Tuesday Morning

It is semi bright and early Monday morning and I am doing everything I can to claim time back in my increasingly busy days because I really need six hours of sleep a night, I need an hour of working out, I need a clean apartment, I need a well maintained blog, and I am adding more to my daily schedule, seemingly at every turn.

So, I mentioned on yesterday’s blog that I am pressed for time, and need to make changes. Today, I am looking at every spare moment and trying to find a way to balance everything I have on my plate. I managed to get up before 7:00, got up at a whopping 6:48. As you may recall, from my very first blog, I had got in a good habit of waking up early when I began this blog, and I need to get back to it. Why? Because I have to make changes to see changes, one of my very first blog lessons. Looking at the blog and what changes I want to make, looking at my earliest blog lessons has been helpful. Sometimes you know the answer.

To make this all work, every spare second spent on the phone on hold at work, every second I would have spent on smoke breaks if I were still a smoker, every spare second I have in my day job, I need to spend writing the blog. I have an app that syncs on all my devices so I can always pull it up on my computer or phone, which I have been doing for a while, but I need to rededicate myself to every spare second I have.

I need to spend more time meal prepping, also. Thanks to Pinterest, but more so to one of my online friends, Quay (_StyleManor on Instagram), I have some great meal prep ideas, and I need to actually do them. Bret and I lose so much time to food, so I want to start batching making lots of options for us, so we can just grab and go a variety of healthy, tasty options.

I should have meal prepped on Sunday, but we didn’t go grocery shopping until after eight, and we didn’t get home until after ten…needless to say, I did not meal prep, leaving me cooking breakfast in the morning, doing dishes when i get home, making dinner, doing dishes after dinner…That is too much time wasted.

So, I need to find a way to meal prep, and money is low after our trip, so I am compiling a list of meals I can make for an inexpensive amount.

I have been wanting to meal prep inexpensive meals for us to enjoy during the week to save us money for more trips, but that means a sacrifice to time, unless I can sort that out as well, which means meal prep, which means planning the meals and preparing them, and ALSO involves finding ways to store these foods, as we don’t have any Tupperware and not much in way of mason jars, either.

Donations welcome.

Typing this actually gave me the idea to reach out to my more environmentally friendly friends and ask if they had a any containers they no longer wished to use, to try and save some money and also prevent some plastic from making it’s way to a landfill.

Meal prep could, I think, save me several hours a week, by doing it all at once, plus reduce stress.

Bret and I have also agreed to start spending Sunday’s doing nothing but stuff for our business and our brand. Editing the vlog, planning blog posts, taking pictures, meal prepping, doing everything we need to be set up for success for the week, as well as putting the previous week to bed, on Sunday. This shift of how we spend our weekends goes hand in hand with how I am viewing my evenings.

Namely, very little rest. Lots of work for the future. It sucks, but fact of the matter is our dreams involve paying our bills and living our lives without the aid or nuisance of a 9-5 job. This also means we have to work, pretty damn hard, all the damn time, to make that life workable, much less sustainable. I am okay with doing the work, because it is doing the work needed for my own life, versus someone else’s.

Why work ourselves to the bone to help someone else achieve their dream? That is all working for others does.

This being said, I am incredibly passionate about and supportive of collaborations, and think more companies should be viewed as such. A collaborative process. No one person, no matter how “experienced” or “educated” or “managerial” will know everything. My experience, sadly, says that these traits tend to mean they in fact do not, in fact, know much at all.

Bosses are rarely experts in the field they are in, they are simply the person who had the capital and foresight to start the company, and they hire the experts. Many companies are this way, even if they did not start out that way.

Does the C.E.O. of Walmart know how to operate registers? Exactly.

And it works both ways, hell it works every which way.

Even someone, like myself, trained in Quickbooks and Intuit Point of Sale systems, if I were to go to another company, even one that used the same software, I would need to know how they best use the program. I would not be the expert. But, after a short while, it stands to reason I may also know more about the entire program than they did about their part of the operation procedures.

No, this isn’t meant to be a rant for companies, but I could post this all to LinkedIn if I wanted to, but I digress: Unless you are working in a collaborative way, you are only helping someone else achieve their dreams.

Why do I make this distinction? Because plenty of artists like to sit on a high horse and pretend that what they do is somehow more important or more fulfilling than another persons, and that elite attitude ticks me off, because we are all suckers if we are all just lying to ourselves. If you are an actor, you are a tool to make a director’s dream come to life. Same with costumers, stage managers, set designers…oh and directors? Don’t think you are making something special, you answer to producers, boards of directors, and worst of all? the general public, made up of “the donors.”

And those donors are the same assholes we are all dealing with so, let’s drop any elitist attitude about what we do being more important than anyone else- We all could probably do more to work for ourselves and only work with others if it is for the betterment of everyone involved.

No, I am not saying be rude and never help others, I am saying be a collaborative force of nature, not a damn door mat.

You can’t do it in your job, all the time, but you can try and position yourself to do so. Even regular ole boring jobs, like accountants, can become more independent.

We are spending Sundays working on our stuff, to get closer to that, plus our evenings, to really work towards these goals. Without giving too much away, I am really excited about the stuff we are working on, and the stuff we have coming in the future.

