From Graphic Design to Travel (Plus Post-shift Update)

From Graphic Design to Travel (Plus Post-shift Update) Success Story > From: Job To: Portfolio career From Graphic Design to Travel (Plus Post-shift Update) “Overcoming doubt is hard, but once you decide to just do it â€" that's when it gets exciting.” * From Graphic Design to Travel (Plus Post-shift Update) Adam Groffman had trodden the 'expected' path after university. But a weekend in Reykjavik taught him that he didn't have to follow the herd â€" he could design his own working life, on his own terms. Find out how he created a bespoke career that combines his passions, and how it's working out for him four years on. What work were you doing previously? I was a graphic designer for a book publisher. What are you doing now? I'm now Online Marketing Manager for an independent tour operator in Europe. I also run a successful travel blog. Why did you change? I quit my job to travel around the world. I loved my job, but I felt that, at that point in my life, I needed to travel more; the job wasn't able to provide the travel experiences I was craving. I saved up my money so I could take a gap year / career break and figured I'd go from there. To make myself feel less guilty about quitting a job in the height of the recession, I started a travel blog as a way to keep me doing new things while I wasn't at work. It started for fun, as a hobby, but as I learned about how to build a successful blog, I became more and more interested in marketing and social media strategy. When was the moment you decided to make the change? I was visiting Reykjavik, Iceland, with a good friend. We were only there for a three-day weekend, but during that time we met so many interesting people and fellow travellers that I felt inspired to make up my own life plan. I've been lucky enough to travel and study abroad throughout my life, and I see no reason why that should end with a full-time, 9â€"5 job. I started working two weeks before I had even graduated from university. Without any transition period between school and 'real-life', I spent most of my early twenties busily making a career and being responsible. It wasn't until I met people my own age from all over the world (doing very different things to what I was doing) that I was inspired to take action. It seemed unfair to think that they had all these amazing stories to tell, and here I was, beginning to feel more and more complacent in my generally comfortable life. It was on my IcelandAir flight back home from Reykjavik that I realised there was no reason to stop travelling. I could make something work somehow, whether through my job or on my own. In seat 19F, I wrote up a list of questions: Could I travel and not work? Where would I go? How much would it cost? Would I be able to live like that? What would I learn / do? When would I go? I didn't have all the answers (actually, I had none at that moment), but I knew they were questions I would be able to answer. Honestly, I'm surprised at how easy it was to make the decision to pick up and leave without answering a single one of those questions. Are you happy with the change? Yes! I loved working as a graphic designer and I loved working in the publishing industry. But working in a large corporation sometimes meant my creativity was being stifled. Today, owning my own publication (a very popular travel blog), I get to control the entirety of the publishing process. My work as an Online Marketing Manager at Eating Europe Food Tours is also exhilarating. Working with such a small company, my decisions have more meaning â€" making the job that much more rewarding. What do you miss and what don't you miss? I do miss working as a designer â€" I got used to working with Adobe Photoshop every day and still find reasons to use much of the Adobe Creative Suite for whatever projects I can. I don't miss the stress of working for a large, multi-national company full of corporate bureaucracy. How did you go about making the shift? As my round-the-world travels wound down, I had to make a difficult decision: do I return to America and look for a job there? Or do I try my luck one more time and pursue my dream of living in Europe? I took a chance and moved to Berlin, Germany. I worked in a few different tech start-ups before going completely freelance. I've pieced together a career from my experience in design, marketing, tourism and writing, and of course I'm now managing the online marketing for Eating Europe Food Tours. It’s a great job which combines all my passions: travel, food, tourism and marketing! I've also built up my blog as a way to bring in income. What didn't go well? What 'wrong turns' did you take? After taking my gap year to travel around the world (and blog about it), I struggled to find what it was I wanted to do. I didn't even know where I wanted to live! Thankfully, with the savings I had left after my travels, I was able to spend several months trying out some internships with different types of companies until I could decide what I was most interested in doing. How did you handle your finances to make your change possible? I spent a lot of time building up a savings account and was lucky to graduate from university without debt (thanks to a financially savvy family and a lot of scholarships). My savings were a big help in making the career change possible. What was the most difficult thing about changing? The doubt. Changing careers can be scary and, as is probably natural, you go through a lot of self-questioning â€" Is it the right decision? The right time? The right thing to do? Overcoming