Bon Courage

Inspiration, love, work, and friends… all of these come from the least expected places for me.  

I’ve been light on the writing lately, and mostly it’s a side effect of trying to figure out that next thing.  I’ve come to terms with a few things in the past 3 years and they are as follows.

• I really love product development and innovation, and that applies to all products, although the bulk of my experience has been around digital/web/social media.
• I value my vision (literally) more and more each day.
• I still talk to strangers, as my dad had told me to do so when I was a wee one.  And as a result, my life is enriched on a daily basis.
• At times my fear of something is much worse than whatever that thing is.
• The good outweigh the bad if you just look at the situation in the right way.

My move back to NYC from San Francisco, London, and China (all at once) has taken a toll.  After 2 months, I am finally settled, living wise.  Work wise, I’ve fielded numerous coffees, interviews, projects that I am on the verge of getting, only to find that funding has been halted.  Frustrating frustrating few months and yet, I am happy here in NYC.  Happy to meet wonderful new people, continue relationships from 11 years ago (when I’d lived here last), and feel very very fortunate to have been introduced in to founders of brands and organizations that I have admired since I was a child.  For all the love and support of the NYC crew, I am grateful.

But this post isn’t really so much about that as it is about another post.  I’d bought “The Whuffie Factor” when it first came out, had heard @missrouge speak at SXSW but have never met her.  I just checked out her blog entry here, which talks about her recent move to Montreal.  I have some loose plans to move to Vancouver in the future so her perspective on Canada is particularly interesting.

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2009/09/new-perspective/

I’m tempted to quote the whole blog post but I won’t, it would be a bit obnoxious.  Please do go read it.  Quite simply though, this one snippet from Tara sums it up nicely:

“In under two months, I’ve stopped being so stressed, I feel less obligation, more ready to work on what’s important rather than what I need to do to prove myself”

Amen sista.  Personally I find it a hard leap to make, and I admire people who can do it + commit to it.  I struggle with it but perhaps, like everything else, it’s the fear that is worse than the act.

Thanks for your inspiration Tara, hope to meet some day.  And as my dear friend Steph says, “Bon Courage!”.