Grow in Dog Years

After many years of traveling, living abroad, and continually challenging myself to try new things, something I've realized is that, it’s not traveling that I truly enjoy; its personal growth that comes with getting outside of your comfort zone. Why? Because when we travel time becomes distorted. One day in a foreign country can forever change the way that you think about life. One week trekking through the amazon, or taking a road trip will often be more impressionable on you than a year in university. A few months working abroad can forever shape what you want out of your career and your life.

I believe that anytime someone puts themselves outside of their comfort zone, it leads to an accelerated hyper growth; what I now refer to as “growing in dog years”. In the same way that a dog theoretically ages 7 years in a year, I believe that when we travel, try new challenging things, and get outside of our comfort zones, we grow at a more rapid pace; we grow in “Dog Years”.

You see, when we get outside of our comfort zones and try new things, we realize that time is not created equally. When time is maximized, and we pack as many overwhelming experiences into a short period of time, we grow at an accelerated rate because, quite simply, we experience more. The more that you experience, the more that you grow.

This is why when we return home from our travels it is so hard to relate to our friends. So much has taken place for us in the last year, but for them their lives have remained essentially the same. They might have a new job, or a new girlfriend/boyfriend, but in reality their lives haven’t changed much throughout the course of that last year. They haven’t experienced the same intensity and acceleration of growth because quite simply, they haven’t experienced as much.

In my opinion, it is simply because you have grown more than they have in that same year. You have had more experiences. You have learned more things. You have widened your perspective in a way that they haven’t. So you are literally no longer at the same points in your life, you have accelerated your own growth and are now years ahead of where they are. In the same year that they grew only one year, you have grown probably 3-4x what they have.

Have you ever been in a position where you look back at the last 6 months and say to yourself, “I feel like the last six months have passed by in the snap of a finger, but at the same time so much has happened and it feels like an eternity ago!” This happens because you packed new experiences into your life, which made time pass by seemingly fast, but these experiences also accumulated at an insanely fast pace, making it seem like an eternity has passed. It’s quite the contradictory feeling.

I look at it like “hacking time”. If you want to get the most that you can out of your life, your goal should be to pack in as many new experiences as you possibly can into every year. If you look back on the last year of your life, how many new things did you try? How many impressionable events can you name? How many times did you take a new trip somewhere? How hard did you push yourself at work? How many new skills did you pick up? The more things you can list out, the more that you have grown.

Take something like Vipassana meditation for example. Although it might be a mere ten days long, in those ten days you will experience years of personal growth because it is such a novel and challenging experience. When you come out, you have grown more in the last ten days than your friends who didn’t do it with you.

Unfortunately, I also think that it’s necessary to touch on hardship, because hardship has a way of manipulating time, but in a bad way. Hardships and struggle have the potential to cause adverse growth. They have the ability to debilitate people and slow life down.

Hardships have a tendency to debilitate people. Something bad happens, and we sit in our rooms and sulk. We stop working. We stop moving forward. We stop growing. Months can pass in this way. Have you ever had a friend go through a failure and take months to get over it? Or a friend who broke up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and they take a year to get over it? Or, in the worst case scenario, the death of a family member? Situations like these have the ability to slow or entirely halt your growth, and it is important to be cognizant of this.

Hardships and struggle have the potential to either debilitate or motivate, and it is up to us with how we handle these hardships. We can either use them as an opportunity to grow, or a time to recess. Am I saying that if something bad happens ignore it and keep moving? Absolutely not. I am instead saying that with every struggle comes an opportunity for growth, and in the end it’s up to you how long you let that struggle knock you on your ass, or get back up and keep fighting.

Where positive experiences speed life up and cause one to say “time flies when you’re having fun”, negative experiences have the ability to slow life down and make it seem like it passes forever. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a bad mood the day seems to pass by incredibly slowly? Or remember back to those days of sitting in a classroom and staring at a clock waiting for time to pass, and then you go outside for recess and it feels like you didn’t get enough time to play? Funny how time becomes distorted depending on our mindset and how we are perceiving our experience of said time.

This is why it is so important to schedule things into your year that will have the maximum impact on your growth. This is why it is so important to choose a challenging career path, travel and work abroad when the opportunity arises, and jump at novel experiences every time you get the chance. It’s like the phrase “getting the best bang for your buck”, but instead I look at it as, “get the most shine for your time” ;) (ok ok I’m working on it!)

Time is not created equally. It’s up to you how you spend your time on this planet, and how fast or slow you want to grow. You have the ability to grow like everyone else, or grow in dog years. Personally, I choose to get the most out of every day that I am here on this planet and grow in dog years, and I encourage everyone else to do the same :)

See What Sticks: An Unconventional Partnership

Hi everyone, Amma Marfo here. Two quick things about me that you’ll need to know before we begin:(1) I am a reader. I am a library-loving, constant tome-carrying, unapologetic bibliophile. (2) If there’s anyone you will meet who can connect what she’s reading to the world around her, it’s me. As such, I want to dedicate my time in this space to sharing with you what I’m reading, and how it could inform a budding professional’s daily life.

Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Batman and Robin. Lucy and Ethel (sometimes). History and pop culture are littered with examples of powerful duos, hard at work to make the world better (or, in the case of Lucy and Ethel, more filled with chocolate). So often, we distill the stories behind creative excellence down to a moment of brilliance in one person (think Newton's revelation of gravity), or farm it out to a group through exercises like brainstorming. But Joshua Wolf Shenk's Power of Two splits the difference of those two long-held tenets, making the case for excellence as a pair.

He explores the accomplishments of collaborators like The Wright Brothers and the DaVinci brothers, comedy writers and producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Alternatively, he explores the power of rivalries as well, and how the relationship between competitors like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys brought out the best work in each. But in the most emotional part of the book, Shenk walks us through his final deadline for the very book we're reading...and the struggle he's having in the absence of such a powerful collaborative relationship.

I've been lucky enough to have a few people in my life that have given me the "power of two," each in a different season of my career. I can attest that there are projects I wouldn't have finished, ideas I would have doubted, and praise I would have shrugged away if not for the presence of strong, caring, and brilliant co-conspirators. The perspective of a dedicated partner can help you articulate your thoughts, can compassionately redirect you when you're feeling lost, and can cheer you on when your motivation is flagging. In the absence of that help from a trusted friend and second mind, some ideas would never take root. So my heart goes out to Shenk- writing a book about the power of creative relationships, all while searching for his own creative "other half."

As he chronicles his race to the deadline, he highlights a few strategies to create the kinds of partnerships that yield significant work:

Try.

Connection will not swoop down on you like a hawk seizing a mouse, and even if it does come toward you like a boat while you're floating in the ocean, you will still need to grab the rungs of the ladder and climb onto it, and the first step may not be the hardest, but it is, often, the wildest.

I love that Shenk follows this statement with, "find a stranger who gets you or a friend you think is strange." Sometimes, partnerships start when people realize they have a lot in common- these are the ones that are the easiest to cultivate. However, there's also tremendous benefit to working alongside people who are quite different from you. One of my most successful creative partnerships, with my friend and colleague from graduate school, came about because our personalities are different enough that we decided to present on it. Further, one of my current creative partnerships works well because my partner and I are each good at very different, but complementary, things. In both cases, each party took a leap to get involved- it's a little scary to put yourself out there to someone else- but it's often a risk that needs to be taken. As Shenk says, "To try is to risk succeeding."

Accept.

Accept that your partner is a pain in the ass. Accept that you are a pain in the ass, so the two of you are made for each other [...] Accept that the people you need will please you and disappoint you but that the index of the creative experience is not your pleasure or disappointment.

The premise of a partnership- be it platonic, romantic, or creative- isn't based in universal harmony. There are misunderstandings, fights, and even dissolution at points of struggle. But these moments are normal, even necessary, if meaningful work is to appear. Work with your partner to keep the work central, while at the same time being attentive to their emotional needs. Both are important, but they are separate, and each will take priority at different points of the ideation process.

Play Your Part.

The way out of the shackles isn't to find the key of to strain like the Hulk until they burst. The way out of the shackles is to stop believing in them. To play your part, do what you do best. To play your part, talk to someone. Talk to your partner.

We often take on projects or initiatives because we believe them to be important. And this is good, because this is how problems big and small get solved. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy the ride. Let play be a part of your creating process. Have fun. Some of the breakthroughs that have informed things like a new tool to solve a problem, an analogy to describe a concept, or even the structure of my first book, came when I took time away from the situation at hand to enjoy myself. It invites new perspective, and the distance required to look at our work objectively. Let your partner encourage you to play and create in new ways, you never know how it'll affect your final product!

All of this putting yourself out there, cultivating a relationship that supports the work, and making space to play to ensure solid creative work, will go a long way to help you create work you can be proud of. And when you do, Shenk advises you to keep the partnership going: "finish, or, at least, surrender. Give over the thing that you've both created and start the process over." The world needs what you and your partner have built- now get to the work of doing it all again.

A Quote for Comfort

I've got a few ideas for my debut post here on The Niche Movement. Thoughts about how to nail down what you want to do, about how your career path will most likely not be what you thought, about my personal career journey. But honestly, none of those are resonating with me right now -- and my best writing comes when my heart is locked in with the topic.

So today, I'd like to share a passage that's resonating with me right now. It's from The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles by Marianne Williamson in a chapter titled "Job vs. Calling."

