Entrepreneurship Is Metamorphosing Into Something Beautiful

Your brain tends to wander when you’re tending a garden.

I think it’s the quietness of it; there’s not much else for your brain to do but think. You till and manipulate the soil and cut back spent blooms, and your brain has free license to run away with itself.

That’s when my best ideas come to me. They pop up like surprise buds, and my excitement for what they will become increases until I can flesh them out and label them as either a desirable plant to nurture, or a dangerous weed to eradicate.

The idea that has popped up to consume my thoughts these days, as I live among the spent peonies going to seed and the changing hues of the long-since flowered shrubs and the floating butterflies visiting every remaining bloom, is that the way we do business and chase our careers has changed—a theoretic metamorphosis that may permanently alter our very definition of success. This change means that true success doesn’t have to be linear if you don’t want it to be.

And that’s good; I don’t want it to be linear.

The grind

Growing up, working was a way to support my lifestyle. Nice clothes, fancy cocktails (like, a lot of fancy cocktails), and an adorable apartment in the trendy part of town, complete with a working and equally adorable wood burning stove, were all the well earned fruits of my labour.

And that was fine for a while, until my grades started slipping and I couldn’t get out of bed one morning (a wake-up call that scared me to my core).

Work is work; that’s what we’ve always been taught. A job fuels your lifestyle and doesn’t need to be your world, and that’s true — it’s unhealthy to work all the time. Your job can even be something you enjoy, and when I worked in an office later in my career, that was true.

I even enjoyed the commute; there’s a comradeship you feel on the train every day with your fellow office workers, trudging into our respective high rises to ride endless elevators and park behind endless cubicles. A flurry of activity during the lunch hour; walks in pantsuits along the river with colleagues for “creative meetings.” I felt like I was a part of something.

But it also sucked a lot of the time. Supervisors who were unfit for their roles or with whom I butted heads simply for disagreeing on some procedure or other made my day-to-day grind even grindier. Incompetence was a constant nuisance. Then there was the ever-present lure of the corporate ladder and the feeling of being just one of millions of worker bees supporting a high and mighty queen.

So I got to thinking one day as I pruned back my lilac bushes: what if you could capture the beauty of both worlds? The freedom of being home and essentially working for yourself while also enjoying what you do and feeling like you are a part of something bigger than yourself?

Now, that’s an idea that really has something to it.

An entrepreneur’s smoothie

We’re not really in a 9-to-5 mindset anymore, societally. With COVID-19 came the “work from home” era, but it’s occurred to me lately that there’s more to it than just where you park yourself for work every day.

These days, you can make up your own rules—you can have no rules.

I think that’s where the idea of a blend of various working styles came to me—a smoothie made up of working from home, working for others, working in a team or office setting, and working as a solopreneur. A dash of each piece of the pie is more possible post-pandemic than it was before a nasty virus turned us all into hand-sanitizer-obsessed germaphobes.

I guess that’s one point for the pandemic.

I’ve learned a few things during my time off with my kids, during which I thought a lot about what my life would be like when I returned to work. I knew I didn’t want to return to my old job—a government position that, while cushy and stable, didn’t fulfill me. I’d looked at the people working around me back then—some young, some nearing retirement—and realized that I didn’t want to stay there for another couple of decades. The young people mostly jumped ship after a year or two, and the older employees seemed to be either bitter about their situation, or merely passing the time.

When it comes to what I do for a living, I no longer want to do something to just pass the time. Life’s too short.

Solopreneurship

I’ve been writing online for about 3 years.

It’s been rocky. There have been months that were lucrative and months that were modest. Mostly, however, it has been a drop in the bucket, financially. It’s okay—that’s the nature of the beast.

But I’m ready for something bigger.

As my son gets older, he becomes more independent, and that gives me more time to write. While I genuinely love not only being home with him, as well as looking after our new house and making it a cozy home, I still want more. I want to be able to transition back into the working world without having to step out of my slippers, but that doesn’t mean I want to do just one thing.

It’s a matter of quality and volume, and as time goes on, those factors improve. One day, I’d like to be able to write an article a week and spend the majority of my time on my books, but for now, that’s not how the bills get paid.

There’s another part of me, too, that wants something different. I want to be able to write online for myself, but there’s something to the idea of writing content for other people—for websites, businesses, and blogs—that I find appealing.

I’ve been diving into copywriting, and it’s a nice addition to my entrepreneurial arsenal. I’ve also delved into some ghostwriting and freelance work, and the variety of the work I’ve been doing of late has been not only more interesting, but significantly more lucrative.

A changed world

It’s all about bending with the changing tide.

Our society, especially within the working world, looks so different than it did a few short years ago. Most people I knew made the trip into their respective offices every day, complaining on social media about the traffic that morning or the frustration that came after spilling their coffee all over their white button-down the moment they sat in their cubicles.

There were office politics and watercooler gossip sessions and the typical day-to-day meanderings of regular people doing regular things. Now, work is anything but regular, and the majority of those people now work in sweatpants from the comfort of their own homes, many with flexible hours and very different jobs than those they left behind in the Great Resignation era.

The world has changed, and with that, I can’t fathom returning to an office—but there’s something to working with a team that I think I’ve missed more than I thought I did.

I’m now also seeking part-time work for a marketing firm or other company that brings it all together, and I hope to achieve that perfect trifecta of employment: solopreneurship, working with a team, and creative, flexible office work.

Plant the seeds of your own future

It’s taken a ridiculous amount of time to reach this stage in my life, but I’m not sorry about that; it’s been educational. Through everything I’ve learned, I think the most important takeaway is this: it’s possible to craft your own future. This has always been true—entrepreneurs have been making their own rules for decades—but it’s easier to create now. It’s easier to distribute and grow and build anything you put your mind to.

These thoughts billowed up while I was tending to my garden, and trust me: I’m no green thumb. It’s taken time to learn how to not kill every plant I touch, and it’s taken a lot of research and effort to learn how to make those plants grow and thrive. I think the same can be said for your career.

It takes time and research and an awful lot of soul-searching, but ultimately it involves tapping into your budding creativity and patching together the kind of future you want. It’s a metamorphosis in its own right.

And I think that’s kind of beautiful.

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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

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