort and frankly luck because I finally found a mentor who could explain things to me. The problem is that I knew I need to be organized in my life and in the business I was starting, but I had no real method to do it. This mentor was the first person to help me see that a long-term vision was exactly the tool I needed to create my figurative GPS.
And here’s what I figured out pretty fast: In order to achieve my big dreams, all my goals and even exceed them in life and business, I needed a much deeper level of clarity than I’d ever had before so that I could be strategic about getting it all done.
This led me down a long path of learning how to get a deeper level of clarity. I created vision boards and mind maps; I wrote out my thoughts in dream journals, white boards, and post-it notes. I tried all the planners, all the journals, and all the YouTube videos I could find.
You name it. I’ve probably tried it.
But here’s the thing… Most — basically all —of these strategies failed.
And, by failed, I don’t just mean didn’t make me rich. It cost me time, so, so much energy, & I earned more burnout and little to no money and SPENT way more (books, courses, and software) than the little that I did earn.
Failure after failure, I kept trying to “work smarter, not harder”, kept trying to have a good work/life balance, kept trying to get more clients through my social media, kept tweaking & redesigning my website, and trying again. Because fixing my marketing and building my brand is what all the gurus say I’m supposed to do, right?
Eventually, two things happened:
I grasped the big-picture of how strategy works and how to actually use it to accomplish more even without overworking myself.
I got clarity. Once I focused my life vision (my overall life objective and my why) and learned how to use a strategy for achieving it, my productivity, patience, motivation, and results from adding my travel, being able to work, live, & play all over the world to scaling my business and starting to pay myself and hire help all started to fall into place.
I didn’t need to be a work-a-holic,
I just needed to focus on the right things.
I didn’t need to default to working harder on my marketing & sales,
I needed to have a strategy to prioritize what needed to be accomplished at the right time.
While just getting out there was what I needed to get started,
It was time I get vision and organized because one step in the right direction takes you infinitely closer to your goals than 1,000 steps in the wrong direction.
A few years later, my life is on track to build all my quirky dreams from building a tiny house and workcation-ing in Costa Rica for a year to paying myself and hiring help. I finally have the life I want. I finally feel fulfilled.
Take action, get your life and business organized, and live your own version of freedom & fulfillment.