Next weekend is my 25th birthday (!), so I’m going to write two posts about it. For the first one, I wanted to reflect on the lessons I have learned so far in life–especially things that have been driven home to me in the past year.
Expectations vs. Reality
I used to think that my mid-20s would look like this: moving up the career ladder, living in an apartment, traveling the world, staying out late with my copious friends (ha!) and y’know, maybe I’d have a boyfriend. I thought I’d be a different person than I was as a teenager.
Here’s what it looks like instead: I’m married with a baby, living in a house five minutes from my mom’s, staying at home and pursuing my creative interests in my free time. I don’t travel much at the moment and I’m still a homebody with a few close friends. To teenage Claire’s dismay, I’m exactly the same person as I was 10 years ago–I’m just not ashamed of being unconventional anymore.
Life worked out much differently than I planned. And often I feel like my real life, the one where I’m content with who I am and unashamed of chasing what I really want out of life, is just beginning. At 25! I guess I take after my parents, who both started completely new careers and businesses in their 40s/50s. Never stop growing, right?
Here are the Life Lessons I’ve Learned at 25…
Focus, focus, focus.
Most of us have a million ideas for projects we’d like to start–but we also already have pretty full schedules of commitments between work, family, our social lives and more. The thing that sets successful people apart from the rest isn’t their ideas; it’s that they pick one or two goals and really chase them, instead of waffling back and forth between several. Pick a goal and stop worrying about whether or not it’s the right one. The most important of the life lessons… Just do it, as Nike says!
Doing things consistently is better than doing them perfectly.
Practice is how you improve at things, not stressing over every last detail and giving up because things aren’t exactly as they should be.
For example, every time I shoot a recipe, I dislike my photos. They are too dark, too gray, the prop is .0001cm too far to the left, there is a streak on the plate, blah. But nowadays, instead of deleting those photos and giving up, I’ll grit my teeth, publish and submit those recipes to sharing sites. And guess what? People pin my recipes, click through to them, and they’re accepted by foodgawker and others. Take a deep breath and share your imperfect work–you are truly your own worst critic.
Your success or failure is not a reflection on you as a person. Divorce your work from your self-esteem.
I always used to feel like a failure when I submitted a photo to foodgawker and it was rejected (for the record, my photos were rejected seven times before I got one accepted!). The cycle was: I would try, and fail, and give up for a couple more months because I’d think: I’m just not good enough. I felt like the rejections were a reflection on me and my creativity and talent. But that isn’t true. It’s a damn photo of muffins for crying out loud–get it together, Claire!
Let criticism inspire you and more importantly, know that it doesn’t mean you are insufficient, merely your work is.
Why not you?
Let me tell you something about myself: I would love to be a freelance photographer and digital marketer, in addition to running this blog, once my kid(s) are older and more self-sufficient. There, I said it out loud.
At the end of 2013, I was on winter break after my first trimester of college. I went out with some friends who recommended that I check out foodgawker since I love to cook. Foodgawker introduced me to blogs and I started following my first blog, my friend Kristy’s, in 2014.
But she writes about her life too, not just food, and what she does for a living intrigued me. Digital marketing was a fascinating yet mysterious concept to me, as someone with their head stuck in very theoretical, not-real-world-applicable college textbooks 24/7.
Over the next few years, I started a blog and read about topics related to content creation, social media management, and more in my free time. I interned at a nonprofit one summer working on member communications (essentially marketing, but not with profit as the end goal). I enjoyed it and decided it’d be a socially acceptable field to pursue after college. But what I really wanted was to learn more and go it alone, freelance.
Earlier this year, my friend Megan finished a degree in digital marketing and launched her own digital marketing business. (Go, Megan!) Finally, I thought: why not me, too? Why have I held myself back from the things I really want to do? Fear of failure, embarrassment that I didn’t choose the right degree in college, embarrassment that I’m “copying” other people, lack of self-confidence, and now lack of time with a baby… all that be damned.
So I signed up for a class in digital marketing. I squeeze my videos and quizzes and exercises between Kidlet’s feeding sessions and tummy time and doing the laundry. I stopped waiting for the perfect time, stopped doubting that I could do it. I’ve done many hard things in my life–there is no reason not to believe in myself. Why not me?
And if you’ve been putting your life on hold, as I was… why not you?
Mary Oliver asks us in one her poems:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
So tell me, friend: what is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life?