Aimee Smith

I didn’t update yesterday on account of being dead ass tired, but I did find a useful Thing-Finding resource: This post on finding your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) by Naomi of IttyBiz (another great site for aspiring entrepreneurs).

The third point, “What are you good at?,” got me thinking about my unique strengths as a writer, which have always been hard for me to pin down. The first thing that came to mind was my spelling and grammar, but I quickly realized that was no good — anyone who writes for a living is expected to have great spelling and grammar.

So I tried to remember specific, positive feedback I’ve received on writing assignments. Here are a few things that came to mind:

-The summer after my junior year of high school, I wrote an article on my experience with choosing a college for Student Paths, which the editor praised for its “conversational” tone.

-In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a memoir about some of the vacations I’ve taken with my family, which my teacher and classmates found funny and relatable.

-In my junior year of college, I wrote a literary journalism piece on the PRT (the monorail system at West Virginia University) and why it sucks. My teacher was quite impressed with it. I can’t remember exactly why, but I think it had something to do with the combination of factual information and my unique (and snarky) voice.

An excellent tip Naomi recommends for figuring out what you’re good at is to “think about what part of your work doesn’t feel like work”. The above pieces were all fairly easy — and enjoyable — for me to write. They were also all non-fiction, which is interesting because I’ve always considered myself more of a fiction writer. And they were all about me (or my experiences) and written in my voice, which is even more interesting, because I’ve always considered myself a boring person with a boring life that’s boring to write about and equally boring to read about. But that’s clearly not true.

Oh, yeah, the “panic” part of the post title. Earlier today, I was at the library searching for clues that might point me in the direction of my Thing, and I had a bit of a mental freak-out. It went something like this:

What was I thinking? I need a full-time job NOW! I don’t have time to search for my Thing! What if Havi and Victoria and Naomi lied to me and I don’t even have a Thing? I knew it. I’m the one Thing-less person under the sun. No one will ever pay me for anything. I’ll be stuck in retail for the rest of my life. I’m going to go home and cry and eat some brownies now.

Fortunately, however, I didn’t. Well, I didn’t cry. I did eat a brownie, though. It tasted good. Almost as good as writing this post felt.

One of the exercises Victoria Brouhard recommends for finding your Thing — that is, the thing you love doing that will also support you financially — is browsing a real-live bookstore (check out her free teleclass, Six Essential Steps to Find Your Thing, for details on how this exercise can help you). I happened to have the day off work, so I decided Thing-Finding was as good an excuse as any to take a trip to Borders.

Since I’m looking to start my own business, I began my quest in the business and finance section, where I came across some very interesting titles. One of these was The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, the story of how authors Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson embarked on a nationwide crusade against bad spelling and grammar. Hmm, definitely want to file that away for further consideration.

My big find, however, was in a section a rarely visit: Humor. A lot of titles caught my eye in the humor section, ranging from the vulgar (Shit My Dad Says) to the controversial (God Made Me Do It: True Stories of the Worst Advice the Lord Has Ever Given His Followers) to the odd (I Was Told There’d Be Cake).

But the one book that positively screamed “Buy me!” was Retail Hell: How I Sold My Soul To the Store/Confessions of a Tortured Sales Associate (the slash isn’t actually part of the title, but I think it should be). How many times have I used the phrase “retail hell” in reference to my current job? (Hint: A lot). I skimmed over the first few pages and experienced a powerful feeling of deja vu as I chuckled at author Freeman Hall’s anecdotes. I don’t often think “I could have written this” while reading a book, but that was my overwhelming reaction to those few pages.

The icing on the cake: At the checkout counter, when I was digging through my wallet for my Borders Rewards card, the cashier noticed that I had a crapload of gift cards which I’d kept even though they were all used up…or so I thought. But I gave her the cards just in case one of them still had some money on it, and lo and behold, the first one she tried covered the entire price of the book. Which was pretty damn awesome for two reasons:

1) The obvious reason: My savings are limited, and I’ve been spending way too much on ebooks, magazines, and online writing and self-help courses lately.

2) The not-so-obvious reason: Corny as it sounds, I felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. That something may not necessarily be that I’m supposed to write a humorous memoir about my retail career, but I do feel like I’ve come a step closer to finding my Thing.

Originally, this was going to be a blog about the journalism industry, as well as a place to host my writing portfolio (which, at the moment, consists entirely of articles written for my college newspaper two years ago). I started reading Poynter and Columbia Journalism Review for inspiration. I created a page with links to my articles. To entice people to read them, I bragged about the facts that my college newspaper 1) is consisently recognized as one of Princeton Review’s 20 Best College Newspapers, and 2) has been mentioned on the Colbert Report (come on, who doesn’t want to read a paper that’s been mentioned on the Colbert Report?). I even gave the site a catchy (-ish) name: The Informasomniac (courtesy of Urban Dictionary).

I hoped that, by doing all this, I’d manage to catch the attention of some key players in the industry and land myself a job that would allow me to make use of my English degree, unlike my current job as a part-time retail sales associate. But for some reason, I just couldn’t find the motivation to start blogging.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what that reason was: I don’t want to be a journalist.

I started college as a journalism major, but switched to English at the end of my first semester because 1) creative writing appealed to me more than news writing, and 2) the thought of interviewing people scared the living daylights out of me. Nonetheless, I took a job with the student newspaper the summer after my senior year because I needed money and job experience.

My instincts turned out to be right. I was constantly asked to revise my articles to fit the paper’s style, and I never got the hang of interviewing. Cornering students in front of the library and asking for their opinions on the new “text-a-librarian” feature that none of them had even heard about made me feel like a pest, not to mention a dork. And I don’t want a job that makes me feel like a pest or a dork.

So, I know I don’t want to be a journalist, and I know I don’t want to be a retail sales associate. But I still have to figure out what I do want to do.

Thanks to awesome bloggers like Marian Schembari, Jenny Foss, Ashley Ambirge, Havi Brooks (and her duck, Selma), and Victoria Brouhard, I know I don’t want to find a “real” job. I want to work for myself. I don’t yet know what kind of business I want to run, but these ladies convinced me not to let my fear of the unknown hold me back any longer. So I deleted my writing samples page, I changed the name of the site to my own name, I changed the theme to something cuter (who can resist pink polka dots?), and I started writing this post.

And thus begins the blog of a budding entrepreneur.