*Sunday Ramblings is a weekly post where we share our personal anecdotes and thoughts. These posts won’t necessarily be directly related to In the Rough, but the likelihood is that they will be while creating a transparent look into the business.*
*This is Volume 5*
Do you ever sit back at what you’re doing now compared to what you were doing five, even 10 years in the past? I can’t help but going back to roughly 11 years ago when I was fairly confident I’d be living in Grand Rapids, MI, studying how to build furniture. The brochure made it look idyllic. Studying and building furniture in a state-of-the-art building surrounded by nature. Everywhere I looked I heard nothing but positive things about both the school and the city. I was excited. I built a portfolio – I don’t remember what it consisted of anymore. I filled in the application… I did everything short of actually applying. That excitement didn’t last that long. I somehow didn’t realize the price for an international student. $30,000 tuition for one year? It was a four year program. That didn’t include anything else. I’d need a place to live, food, textbooks, materials? A new computer… what else? Surely the expenses didn’t end there. My excitement and that dream got put to a staggering and shattering halt. Maybe I wasn’t excited as I thought. As I do, I kept moving forward. The dream got slotted away somewhere deep and dark and my daily grind turned to finishing my English degree.
Since then, the dream changed. It changed a lot. I landed in a spot that was at first inspiring (maybe blindly so) and eventually a great teacher, in the sense that I learned a lot about the rights and wrongs about business, but also about myself. I found my passion. I ended up back in school, back with a dream to do things for myself. Am I a bad employee? I don’t think so. But I think I have a lot to offer the world, or on a smaller level, my community. This new dream struck me so hard it felt like it had always been a part of me – like another limb, one that I didn’t know about but once I found it I wasn’t sure how I’d lived without it before then! Sounds cheesy, I know. My apologies.
The dream today is still the same. It feels farther now than when I went back to school, especially as now I’m paying off student debt that really slows everything down. Money being the biggest deterrent… or the only one? In my mind it’s the only thing stopping me, but in reality I know there’s a lot more to it than that. I know that I still have a lot of work to do to get to where I really want to be, but I also know that I will continue to work hard to get there. Until then, I need to find that passionate fire and apply it here… because I know I’ve been slacking. I need to resurrect that Grand Rapids dream, and maybe, just maybe, that’s when everything will click into place.
In the Rough 