Hi, my name is Lisa Futscher, and I’m a 38 year old soon-to-be author. I’ve always known that I wanted to write a book, but looking back, I see now that the main hindrance has been that I allowed others’ definition of success to prevent me from actualizing my own.
Don’t let others’ definition of success prevent you from actualizing your own.
I think what makes this particularly astonishing is that I grew up believing that I could be anything I wanted to be. My mom was a doctor, and I attended a college preparatory high school. I always expected to have a career, and my family expected it for me as well.
Though my creativity was cultivated and encouraged, I was urged to make plans for a career. Of course I knew there were professional writers, but those were the exceptions, the lucky ones, so I needed something more secure to rely upon. Whether I was directly told this or I only inferred is hard to say. It was something I just knew, learned most likely through repetition of seeing others’ attitudes towards more respectable, lucrative careers.
So when time came to go to college, I began as pre-med, then quickly changed to business, with the belief that these were practical job choices (which is not to say they aren’t). But by the end of my first year, I felt an emotional void that only writing could fill for me, and so I decided that I would change to a liberal arts degree in English. But even then, I felt that I couldn’t just have an English degree, so I went on to get a teaching degree to go with it…because how could I ever be just a writer?
Particularly, it was the fear of not achieving monetary success that prevented me from doing the thing that I wanted most to do. The biggest irony is that while I’ve certainly had accomplishments along the way – I have won awards as a college writing instructor and for my direct sales business – I still feel that I have yet to build a career that has created the lasting financial security that I believed would result from my hardwork and choosing what we were taught was the safer career choice, which for me ended up being teaching.
Part of the problem is of course related to the corporatization of America. In a sense, millennials were deceived when we were told that college would lead to careers for us. Sure, it has for some of us. In fact, I will even admit that for the friends who are still working in their fields, it was the ones who stuck with their degrees in medicine, business, and engineering. But when I look at my friends who chose the liberal arts path like me, many – if not most – of us do not have careers in fields that require college degrees. College just wasn’t quite the sure thing that we were led to believe.
But this blog isn’t about the corporatization of America. And it isn’t about painting myself and my liberal arts friends as victims to our broken system. In fact, I do not regret my choice to get a degree in English; I value the knowledge and experience I gained. And in my heart, I knew it was the only path that wouldn’t make me miserable. It also isn’t about pointing blame at teachers and loved ones who guided me towards a career in a field that would have been higher paying because, ultimately, I know they loved me and wanted what was best for me too.
What this post is about is the fact that I felt like my dreams were somehow wrong or insignificant, and so they had to wait. I didn’t even know how to follow my dreams, so how could I ever begin to try?
What are the steps you need to take to actualize your dreams? What is the first step to actualizing your dreams?
What I wish someone had told me then was that my dreams are important too. That it’s okay to have a plan B, a practical option. But take a look right now into what steps it would take to reach your own goals. I was so convinced that you went to college, and then got a job. I didn’t know there were other options. And if I had just taken the time to look, I might have incorporated those steps into my plans. Instead, I thought I had to follow someone else’s plans.
I began to question the establishment when I was working as an adjunct professor making $2800 per course that I taught. To put it in perspective, while they would never have assigned me the four course teaching load that a full time professor would have taught, I was teaching three courses per semester, plus the twenty hours of tutoring I did a week amounted to the same level of work as a full time professor, yet my highest annual salary during that time was about $17,000.
So I felt liberated from the system, in a way, when I turned instead to direct sales, where I quickly excelled. I wasn’t afraid of putting in the effort, and direct sales was like being the owner of a franchise in that they taught me how to build a business using their model. In many ways, it gave me freedom because I was able to make my own schedule and essentially set my income for myself.
But again, it amounted to me letting someone else tell me how to be successful. I got my first taste of being recognized for my sales early on, and then my ego needed that to keep going. But again, writing was something that I thought I should do after I was established. After, I got my career to the point I wanted.
Even then, I subconsciously believed that writing as a career could never be stable. Putting that alongside the fact that I built what was considered a successful direct sales business simply illustrates the absurdity of my belief.
Are you actually looking for stability or validation?
When you offer people a job in sales, most people run away saying that it’s unstable. Clearly, the instability hadn’t deterred me. Over the years, I’ve had several people tell me that it was fear of failure that prevented me from pursuing my writing dreams further. While I certainly won’t deny that, I think more specifically, it was that I felt that I needed others to tell me how to be successful because I didn’t believe in my ability to determine my own level of success. I wasn’t really looking for stability, or at least not that primarily. I was looking for validation and respect through my career choices.
The funny thing is that in all my efforts to find a career that would be considered secure by others’ standards, I never felt secure at all. I mostly felt taken advantage of, expendable. Even in my direct sales business, I knew that if I stopped moving for long, my entire business would fall apart around me.
Finally, I just decided that if I kept waiting for security, I’d never get to do the thing that I want to do. What ultimately made me change came down to the fear of not trying became greater than the fear of trying for me. So here I am.
Recently, I’ve been researching how to start a writing career, which led me to discover an annual reference book published called the Writer’s Market. It’s currently in its 100th edition, having been published annually since 1921. Do you see? The resource always existed. I just didn’t know to even look for it. I believed that I had to follow the system laid out for me, that it was safer than forging my own way.
And that’s the point – that if I wouldn’t have been so busy listening to what others told me, either explicitly or implicitly, what success was, then maybe I would have made different choices. The reality is that I no doubt would have struggled, and would have lacked security. But I did both of those things anyway. At least then, it would have been on my terms. I could have been moving towards my ultimate goal, which was and always has been to be a writer.
Don’t ignore your dreams just because others have told you it isn’t good enough.
Now to be clear, I am not suggesting for anyone to throw caution to the wind. I don’t encourage people to become starving artists, for I don’t wish that of myself either. But I do suggest that if you have a dream, don’t ignore it because others have told you that it isn’t good enough. Just start. Move slowly if you must. But don’t wait. Do it now.
For here I am, age 38, just starting out with the hope and belief that I will build a name for myself.
Lisa Futscher 