Some time ago I opened a Sparrowebites Etsy shop. I had made a good amount of weaves since I took my first weaving course so it seemed it was the time to start selling them. I gave up TV to weaving. I immersed myself in to so so intensely. I had the time,  a notebook full of notes of future projects and a basket full of yarn. Of course I also had thriving Weaving Pinterest album, but where was this heading? I really didn’t know, but I didn’t let that stop me.

After a 13 year career in marketing I became a Yoga teacher, and now I consider myself an aspiring weaver too. One doesn’t replace the other. Every new skill or experience adds up to the previous one and makes up for all you have to offer to the world. I’m all of the above, and many more to come.

They might seem random and disconnected paths but they are not. Yoga helped me overcome stress and heartache when I first moved to Singapore. It became a part of my life that stays with me regardless of how much I actually practice. It taught me a mindset and an approach to life that I apply now in everything I do. It also dded something I had been missing for some years now in my corporate life: A direct touch with customers.

While all my marketing efforts were usually too high above the food chain to the customer, teaching Yoga was DIY. I could plan, execute, deliver my work and see the benefits and feedback immediately. Let me assure you something, there’s nothing more fulfilling than that seeing the results of your effort right there, in front of you, in that precise moment.

Weaving for me is a lot more intimate. A lot more about creating, but directly with your hands, not with the mind and using technology, but purely with your senses, with head your eyes and your hands. It’s going back to basics. It’s creativity without a real purpose, not like advertising. Pure aesthetic just hoping somebody would feel the same way about it as you do. We could say it’s like… art?

It felt so good to be able to execute my own ideas for once, without relying on others like agencies or graphic designers of my past life.  I had no idea that I craved for the production independence so much.

Whatever I do in life, marketing, yoga, my own mindfulness craft ot weaving, it all has something in common: passion. My passion for discovering, for learning and becoming good at anything I get myself into. Then sharing it with others that might benefit from it or contribute to a bigger cause.

Passion doesn’t have to be one thing, and It doesn’t have to be THE only thing you do. Passion is an approach based on a feeling, not a plan or a job or a hobby, and feelings change overtime. 

We hear all the time that for a successful career path one should find that thing they are passionate about and follow it. That was the mantra some years ago but now things are luckily changing. The truth is that only 3% of people doing that succeed (according to research by 80,000 hours.org )

This TED talk was a real eye opener for me. You are not supposed to know what you want to do all the time. Being good at your job doesn’t mean that’s the thing you are most passionate about. It’s a job, it needs to cover the basics of not hating it, and pay the bills.

I got the reassurance that what I’m doing,  to explore and experiment, to keep trying different things while I take a break from corporate, it’s healthy and actually necessary. It also gave me confidence to know that I can be a multidisciplinary professional and grow as such.

From a marketing perspective going many different ways made me feel a bit insecure. It’s something we call positioning, and it’s done with brands products and services. But try to do it with people. Try to do it to yourself, and. it’s not that easy. It’s straightforward to say: this is what I do and why I do it well. But the reality is there’s much more to me than that. I’m not a product, I’m a human. We have many layers and sides.

I always found it very difficult to apply what I had done for so many years (marketing communications) to my humble self. The concept of personal brand is something I do not quite see in myself. That’s becase one can’t see it from their own perspective. Because the brand doesn’t belong to “The Company” but lives in the audience’s mind, it’s a perception others have of you.

As a marketeer one needs to find a common umbrella to all those facets to build a personal brand. People are not services or products, people change and evolve and that there are many sides of them that make the whole but to be able to differentiate, in the customer’s mind, one needs to chose only a few.

That’s probably how I ended up with this blog in this website that can that seem a random at first but that in reality it’s about me and the various abilities, talents and interests that define me. Those facets I don’t get the chance to “market” while selling my marketing communications and branding services but are still part of me and important to me. The passion for aesthetics, the mindfulness, the wellness, the plants the the practical life… just like my ‘art’, I can only hope that when I launch the message in a bottle it resonates with the person that finds it.

A person is the combination of all those many sides. Some on the bright side of the moon, some on the dark side, but still part of the same rotating moon. It’s not just one passion that guides your way to success. It’s a whole.

It’s easier to make an impact when you focus on just one benefit, but that’s also reducing your chances of success. Launching yourself as a service provider or a new discipline can be as scary as jumping into a dark pool.

You can’t really see how deep it is, so it’s hard to predict if you are going to end up going in the water with a graceful dive, or an embarrassing belly flop.

When you get out of your comfort zone you just don’t know at happens next.  But you believe in it and you I love it and you go ahead! Only time will tell, and you are the one to define your own measurement for success at what you do. An experience is a success, a leaning is a success, enjoyment is a success, a failure is also a success.

I secretly always wanted to be a journalist in Glamour magazine and try different things to just write about them. That’s how this blog started and the same curiosity and interest is what keeps it going. Weaving is part of my experiments in life, and something to do for joy. To feel and enjoy and to write about it. I look at my work and I feel really proud and I don’t need to know where is this heading.

Singapore, July 2017 –