Hey there,
As I sit down to write this note on a Sunday afternoon, an almost-finished novel tempting me to savor the last few hours of the weekend before another full week, I feel both exhilarated and exhausted.
This year has been everything—isolating, eye-opening, challenging, affirming, confusing.
I’ve experienced highs and lows in my work life and personal life this year. First, I want to celebrate a few wins that myself and my team have seen with Curate Well Co. so far this year:
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We grew from a team of 1 to a team of 3
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We had 933.33% revenue growth between Q4 2019 and Q2 2020; and 165.29% revenue growth from 2019 to 2020 YTD
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We’ve added 2 new offerings, expanded our online presence to 2 new platforms, rebranded, and landed some pretty rad features (hey, hi, hello Darling, Buzzfeed, Medium, and Thrive).
We have a lot to be proud of.
We also have some really incredible expansion and evolution projects in the works for the remainder of this year and the next (you’ll have to wait to hear what those are, but here’s a few hints: product lines, project management, and lots of inspired design work)!
I’m exhausted from everything 2020 has thrown at us. As the owner of a small business, I feel the impact of unexpected hurdles. As a caregiver at heart and natural leader I’ve absorbed some of the shock for many of my clients, community, and team culture in the hopes they don’t have to endure the ripple effect of its full strength.
I’m equally exhilarated by the possibility and growth (call it the Type 1 “reformer” in me) this year has shown us. It has efficiently demolished barriers we’ve grown accustomed to and it’s reminded me how important creativity and connection are for us to thrive.
I have a feeling 2020 has more in store for us, so I wanted to share with you a few of my key learnings from the first half of this year in hopes it supports you and your endeavors:
Confront challenging circumstances head on
There is no turning a blind eye to 2020. This year has been effortful. I’ve realized that being essential with our effort is necessary if we’re going to overcome obstacles.
What I mean is this: we no longer have the luxury of avoiding hardship, avoiding uncomfortable situations, or putting off change. We have to set our sights on the things that matter and work towards that end.
I admired the leaders in my community who immediately invented new iterations of their businesses or offerings in March when they were forced to close their doors. I learned from the leaders in my community who loudly and confidently shared their voices and showed up to fight social injustice in June.
Here’s one way I’m integrating these lessons: as the Curate Well Co. team grows and our company culture is born, I’ve committed to confronting challenging situations head on. I give timely, informal, candid feedback multiple times a day to my team. I closely examine our SOPs (standard operating procedures) and systems for their vulnerabilities, and iterate on them quickly. I invest in experts monthly, to teach us what we don’t know. And I’m confronting my privilege, my role as an ally, my Instagram feed and social circles, and the influence of my voice.
Assume you don’t have the full context
We cannot possibly know what is happening inside each person’s individual experience. This is true normally (oh normal, we miss you)—and with social distancing and conducting almost all of our communication and connection through technology, it’s only more true.
Cancel culture is tempting—and often well-intended. What I’ve learned this year is that context is everything. I’ve learned that asking more questions, making a more thorough commitment to understand, and choosing to create the space for context before reacting allows me to be the most authentic version of myself.
Communicating through technology doesn’t provide us the full context. Whether it’s through email or on social media, the scope of what we consume is incomplete and often altered.
This is a call to hold ourselves and each other to a standard of compassion while we seek the full context.
I’m practicing this key takeaway by holding myself accountable to asking questions in every single conversation. To noticing when I judge myself and others, when I jump to conclusions, or justify before examining all the information available.
Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture
So many events this year have reinforced our sense of urgency. We’ve had to adapt and adjust to survive in the short-term, and many of us (myself included) have had lapses in our long-term vision.
While the opportunities to grow have been aplenty, I think it’s worth asking ourselves if we’ve been growing in the right direction. As I reflect on the last 6 months, I’ve found myself in a spiral of creation that has not necessarily gotten me closer to my long-term goals (which were in the forefront at the beginning of this year), although they have been fruitful in the short-term.
While I don’t want to discredit my work (or my team’s or yours), I do want to challenge us all to come back to who we want to be a year from now. Five years from now. Ten years from now.
Maybe that seems daunting given how much we’ve experienced in the last four months alone. Maybe conjuring up an image of the world ten years from now seems laughably inconceivable to you.
I urge you to imagine and identify what you want for yourself and the world long-term anyways. Keep it at the forefront of the actions you’re taking now. There is no future without the present. Every day is the present, until we wake up one day and it’s the future. No matter which actions we take, they are creating the future right now. Let’s take aligned action.
I am committed to taking action on projects and initiatives that fulfill my long-term goals on a monthly basis. To allocating resources towards my wild, impractical, exciting dreams. To continue to imagine and reinvent unique and original expressions of my ideas.
If you want things to be radically different; you have to do things radically differently
One thing I’ve learned this year is that it is so remarkably easy to do what we already know how to do. To not disrupt the status quo. To effortlessly slip into familiar patterns and habits. And when we courageously step outside the boundaries of what’s already established, to deeply crave a quiet retreat back towards the comfort of what we’re used to.
In chatting with friends a few weeks ago, I realized that work has expanded to take up most of my time. Without the structure in my schedule of a workout, a coffee date with a colleague, or happy hour with friends, there was nothing to keep me from working all the time.
This showed me how easy it is to normalize things that are not at all normal (like working 14 hour days, or social injustice). This conversation was a potent reminder that if we want things to be different, we have to keep showing up to make them so—or we risk our integrity, our character, deteriorating.
Radical change doesn’t have to look radical. It can be enforcing boundaries. It can be holding the space to feel your feelings. It can look like continuing to ask yourself: what could change and what can I do to contribute to that change?
You are a catalyst and you’re here for a purpose
If nothing else, I learned this year what it means to have a soul purpose. To have your whole soul stand for something so strongly, that nothing can stop you from living it. To believe so fiercely in something that you know it’s possible despite any obstacle that may crowd your path. To have complete certainty that you are a catalyst for something—a force that can’t be stopped, here to create something. It’s just a matter of figuring out how.
I want to leave you with this:
We each have a unique experience. That’s our right. And so it’s easy to forget that no person has the exact same experience as you, no matter the situation. The only experience we share completely is the experience of being human. And, human to human, I want you to know I see you.
I see your strength. I see your vulnerability. I see you asking hard questions, and thinking through hard answers. I see you problem-solving like you’ve never had to problem-solve before.
I see your courage. And your kindness. I see your anger. I see your fear. I see your wisdom and your curiosity. I see all the things you’re doing, that people don’t see.
I see you.
With love,
Pia