Really Enjoyed

Hi there! My name is Brittany, and this is my first big experiment in epic content creation.

For years, I’ve tossed around the idea of starting a full-fledged site. As a teenager, I wrote personal blogs on sites like Xanga. In college, I studied journalism and wrote for the student campus magazine. After college, I followed a career path in education and nonprofit work, letting my journalistic ambitions slide into hobbyist territory. At that point, I couldn’t really call myself a writer. After all, writers write, and I wasn’t practicing as much as I wanted. But my desire, while muted a bit, was still there.

However, in late 2010 I reached a turning point. After a significant cross-country move from Indiana to California, I accepted a position as a fundraising manager at a local nonprofit. For the first time in my life, I found myself hating to write. The pressure of needing to write proposals for my manager in his style, his voice, suffocated me. With his criticism of my work, I lost significant confidence in myself. Even though I wrote my own successful proposals without his input, I still felt inadequate.

As larger, organization-level financial problems surfaced, I began planning a way out. I started searching for information on how to quit and move on successfully, and I discovered a world of writers and entrepreneurs who figured out a way to forge their own path outside the traditional sphere. Chris Guillebeau, Corbett Barr, Leo Babauta, and Tim Ferriss, among many others, showed me that it was totally okay to want way more out of writing, work, and life than I was asking already. My desire to create something lasting pushed itself slowly back to the forefront of my mind.

I left the fundraising position in early 2011 and set out to rebuild my confidence. Spoiler alert: This did not happen overnight. I endured six long months of unemployment, during which I could barely face my resume for shame of having left such a traditionally “good, professional” job. Nor did I begin writing again right away. To my personal disappointment, I consumed far more writing than I created, thinking that I would start soon… after I read just one more article, sketched out one more outline, finished one more book. After all, reading and learning felt like “progress” toward my goals. And while many parts of my studies would prove valuable, it was still a method of profound procrastination.

A chance job opportunity snapped me out of my creative funk: I was offered a technology sales position with a local bookstore. I couldn’t have known it, but this was the exact confidence builder I needed. I’d never held a retail or sales position before, and on paper the job appeared to be very cut-and-dry.  However, there were a vast number of business skills that I learned for the first time: assessing customer needs, finding the right solutions, and making the move to close sales. Most importantly, though, I found the confidence to make measured and honest recommendations to customers.

And that’s what I hope I can do here. This is an experiment in writing consistently, online entrepreneurship (more on that later), and creating something lasting. With this site, I want to share all the things that I really enjoy with the world:

• Movies
• TV
• Books
• Travel
• Health
• Technology
• <insert life-changing thing here>

Nothing but the open road ahead of me...

I won’t claim to be the first to find the newest things, and I know my recommendations won’t appeal to everyone, but I have had enough success with friends, family, and now customers to know that this is worth doing. More than that, I hope that this can be a hub for others to share the things they really enjoy.

This is my first attempt at writing regularly, so please be honest but kind. Follow me on Twitter to get my latest posts, and you can find my RSS feed here.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!