Anyways, sorry for a small rant about collaboration, working for yourself, etc, but I do stand by it.

If you aren’t happy doing what you are doing, start making changes. No, I am not saying to quit your job with no plan to stay afloat, but I am saying if you hate your job, start saving, reorganize your budget, do something different, to try and get somewhere else.

I hate my job, and I want to write every day.

So I blog every day while building my universe, I work every day to get to a place where I can afford to quit. You have to make changes to see changes. This was one of my earliest blog messages and I imagine it will stay a big one for a long time, because I believe it in as much as I believe in one of my other major messages- The weed isn’t making you lazy, you just want to be lazy.

So make changes if you don’t like what you see. Don’t give me excuses. I know it is hard.

I also know the excuses I made to myself before I decided to stop blaming the world and just fix it.

Don’t kid a kidder, as they say.

Tuesday Afternoon

I think I will cut up that rant and post it to Linked In, and maybe make an audio or video version of it, using that ole Gary Vee model of content, just so I can spread these messages around.

And Remi Cruz and Alisha Marie always say: Content, baby, content.

Actually, Tricia (@Bodyofwerk On Instagram go follow her, seriously, she is a Goddess) and I were talking recently, in kind of an ongoing conversation about the content we make and post online.

Make content that makes you content.

Make content content.

#contentcontent

Make the content content, baby, content content.

Don’t post inspirational text on some free access photo. Post real, actual, original, content.

I’m not saying don’t say encouraging things, but maybe, just maybe, you could use your own quote, or, *gasp* a picture you took yourself. You are a writer, you can find a cool looking anything and get the same generic background for the text you want to put on it. Maybe make that text something you wrote yourself, or a character said. if you feel the need to quote, include a caption as to why this quote means so much, how you found it, or how much the person who said it means to you…literally anything original would be great.

Now, if being unoriginal is what makes you content, I guess go for it? But I feel like so many people are not hearing the full message for “why” we post content online.

Look, if you are only using the internet and social media for connecting with friends and stuff, little of this will really mean anything or apply to you.

But if you are “growing my personal brand” “Building an audience for my e-commerce company” or “Trying to get enough followers to monetize my account” then maybe put down the selfie stick and listen up.

Your personal brand doesn’t mean shit if you don’t allow it to. If you are copying others, or just putting out content to feed an algorithm and trick people into following you, you kind of suck.

Yeah, actually, I wasn’t going to go this hard, but….

Nah, I want to be “real to my brand” so I will. You suck.

The internet is a crazy big world that lets us achieve our dreams. In a world where you can be anything, you opted to be a copy cat.

You suck.

Let that sink in.

A chance to be a truly unique individual and find, not build, find, an audience of people who will truly like you, and you choose to copy someone with 100,000 followers and generic content because you so desperately “want to secure that bag.”

You suck. If you have a problem with that suckage, change it. Sorry, but not.

Yesterday, a Gary Vee video (that he probably chopped up into articles, IG videos, Snapchats, Tik Toks, Linked In posts, Facebook posts and Podcast fodder) discussed how when all is said and done, the internet strips everything away.

Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, Snapchat, Xanga, Medium, WordPress, Twitter, Tik Tok, YouTube…The internet’s short attention span can make any of these obsolete, as some of these apps have already shown you.

But the internet can’t strip away the YOU of the content. It doesn’t matter if YouTube shuts down tomorrow, taking all your views, subscriptions and paychecks with it. But if YOU have the ability to make those videos, you don’t need YouTube, you simply utilize YouTube.

YOU have the ability to make those DIY videos, those MUA tutorials, those day in the life vlogs…if you can make them, then YouTube is merely a platform you allow to publish your stuff.

These apps, these websites, they don’t need to matter to you because without YOU they don’t matter.

Think it through, logically. Without you, the website goes away, because you are the one putting up the content. If YouTube closes tomorrow, you still exist. Save those videos on a hard drive, maybe, so you keep your content, but you don’t need YouTube.

Self published “indie” or “fringe” writers will probably love so much of what I am saying because the writers of the world are slowly seeing that the traditional route of publishing is seriously not for everyone. In fact, it turns out, it actually really isn’t for everyone. More and more writers are self publishing, which is why you may notice i get hostile about the online writing content.

Not all of them, but so many writers are putting up content for the sake of content, and not for their own contentment. Content content is the reason so many of us started building online followings, building our online communities, starting blogs so we can sell our books that we self published ourselves…so why would we get away from that, when we are finally in a place where the rest of the creatives are joining us?

This topic is bigger, and without giving spoilers, this topic will be discussed further, so if you have any passionate opinions, REACH OUT TO ME. (@abbigrasso on all social media, Twitter and Instagram are easiest for me, so feel free to contact me.)

This isn’t some gimmick to trick an algorithm to making me popular. This is me wanting to connect with fellow creatives who are out here trying to do the damn thing. Because I want to support you, even if it is just me always hyping your newest post…

At least your content is genuine, and so is my support.

So let’s all make content content, content that fills us with contentment.

Not complacency, but a true happiness.

❤

Abbi