"If you're kind to people, if you're compassionate, if you pour your excellence into whatever you're doing, then you're doing the job God sent you to do. From that will emerge the next form that's needed to host the energies you're bringing forth."

Earlier on the page she says: "...our value, individually, is determined not by what we do but by the consciousness with which we do it."

What I love most about this post, and why it resonates with me right now, is the "from that will emerge" piece. Essentially it says that the next best way for you to use your gifts and talents will present itself to you. You don't have to push, you don't have to force it. You just have to trust that if you show up and use your gifts and talents wherever you are, the next right step will present itself to you.

I hope these passages provide you comfort, acknowledge that if you're doing good work in the world with intention, you're on the right track, even if you're not "there" yet.

Starting Your Own Business Is No Joke: 3 Lessons for Anyone Taking a Leap of Faith

April marks six months since I left my full time job at Rutgers University, moved to Washington, DC, and launched my business full time. Let me correct myself, businesses. Today, as I sit here on April 1st writing this post, I am sharing this on my first day from my new office space at WeWork in the middle of DC. Ever since I went all in and to be an entrepreneur, I’ve been tip toeing the line of living the life of a digital storyteller (social media strategy & content creator) and the other, as the founder of The Niche Movement, a community to help young professionals find their passion while applying unconventional career search practices in the real world.

Since I took a leap of faith, even though the two businesses on paper were two different offsprings of my work over the last eight years, they have actually started to blend together in a weird but serendipitous kind of way. For example, from cold emailing conferences in DC last November, I landed the amazing opportunity to photograph for VentureWell, an ed tech conference full of like-minded higher ed colleagues and students who see things differently. As I photographed this conference over the four days, I personally met individuals that have created co-working spaces on their campuses all the way to Aneesh Chopra, Obama’s former CTO. Along with other work I have completed since October 2014, it’s moments like this that I know all of this will lead to something bigger and to have patience and most importantly, trust the process.

As I am weeks away from finishing my book, funded on Kickstarter last summer, I can say that the last six months has been the most rewarding but challenging months. However, each subsequent month has provided a lot of clarity and created a vision in how I can bridge the two businesses together. More on that to come later this spring.

I’ll admit, this is the first post I have written in 2015 partly because I have been head-down focused on bringing on clients and creating strategies and content for them. Next, I spent the end of 2014 interviewing inspirational people for the book including Nancy Lyons, founder of ClockWork and featured on NBC Nightly News in November 2014. Finally, it has been difficult to find any energy at the end of the day to write for a few minutes in order to thread the book together.

The good news though, I have loved every minute of it and have worked with some amazing people along the way.

The three pieces of advice I want to share with you whether you are starting your own business, in the middle of your career, or looking for a job you love is the following:

1. Take a deep breath and hold on tight - Finding a job you love or starting your own business is a long, bumpy, and untraveled path. If you are looking for instant gratification or a quick solution, you are headed down the wrong path. With the right amount of planning, guts, and trusting that everything will “be ok”, it’s best to view this journey as a marathon and not a sprint.
2. Put yourself out there - If you have something you want to share/promote or a service (big or small) to help others, you have to let people know. But don’t forget, have tact and be genuine with a touch of creativeness. I have found by just introducing yourself (digitally or in-person) and then leaving with “If I can help, please let me know” or “How can I help you?” goes a long way. Also, don’t forget the follow-up. Most of the people interviewed for the book and many of the projects I have worked on came from the simple follow-up both over the phone and through email.
3. Care about the people first, work second -  When you're starting out in a new job, career, or launching a new business it is so easy to get wrapped up in administrative tasks, finances, personnel, next-steps, etc. If you can find even just the smallest sliver of what you love about your job combined with 100% genuine effort, your reputation will sky rocket.

Do the work.

Ask questions.

And add more value than asked of you (within reason - don’t be taken advantage of).

One of my clients earlier this year was strapped with a deadbeat developer (which I have very little experience with), however, I made several contacts in NYC and DC and also knew of 5 resources they could check out. Without hesitation I got on the phone and helped them out. It had nothing to do with social media but I knew I could help.

There are a lot of people to thank over the last six months, including every one of you reading this and following me along on this journey.

I also appreciate every single person I wrote about in my blogging journey over the summer for their continued support.

In addition to my wife Courtney, my parents, and close friends, I really want to thank the following businesses and clients for choosing to work with me, seeing the value I can add, and sometimes giving me a chance.