that doubt is challenging, but once you decide to just do it â€" that's when things get exciting. What help did you get? In the process of moving to a new city (a new country, even!), I made a lot of new friends. Meeting new people while I myself was looking for new things to do and experience just opened up my world to so much more. I was able to hear other ideas and see more of what other people were doing. The more I learnt about other people, and saw what they were doing, the more curious and creative I got with making changes in my own life. I suppose it was this curiosity with the world that helped me to make the change. What have you learnt in the process? It's important to try new things â€" to test them out and see what works, and what doesn't. What do you wish you'd done differently? I wish I'd kept in better touch with my co-workers and friends from before the shift. Graphic design was such a big part of my life for those few years in college and afterwards; I miss the conversations about typography, about the importance of colour, about the evolution of design. What would you advise others to do in the same situation? Continue to be curious. Be willing to take the smaller risks, so you can eventually take the bigger ones. We caught up with Adam recently to see how his shift was working out, a few years on. Here's what he's been up to, and the biggest lessons he's learned. What's changed for you in your career since we first published your story? In my first story, I mentioned working in online marketing for a food tour operator. During my initial career change, having a relatively stable income as a marketing consultant was helpful â€" but today I am 100% freelance. Almost all my income comes directly through my travel blog, throughworking with sponsors, advertisers, and running campaigns as an influencer. Occasionally, I do still consult with travel companies looking to reach unique markets, but I've found my real passion is writing so that's my main priority. I also was living in Berlin, Germany for many years right after my career change, but last yearI changed it all up again and moved to Brooklyn, New York City. How do you feel about your work now? As a full-time, self-employed writer, there are ups and downs. The hustle in NYChas been a bit harder, but I do really still enjoy it. I just can't imagine doing anything else right now. What challenges have you come up against since making your shift, and how exactly have you dealt with them? Because I've changed locations and now live in a more expensive city, the biggest challenges have been financial. Luckily, my blog is self-sustaining and really covers all my expenses, but I'm always trying to grow my business. How is the financial side of things panning out, and is this what you'd expected? There are ups and downs, of course. But largely it's working. In my new career as a travel writer and influencer, there have been some market changes that are challenging financially, but that havealso opened up other opportunities, such as freelance writing for bigger and more important publications. What have you learned, since making your shift? I've learned that the hustle never really ends! To find out more about Adam's travels, visit www.travelsofadam.com What lessons could you take from Adam's story to use in your own career change? Let us know in the comments below.

Personal Brand Spotlight Wendy Marx - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Personal Brand Spotlight Wendy Marx - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Successful Personal Brands have a direct correlation with successful businesses.   As your brand equity grows and develops, your corporate brand entity will share similar successes.   One way to have a leg up on the competition is through public relations and communication efforts.   For this expertise, I turn to none other than Wendy Marx.   Wendy has 20 years of public relations experience branding companies, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.   Today, she is president of her company entitled Marx Communications, which is a PR company that develops programs for B2B companies, executives and entrepreneurs by providing a high level of service and pitching.   Aside from day to day activities, she is also a fellow blogger and friend, who blogs on Fast Company Magazines website.   Wendys diverse background includes promoting everyone from application developers to Columbia Universitys E-Commerce Management program. That is only the beginning.   She has worked for ATT and GE Capital in a variety of marketing and public relations positions and was part of the group that helped develop the highly successful ATT Universal Card.   Of course Wendys brand had to start somewhere and it began with the University of Michigan, where she got an MBA and then a masters degree from Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Journalism.   Wendy shares my passion for writing, as her work has appeared in the New York Times, Information Week, Fortune Magazine and Forbes. Wendys blog preaches about Personal Branding and highlights some of the topics Ive discussed in the past.   She has leveraged the media power of Fast Company to accelerate her own blog and business.   Ive noticed how Fast Companys brand name helps drive her blog in terms of awareness and the respect shes gained from others.   Her writing ability keeps others interested and tuning in for each post. View her blog on Fast Companys website to learn more: http://blog.fastcompany.com/experts/wmarx/  

I hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio.

I hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio. This past week was Spring Break and toward the end, somehow my ex and my nanny fell out of the picture, and I was doing a lot of taking care of the kids, which, I have said before, is not what Im great at. I wish I were. I tried for four years to be a stay-at-home mom, only to discover that I am not meant to do that. So, in a moment of innocent desperation, I wrote on Twitter: No school today and the nannys on vacation. A whole day with the kids gets so boring: all intergalactic battles and no intellectual banter. I almost didnt post that Twitter because its so banal. But, in just seconds, because thats how Twitter works, there was a firestorm of men telling me that Im a bad mom. Really. Yes. Heres one from David Dellifield: @penelopetrunk sorry your kids are a burden, send them to OH, well enjoy them for who they are I couldnt believe it. Its one thing to be a total asshole to me on, say, Yahoo Finance, where someone used to spend a good portion of each day making sure that the C word did not appear in the comments for either Suze Ormans column or mine. (The best days were when the C word appeared in a way that linked us. Really, those were some creative commenters on Yahoo Finance.) The difference between Twitter and Yahoo is that Twitter is intimate, and real-time, and pointed directly at me, not at the editorial board of Yahoo. Like many people who are total assholes online, Davids contact info was easy to find. I called him at work, because, big surprise, he is not a stay-at-home dad talking about how everyone should love parenting. He is a dad who is not home all day talking about how everyone should love being home all day with their kids. There was no answer at his work. But I noted the number so I could ruin his life there if I ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson. Then I called David Dellifields house. I thought maybe his wife would answer and I could ask her if she knows that her husband is emailing other women to encourage them to send more kids to his wife to take care of. All day. There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again. So I wrote to David â€" a direct message in Twitter terminology: Im surprised by what you wrote. Are you intentionally being mean to me in a public forum? He wrote back: no, but it seemed you were complaining about your children on an open forum, kids have faults, lets love for who they are So heres the problem: Parents need to be able to say that parenting is not fun. The day-in and day-out of parenting is very, very difficult. This is not even news. There is a reason for the reams of research showing that having kids does not make people happier. Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Harvard, writes in Time magazine that we trick ourselves into thinking kids make us happy. Nattavudh Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, published research in The Psychologist, that concludes, Social scientists have found almost zero association between having children and happiness. Scott Stanley, a psychologist at University of Denver, reveals research that shows that marriages are much happier before the couple has children. So first of all, anyone who says that parenting makes them happy is probably lying. Just statistically speaking. But also, we know the people who are well positioned to like parenting. There are sixteen personality types, and only a handful are perfectly tuned for staying home with kids. People can have competing feelings. For example, I love my job but I hate getting up and going to work every day. Or, I love this blog but I often have to force myself to sit down and write a post. Competing feelings happen to healthy people everywhere. St. Augustine called this dualism; mommy bloggers call it reality. Its a big deal that women are writing publicly, in real time, about how difficult it is to stay home with kids. Look, I get emails every day from women who left the workforce for kids and feel lost. Heres the blog of a woman who wrote to me two days ago: The Reluctantly Frustrated Stay-at-Home Mom. These women feel lost because you can love your kids and still be bored. Kids are not nonstop fun. Talking with young children is stultifying. Yes, they are funny. But in general, you have to pay attention to them every second, even though they are not really doing something every second. And as soon as your mind wanders too far, something bad happens. For example, I took the kids on a hike yesterday, taking a coat for myself but not for them. Because I checked out. Because I wanted to think about things that are more interesting than coats. This is normal behavior. I mean, intellectuals need intellectual stimulation, and thats not something kids give. This does not mean I dont love my kids. Only an asshole would suggest that because I dont want to stay home with them all day, I must not love them. And all you people who say youd love to stay home all day with your kids if you could, you are completely full of shit. I know because I was living at the poverty line in NYC while I stayed home with my kids. Thats how important it was to me to stay home. I wanted to be with them for every moment, be a great mom, all that. So I did it no matter what â€" no financial situation could have stopped me. And if you really wanted to be home with your kids all day, youd do it. David: That means you, too. But, newsflash: going to work is 10,000 times easier than staying with kids all day. Yes, I know, staying with kids is more important. I agree. So is saving children from starvation in Malawi. But we each do what we can. And the best of us are honest about it. For all you guys who Twittered back to me that Im a bad mom and that I should love being home with my kids, heres a link for you: CEOs who are on Twitter. Because let me tell you something: None of these people needs to earn the money they are earning. They have enough money. They can stay home with their kids. But instead, they are at work. David, can you publicly ask each of these guys if they want to send their kids to your wife in Ohio? Because each of these guys is choosing to go to work instead of stay home with their kids. Do you know why? BECAUSE THE CEOs THINK KIDS ARE BORING. This is not news. The top 10% of the tax bracket system does not need to leave their families to go to work every day. But they do. Why is that? Heres another idea, David. How about approaching all those guys with Blackberries at soccer games? Let me ask you something. Do those guys check their email when theyre getting a blow job? Of course not. Do you know why? Because its INTERESTING. They are checking their blackberries during soccer because soccer is boring. The kids cant figure out where the goal is. The kids and their parents lose interest. They want snacks more than they want to learn soccer. They are cute, yes. But even cute gets boring. Heres another Twitter from David Dellifield: been on twitter several months, still trying to figure out the conversation part of it @DavidDellifield Maybe you dont understand the conversation because you have so little self-knowledge to add to the party.