I’ve thought for a while now about how I should start out my first blog here at my new home, Inkwell Content.
Should I dive deep into how a six-month contract at a content marketing agency in Sydney turned into five years Down Under?
Should I write about why I left agency life behind after ten years?
Should I talk about why I dyed my hair lavender, hopped on a plane, and spent six weeks in rural Maine the day after I left my job?
But I want this first blog to be an example of the kind of content you can expect from me, and that means I need to give you something useful, interesting, and honest. So if you want the details on the personal stuff, let’s have a coffee or beer.
Likewise, if you want to know more about Inkwell Content, you can check out my content marketing services pages here:
Instead of talking about me, I’m going to take a reflective approach, and talk about some of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the last decade in the “traditional working world.” I’ll come back to this post again, in one year—I’ve asked Siri to remind me—and see how many of these lessons hold up in the freelance world.
For now, here are the top lessons I’ve learned that have helped me take the big, scary step toward quitting my job and becoming a freelance writer.
Grudges will kill your career before it starts
This lesson took me far too long to learn, but since I’ve given up on holding grudges, my working life (and personal life, for that matter) has gotten a hell of a lot easier.
If you’ve been working for long, you know there are plenty of people who make a sport out of workplace grudges. Perhaps you do yourself—it’s hard not to. Like family, we don’t get to choose our colleagues, and sometimes they can do things that are absolutely infuriating. It’s natural to want to distance yourself from these people or use passive aggression to make them pay. But this is far more likely to end up hurting you rather than them.
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Holding grudges causes a few things to happen:
- Along with a heaping serving of anger and frustration, you get side dishes of stress and anxiety.
- You chip away at your own empathy; being empathetic is a valuable and rare personality trait that can take you places.
- You eliminate any chance of working with someone, even if they vastly improve over time.
And trust me, people do improve over time. In fact, if I met a version of myself from 10 years ago, when I first started my content marketing journey, I’d probably want to hold a grudge against him. But there are plenty of people who have irked me once or twice in the past, who are now members of the network I rely on. If I’d held a grudge against them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
I am not saying you shouldn’t spend time analyzing people’s behaviors and personality traits; in fact, you should gather that information to determine how to work and communicate with them. If a person is chronically late, for example, you may want to be more firm with deadlines or give them more flexibility to choose their own deadlines. And certainly, if a person demonstrates toxic working behavior like cruelty or condescension, then cutting them out altogether would be a smart move.
But holding on to things that are petty, passed, or pointless is an exercise in wasting time.
Most people hate small talk
If you ask 5,000 people whether they enjoy small talk, my guess is around 4,999 would say no. Small talk is why people dread everything from dinner parties to networking events, and I largely feel the same.
Unfortunately, when meeting strangers, some small talk is necessary. It’s virtually impossible to jump into a conversation without a bit of banal banter—without it you can easily come off as rude, nosey, or socially awkward.
I have discovered, however, that most people only engage in excessive small talk because they feel like it’s expected. Likewise, if you can find a way to get past it pretty quickly, your conversation partner(s) will appreciate it.
There are a few tactics I use to get past this small stuff ASAP:
Ask about them. The easiest subject to talk about is yourself, so give your conversation partner the opportunity to do so. In a professional setting, this may mean doing some research about their business and interests to use as a conversation point. But be careful not to come off as creepy, like you know too much about a person you just met. If you are meeting someone without time to prepare, then simply ask them an interesting question about themselves. “What’s your favorite part about your job?” is my go-to question.
State your intentions early. Small talk will go on as long as it’s allowed, so stop it in its tracks by stating, early on, what your intentions are. Once the conversation about the weather is over, start right in with, “Anyway, I’m here to talk about the blog on your site. I noticed you haven’t updated in a while…”
Keep yourself updated and informed. The more interesting topics you have up your sleeve, the easier you’ll be able to insert these into conversations and steer the dialogue to something deeper and more meaningful. Keep up on the news, either in your industry or in the world, or memorize a few relevant and interesting facts and statistics. Use these as your tools to move the discussion somewhere you want it to be.