CircusTalk

Equalman Studios

Lenore Horton & Ketnoi Group

GWU Business School, Lemonade Day DC students, David Ruda & Alex Boessetta

ACPA

Lost Rhino Brewery

VentureWell

Relay Rides

Why You Should Consider Working Abroad After Graduation

Guest post: My name is Troy Erstling, founder of BrainGain. Throughout my life I’ve visited over 20 countries and I’ve lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Seoul South Korea, and now Bangalore, India. These last five years of traveling have changed my life in countless ways, and I can confidently say that seeking out international opportunities has enabled me to carve out a unique path in life. I believe that traveling is the greatest form of education, and it is my passion to help others do the same. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to live and work abroad. The idea of traveling the world and getting paid to do it has always appealed to me and making a career out of it seemed even more appealing. After graduating from high school in Manalapan, NJ I moved across the country to The University of Arizona in Tucson to obtain a degree in International Studies.

My junior year of college I had the opportunity to study abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was my first time out of the country and it was a reckless adventure filled with steak, yerba mate tea, wine, paragliding, a pathetic attempt to learn Spanish, and some of the greatest nightlife on earth. I made lifelong friends that I travel with to this day. It was the greatest study abroad experience I could've ever asked for.

During my time there a friend told me about Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Turns out, if you are looking to get international experience and work abroad, this is usually the best way to get your foot in the door. I was sold.

After graduating from University I made it my sole mission to get a teaching job abroad. I stayed in Tucson for an extra 2 months to get my TEFL certification and I began researching the best destinations to teach English.

I eventually came across South Korea; paid round trip airfare, housing, medical insurance, attractive salary, and $2000 severance pay. Compared to the other options it was a no-brainer. I searched for jobs on websites like Dave’s ESL café, and within a few short months and a long visa process, I had my job and a one-way ticket to Seoul.

I spent the next year in Seoul, South Korea teaching English to 7-year-old kindergarten students. It was amazing. I got paid to act like a child all day and teach my kids about Michael Jackson and The Beatles. I was able to save around $10,000USD (roughly about $1000/month in savings), and had three amazing trips to Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines for my vacations. It was an unforgettable experience, but I knew I didn't want to be a teacher for the rest of my life...

Around the time my contract in Korea was winding up, I reached out to a friend of mine whom I met while studying in Argentina. He had also been teaching English, but in Spain instead. Turns out, he was no longer in Spain and had been living in India for the past ten months on a fellowship in Social Enterprise.

I looked up the fellowship and it seemed like a great way to transition my career while continuing my pursuit of creating a career abroad. It was a win-win. There were 20 days left to apply, so I submit my application and hoped for the best.

At that point my options were to take the fellowship, and if I didn’t get in go backpack the world. Win-win, but one seemed better for the overall career.

I was accepted to the fellowship and placed in Bangalore, India. My friend from Argentina also successfully applied for the position of Field Coordinator and was placed in Bangalore as well!

For the next year I lived in Bangalore, India studying entrepreneurial ecosystems in Southeast Asia with The National Entrpreneurship Network and worked for one of India's most promising startups, Zoomcar.

Throughout that time I had a lot of people reaching out to me about working abroad. I had friends from the US reaching out to me saying, “I’m 3-4 years out of school, I still do 200 cold calls a day, my job doesn’t give me responsibility, I would love to work abroad…what are my options?” Then I also had friends from South Korea who would say to me “I want to continue working abroad but I don’t want to teach English anymore…what are my options?”

One day it dawned on me that if you want to work abroad after graduation, your options are limited to teaching English and volunteer work. Trustworthy career relevant opportunities are few and far between. But here I was, living and working abroad with one of India’s most promising startups. I felt that other people would want something similar.

With that in mind I quit my job and made helping people find jobs abroad my full time job. I approached startups and social enterprises in Bangalore asking, “Would you be interested in hiring talent from abroad?”, “What positions are you currently having a hard time hiring for that you feel someone from abroad might be able to fill?”, “What are you willing to pay these candidates?”, etc.

Six months later I started my first company, BrainGain. I have lined up 15 companies in Bangalore, India that are looking to hire everything from sales and marketing, to design, to tech. Early stage startups that are Seed or Series A funded and are willing to provide fresh graduates with more responsibility than they are able to handle.

It is my first serious entrepreneurial plunge and I couldn’t be more excited to do it. There is nothing in life that I am more passionate about, and nothing that excites me more than to help others find ways of exploring an international career. When I get on a phone call with someone and tell him or her about the ways that they can live and work abroad I feel like I drank a double espresso. It’s invigorating!

As I write this I am on a train to Boston to speak at Harvard University. To think that 5 years after my travels have began I would be back in the states speaking at universities inspiring students to travel and work abroad absolutely blows my mind. I couldn’t be happier with where my life has come throughout that time.

This is a field I foresee myself spending the rest of my career. It is something that I will dedicate myself to for years to come, and I couldn’t be more excited to watch my life unfold in this sector. It is my niche.

Guest post by Troy Erstling @troyerstling