the quiet advocation for not window-shopping life
How change *really* happens
Make a million dollars this year.
Back in 2018, that was my goal. Lol— I’m so embarrassed to write that. The embarrassment comes from that stale truth that I had never made a dollar working for myself. Me? I worked a corporate day job and commuted 2 hours each day.
AKA I had little time, zero experience, and no idea where to start. And I thought I could make $1 million in year one. That meant making $83,333 that month.
Mental note 1: Stop writing silly things in expensive diaries.
The truth, I got hyped on oversimplified podcasts (you know the type that, in an hour, made the idea of becoming a millionaire as simple as ABC).
It was in this flux of overwhelming inspiration and a crash back down to reality— it was emotional. I spent my car rides thinking this wasn’t how I pictured life working out for me, I’d listen to those podcasts and feel there was an ocean between me and those people. The initial burst of excitement, ‘that could be me!’ soon fizzled out and was replaced with ‘that will never be me’. The result? Get home to slump on the sofa, ready to do it all again tomorrow, my cup filling up with misery.
It was obvious to me that I didn’t want my boss’s life. I didn’t want my boss’s boss’s life or the person above that person’s life. I didn’t want to do it this way, but I had no other way…
This rollercoaster was getting me nowhere. I promised myself that I would do something about it— the trouble was, I didn’t know what.
So I kept writing in journals about my goals. Notebooks and notebooks. Filled with hopes and dreams that I had no idea how to execute. And when nothing ever came from my endless scribbles, I concluded that it was because my scribbles were not detailed enough. Or I wasn’t taking them seriously enough.
I needed more motivation. So at night, I would binge on endless YouTube videos. Over and over, I would watch those videos, staring through the screen to see my reflection on the other side. And then I would journal some more.
James Dyson, famous inventor of all things, namely the cyclonic vacuum, spent 15 years working on 5,126 prototypes that all failed before he made his 5,127th that worked.
Which meant, essentially, he lived in debt (with a young family), failing for years and years before anything came of all his ‘tinkering’. I’ve been listening to his autobiography recently. Bravery —that’s all I can think. Can you imagine having a small family, and going to your essentially your garden shed every day to work on getting a vacuum to suck up dust more effectively? And not failing 500 times, which is every more than a year, day after day of failing. Failing 500 times and then doing that for more than ten years.
It feels pretty unbearable when you can recognise you’re where you don’t want to be, but you don’t know how to get out. Doing anything feels terrifying, total uncharted territory.
My problem? When I really broke it down was that I didn’t dare to start, and I miscalculated what it would take.
I lacked courage & realism, of course, this took years to really cement in my head.
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The truth
The trouble, back then, was that I liked everything and didn’t love anything. I wanted to run a food truck, start a sock business, build a homeware brand, but I also felt passionate about teaching, marketing, and house building. Every time I decided to invest my time in one direction, something happened, and I felt myself swaying again.
So back to the drawing board I went. This time, to design a different type of business. What I hadn’t realised is that window shopping, what you think a career or business might look like, isn’t the same as trying the thing on and seeing how it fits.
This hopping between ideas meant I never spent much time in any. This hop-scotching between business ideas wasn’t because I couldn’t make a decision; it was because, underneath it all, I was scared.
It boiled down to fear. I didn’t want to do the thing to find out I couldn’t do the thing and shatter any self-image of success. I was “planning” convincing myself that I was ‘doing the work’ (even though I really wasn’t), so I could remain blissfully unaware that I was completely incompetent. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
It was a bitter pill that took a lot of water to gulp down (gallons). For months, I avoided it. The good news, though, or at least I’ve found in my life, it’s not something you have to do all in one go.
How change *really* happens
Most things in my life, the things that went on to change my life, actually never felt that big in the moment.
In fact, most big things started really small. The decision to start to be a bit kinder to myself, the decision to wake up 10 minutes early, the decision to put my writing out to the world.
All of those things were the things that led to perhaps the most personal growth I’ve ever experienced, yet in the moment, they felt tiny (and very doable, which is a very important point).
Little shifts
I started writing because it was the first time I felt like I could make sense of the world. It was a way to process my mind.
For a little while, I wrote in documents, then I pressed publish to the world. It was an evolution. I never thought too much about people reading my work—I think mostly because I never expected them to pay much attention.
Instead, I was just focused on what was going on in my mind and what I wanted to say. The irony is that it became my ‘thing’, it became the road, it was the paved word by word. I put the notebooks and did the thing.
Every day, bit by bit, I did more and more. It was a little shift I barely recognised at first, I was too busy writing to notice. And then, 5 years later, it was the habit that shaped me.
Life’s weird like that.
So if you’re in that spot, commitment hopscotch if you will, try putting the planning notebooks away and focusing on one thing. Don’t overthink it too much, just do the thing you feel compelled to do. Do the work. The actual work.
Start there. It might not be your life’s work, you might change your mind, you might go a different direction. But you only learn about a craft, a trade, a career path by being in it. Not by window shopping.
That’s all for today.
Much love,
Eve
Founder - Part-Time Creator Club
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Dude, you are describing me in entirety. This is a great read. Thank you.