Loving Your Work, Working With Your Lover
“Congrats ma’am. It’s a commercial real estate developer”, I used to joke in a joking fashion, that the maternity medical staff must have told my dear late mother after giving birth to me. I was the oldest male child in a third generation thriving real estate business in the Deep South. As it turned out, after trying it for four years in my early adulthood, real estate was not for me and I later discovered that big market media and public relations in wasn’t either. A survival of the fittest environment of any type was not my thing. It took a major coronary to figure it out, but as they say it takes what it takes’. I was forced into early retirement…or so they thought.
The year was 2001. I pinched my skin to discover I was still alive and having been the active person I perceived myself to be, started getting busy. Step one was to learn golf. That lasted about a month. One might think that since I grew up near Tiger Wood, perhaps by osmosis some of his golfing genius might have rubbed off. That was not the case. I spent more time in sand traps, pine tree-filled woods and shallow lakes than on the green grass. Mark Twain had been right. Golfing was a good walk gone bad.
I felt like a zombie for nearly 20 years in corporate America. The longer my tenure, the more I realized it was creating a sort of imbalance between who I really was, and what I was truly becoming. I did not like who or what I was becoming, that is, a person willing to give up my real friends in pursuit of the almighty dollar, and often felt I was selling my soul to the devil. Raises, more perks, and all the other goodies didn’t change my mind. This was not for me. Some of my jobs were “to die for”; and some would have just as soon see me six feet under just for the chance at being in them. If only they knew.
On one of (many sick days; I took them all), I sat down sadly with pen and paper, hashing out what an ideal life would be for me. I had read in a self-help book that the process of writing a dream or goal onto paper was/is actually the first step of action; that is bringing it from the subconscious into the universe. It sounded a little dubious at best to me but I was willing to do anything to have a life that made sense to me with at least some way out of the terrible trappings and into something that might seem like some kind of normalcy. I knew what I was doing, might be pleasing society, but it was killing me.
The change was not a neon light egad experience; in fact totally the opposite. Within twelve years one thing led to another. Today I work at home, sometimes in my jammies if I wish. I work next to the one I love, my finance’ Lee. We run an SEO (search engine optimization) firm that is unique in that it offers not only organic SEO, but Twitter custom designed backgrounds and branded products as well as Internet optimization.
Google suddenly ranked my offbeat cartoon number one where it has stayed since 2005. I have launched at least ten E-stores full of funny gifts and collectibles bearing my cartoon images from tees to mugs and more. I closed a few that weren’t making money. About half stayed open, but that was okay as I considered them an experiment anyway. I founded, design and create the world’s only famous love quote shoes that Keds manufacture for me. I have become the designer for Mariel Hemingway licensed image gifts and collectibles and she is a pleasure with which to work. All of these things have happened from the comfort of my own living room. Not a bad deal for a guy who thought he might spend the rest of a short life chasing golf balls in the woods.
Lee and I have met many amazing people through the Twitter network. I became officially adopted by someone I had always admired greatly, Kathy Ireland as her brother, and it is a closer kinship than any I’ve had with any of my blood siblings. We talk, we laugh, and we tell stories and have fun. She is truly a decent wonderful kind soul. She is like a prayer answered as I always wanted a sister with whom I could communicate. Now it has come to be. She has another adopted brother Jon, and Jon and I are the brothers Kathy says she never had (she was raised with sisters but never had a brother). She is probably tougher than the two of us put together, but nicer than the day is long. She could cheer up Attilla The Hun.
My most unique and important experience that ever happened on Twitter, or any social network is that I met my soul mate there. I was not looking. I was told by peers this was a good place to network and meet people to get word out about products. I met Lee of whom I had waited 54 years to meet. I had had several opportunities for marriage, and both did not pan out, I am sure now for a reason. If either of them had, I would never have met Lee, and nothing and nobody in the world means more to me than Lee and my love relationship with her. We work together. We love our work and we work hard at it. We wear many hats. Graphic designers don’t come any better than Lee, and she is multi-talented.She is also the love advice columnist at the Herald de Paris. She did not know SEO when we started our SEO firm, but now knows it as well as any guru (we don’t use that word as we don’t believe it exists) of whom I’ve read their writings. Working with Lee is always a pleasure and feels more like fun than play. It reconfirms a lot of business principles and work ethics of keeping things simple and knowing that ones word is as good as a contract (even though we use contracts for professional reasons), Lee and I agree, if we say we are going to do something, it is as good as done. Though we work in a very complex business and world, we keep things very simple, and treat each other (and our clients) the way we wish to be treated. Our love grows stronger every day. As my friends remind me, Loving ones work while working with ones lover makes one a very lucky person. I have finally become that very lucky person. I feel like if it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.
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