A few weeks ago, I watched an interview with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame. When he first started out, he met a lot of people who said they were giving their creative dream a shot for a year. If they didn’t have any success in a year, then they would pack up and go home. “That was amazing to me,” he said. “It takes so much longer than a year to realize a dream.”
This is exactly the reason I’m working on a new book, Your Second Step. You’ve taken your first step – you’ve identified your dream and you’ve started working on it – maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Maybe you haven’t seen the success you’d hoped for in the timeline you planned. So should you pack it in? Should you start to work on something else and come back to it later? In other words, should you hedge your bets?
Put aside any disappointment. Go back to the dream itself. Does it still matter to you? If the answer is yes, then don’t hedge and don’t give up. Commit. Double down. Invest more time and more energy, not less. Be Yoda. Don’t try. Do. And keep doing. Don’t back down now. You’re closer to your dream than you think.
When someone asks me who or what I’m trying to be, I don’t give them an occupation. I tell them I’m trying to be someone who the younger me would be proud of. When I was a little girl, I would look to adults I admired: authors, scientists, teachers, teachers, and other people doing inspiring work around the world. I couldn’t wait to be an adult so that I could get out into the world and make some kind of contribution.
In the shuffle of everyday adult life, this kind of memory can get lost. That little kid is still inside me somewhere, still inspired by these same people for these same reasons. The question I think about all the time is if the younger me would be inspired by the me of today. When I have a decision to make, especially when the problem is muddy and there is no clear answer, I think about younger me a lot. I try to imagine how she would see the problem that adult me faces. No doubt, it would be very black and white to her. And then I make the choice she’d admire, the choice she’d be proud of. She’s my barometer for doing the right thing.
“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.” ~ Vicki Robin
Wealth is the ability to make a living while we make a life. I was on my way to a client meeting last week and I took a stroll down 47th Street, Jeweler’s Row. Sparkly baubles in every window caught my eye. Plenty of shop owners were out on the street, trying to entice me to come inside and take a look around. I just smiled, waved, and moved on. I have all the wealth I need, no bling required.
I’m not rich. Far from it. I still have to be careful with my money as I always have to have a stash set aside in case I have a slow month, a client who doesn’t pay on time, or a sizable unexpected expense. Being a business owner is a balancing act financially, emotionally, and mentally. It’s also an amazing gift to have the freedom of place and space.
On Friday morning, Phin and I took a long trot through Central Park, over to the Met, and then up 5th Avenue. The weather was perfect and we both needed an extra dose of fresh air. As I visited the street artists who set up shop outside the Met, I realized how lucky I am. A little over a year ago, I would have spent my mornings rushing through Phin’s walk, rushing through my morning routine, rushing to the train, and then rushing into my very grey office to work that lacked inspiration.
On most mornings now I take a long walk early in the morning without my watch, and return home to work in a sun-filled apartment with trees outside my window and Pandora playing my favorite music. This isn’t to say my work life is perfect. I hustle, pitch, and work very late most evenings. I sometimes have to do work I don’t necessarily like to make it possible to do other work that I love. For example, I spent 9 hours on PowerPoint yesterday for a client project due this week, but today I’ll be working on the final rewrites for the next draft of my first full-length play. That is balance.
What I do have is enough: enough work I love and enough time to appreciate just how lucky I am to have made this leap. I live in a great apartment in a great neighborhood in a great city (with a great little dog). I get to see my friends and family much more than I ever have before. I’m happier and healthier than I’ve ever been. My life, exactly as it is right now, is enough. I am wealthy.
To move ahead, an arrow must first be drawn backward. So it is for us, too. We take one step forward and two steps back. We feel like we are in a perpetual game of catch up, make ends meet, and CYR (cover your rent). I hear you. I live it, too. For every success I’ve ever had, the have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of strike outs. Sometimes I’ve even gotten up to bat to find out that the whole game was cancelled and everyone heard the news except me.
It takes a certain resilience, a certain beautiful brand of lunacy, to carve our own paths, to buck convention, to make the career we want rather than take a job someone else creates. It is a grind, and a grind is what makes diamonds brilliant; it’s what turns wheat into flour that makes bread; it’s what helps aged spices release their gift of fragrance and flavor. The grind is necessary.
We can’t get ahead without first being behind. We can’t give the best that we have without first undergoing some refinement. Our refinement as entrepreneurs is rejection. Rejection shows us in no uncertain terms what really matters to us, and more importantly it shows us what we’re made of, just how strong we really are.
Life is hard in some ways for everyone, and for some of us it’s hard in many ways. We are all battling something, healing from something. We’ve only really got two choices – we can let what happens to us build us up or break us down. I prefer up.
“And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rilke
Questions without clear answers can paralyze us. I’ve wrestled cloudy questions to the ground many times over in an attempt to get answers I thought I needed before I could make a move. I gave up that practice 15 months ago when I left my corporate job to carve a new path of my own design. Now, I have to live the questions, answers or not.
How I made my home in New York City
I didn’t know if I should act on my idea to leave New York behind and move to California so I tried out California for 2 months without giving up my place in New York. I couldn’t just toss the question around in my mind and wait for an answer. I had to try California, I had to live the question, to find my answer. And the answer was New York.
How I started my own company
I didn’t know if I could make a living independent of a company that someone else designed. Like the California question, I kicked the tires on entrepreneurship as long as I could. To find out if it suits me, I needed to give it a go, live it. I’m still trying it; still living it. The answer is becoming clearer, but I’ve got some room to go yet. That’s how I started Chasing Down the Muse.
How I decided to follow my dream of being a writer
I don’t know if I can make a living as a writer. I’ve made part of my living as a writer for a while, but I don’t know if I can fully support myself with my tightly honed abilities to turn a phrase and meet a tight deadline. That question isn’t going to answer itself. There’s no way to know until I try. So I’m rolling the dice, taking a seat at the table, and living that question every day. The cloud cover will eventually break and I’ll have my answer. All I can do now is play it as it lies. Read about my writing by clicking here.
Christa Avampato 