Since the start of the year, I've been on this path of healing and trying to create a more meaningful life for myself.
Healing because I had just gone through my second burnout crisis after a few years in the corporate world and meaningful because although I knew I dedicated and overworked myself to the point of being hospitalized, I couldn't pinpoint a good reason for why I did it.
What was I trying to prove? That I can work non-stop and also worry non-stop about work? That the older generations needed to know that I can take it? That I'm such a good employee that I put myself in that situation? That I'm so intelligent, a problem-solver, and such a special worker that at 20-something years old I had already laid out my whole career in front of me? None of those sounded like good reasons to have a stroke-like burnout crisis, in my opinion.
As I have touched on in this previous post, I started to look for alternatives that seemed and felt like I was not blindly working. I wanted the meaning of my work to be more than just being able to pay my bills at the end of the month and maybe save up some cash to travel somewhere in the next one or two years.
That being said, having goals and targets for something I've never done before also seemed a bit unachievable.
That's when my first to-do appeared:
I needed to study and research my options outside corporate life thoroughly enough so that I could begin experimenting.
The only way I could see myself choosing a path that made sense to me was through trial and error. And that also had to be worked on heavily in my mind.
You see, one of the reasons this was hard for me was because in past professional experiences and academic life, making mistakes was abominable. It was something that had to be avoided at all costs at all times. How could I, now, make all those important decisions in my career based on making mistakes, and seeing what my possibilities would look like in my day-to-day? What about the perfect employee narrative I spent years building and trying to show up for?
The thing is, the more I ponder about it, the more it hit me that I never chose to build that narrative, it was built and sold to me as the ultimate professional role I could exercise. So I simply went for it without ever giving it a second thought. And then, my first goal came up:
I need to feel accomplished both financially and non-financially.
If money was no object and I simply worked because I liked what I was doing, what would that feel like? How can I bring that into my reality? My second goal came up as a consequence of the line of thought:
I want to like Mondays.
In past job experiences, I've had times where before going to bed on Sunday night, I would wish to have something happen to me, my dog, or my house so I did not have to work the next day. The craziest part was that I would not even pay attention to it, it was automatic and I thought it was normal. When I noticed this pattern, it immediately became a point I needed to change. I needed to like my life, not just my weekends!
Ok, so now I had these two very generic non-financial goals I wanted to achieve but what about money? Was I not going to discuss it with myself? It is a bare necessity after all. So for starters, my goal was quite simple:
Get paid enough so that I could pay all of my bills, have some extra to go out and visit friends and family (at this time and for the past 4 years, I have been living away from my home city), and not have to worry too much about my expenses at the end of the month.
This last goal might seem somewhat contradictory. I just said it didn't make sense for me to work to just pay my bills. And I 100% stand by it. But mind you, I didn't have those other two goals in mind. And they make this simple financial goal make sense. In this frame, money was not going to be the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence.
What I realized I wanted to financially achieve was to live comfortably and not cut off any additional expenses. I wanted to dedicate my day-to-day to building something I poured my heart and soul into, that I was proud of, and that was mine. As a consequence, that labor could provide me with a comfortable and stress-free life (as much as possible, of course). I wanted to develop something that would make me exercise the discipline I learned and value even when I didn't feel like working, but that would also give me the time and resources to appreciate and enjoy my life.
Gaining money and having a corporate title to brag about as its own goal did not make sense to me anymore.
Ok, so now I have 3 goals to chase and 1 to-do item to complete. Let's call those goals my new work core values.
I need to feel accomplished both financially and non-financially.
I want to like Mondays.
Get paid enough so that I could pay all of my bills, have some extra to go out and visit friends and family and not have to worry too much about my expenses at the end of the month.
I need to study and research my options to corporate life thoroughly enough so that I could begin experimenting.
I now know that all my decisions going forward need to align with my 3 core values and that all of them are non-negotiable. So it was time to get to studying.
I spent MANY hours on Youtube, reading multiple blog posts and unfortunately fell hard for the "make-easy-money-online" course-selling gurus (more on that in another post). But something changed within me: It was ok. I was allowing myself to make mistakes. To understand how things worked, how I worked, and what I wanted to learn. That's when I started actually experimenting.
I created accounts on multiple freelancer sites such as Freelancer.com, Fiver, and 99freelas. I started my online shop selling simple Canva templates, I took courses on TikTok ads, Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram), and Google ads. I started my TikTok account and this blog. I dabbled in affiliate marketing. And one thing I'm making sure I'm doing now is taking my time. I no longer want to rush my learning processes, I no longer want to feel guilty for respecting my learning curve and I no longer want to prohibit myself from making mistakes. They are a part of learning and will be part of my success story.
I will eventually revisit these goals and break them up into more actionable and smaller steps in some future posts. I don't have any deeper goals at the moment because well, I'm still gaining knowledge to formulate the next steps.
On that note, I want to finish this post by letting you with this quote that really resonates with this new era of mine:
"The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried"- Stephen McCranie
X.O
IAS
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