You become an expert without realizing it
Here’s the textbook definition of an expert:
“A person who is very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area.”
That’s it. Have you ever noticed how many “experts” there are in your LinkedIn network? The word is thrown around a lot, because there is no test you have to pass to be considered an expert in your industry.
I was fortunate enough to come out of college when content marketing was still in its infancy. And boy, was it an ugly newborn. Despite the fact that I’d spent four years at Emerson, where I’d given campus tours about our marketing department, I’d never heard the word “content” as we know it today until I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed post-grad myself. I didn’t plan to become an expert in this field, but here I am, ten years later.
I do consider myself an expert now, though I honestly didn’t see it coming. Our current working world moves so quickly and changes so drastically that there’s a good chance you’ll become an expert in something that doesn’t yet exist.
Organization is everything
I’ve met a lot—and I mean a lot—of disorganized people in my ten years in agency world. Looking back, I could divide my colleagues into two groups: the disorganized, and those driven crazy by the disorganized.
If you know me, you know I’ll interrogate things that annoy me, which means I’ve spent some time with my less-organized (but still lovely) colleagues, asking them why they enjoy living in a world of chaos and disarray.
More often than not, they don’t consider themselves disorganized. Even those who eventually have an awakening feel overwhelmed by the work it takes to get organized.
From my view, being organized is a way to relieve stress and anxiety, but even better, it’s a great way to cut back on the work you have to do. Yes, being organized takes some work up front. You have to create lists and templates and processes that can feel as though they’re dragging you down.
A good process should make life easier in the long run, even if it takes time in the short term. In fact, being organized is often just a classy way of being lazy. With strong processes in place and good organization, you save the valuable time you would have spent hunting down that random email you archived or that old Word document you misplaced.
Identify your inner saboteur and kill them
Now comes the part of the blog where I talk about Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Stick with me, even if you’re not a fan.
If you aren’t familiar, the show is about a bunch of drag queens competing, under the guidance of the famous Ru Paul. Like any reality show, there are some incredible talents, and some really bad, over-produced Inspirational Moments®️.
One thing that has stuck with me, though, is when Ru talks about overcoming your “inner saboteur.”
In Ru’s world, competitors usually need to overcome a voice that’s holding them back from wearing a bolder wig, or doing something weird and spooky with their makeup.
Inner saboteurs are real, though, and they are a big obstacle to achieving your professional dreams. Identifying yours, and killing them, can make a huge difference.
My own inner saboteur took a few different forms.
I suffered from imposter syndrome, routinely trusting poor leadership in my jobs when I would have been better trusting my own judgment instead.
I feared numbers and mathematics, and cowered away from them, which is a problem when you have to manage budgets and your own finances.
I also overcame the inner saboteur of apathy—a common villain among people who aren’t in love with their day jobs.
Some of these inner saboteurs took longer than others to identify and exterminate. I don’t think I could have overcome my imposter syndrome alone—I needed examples of good leaders and poor leaders to figure out my place.
Numbers and mathematics, not surprisingly, took a more rigid approach. Hard lessons with colleagues on designing spreadsheets, plus a good financial advisor and business advisor in my corner, helped me get over my fear (but not my reliance on calculators).
Apathy was the hardest to kill , and I think I may have only slaughtered this one a few weeks ago. Unchaining myself from my desk has been by far the most revitalizing move I’ve made in the last few years.
Now that I’m doing something I love, people keep telling me I look well rested or younger. Both are backhanded compliments, for sure, but I appreciate them, because I feel it too. When I open up my laptop for a few hours of work, I feel genuinely excited to start, and when it comes time to close out, I don’t want to stop. I haven’t felt that in years, and I can’t wait to spend this energy with new clients, adventures, and lessons.
So that’s it for now. This entry is probably the most touchy-feely I’ll ever get. From now on, I’ll use this blog to bring you content marketing insights and advice, tips for freelance writers, and only a little bit of sass. Maybe.
