Interview: Alyssa Miller - taking risks and starting your own business

I met Alyssa when she was attending Howard University here in Washington, DC.  She now lives in Minneapolis, MN with her husband (and brand new baby girl!) and she recently launched her own business – Real Eyes Editing (RE). I had the opportunity to catch up with Alyssa on the phone and we talked about what she’s learning on the front end of this entrepreneurial endeavor. EKO: Tell us about RE!
Alyssa: Real Eyes is a copy editing business that primarily services Christian thought authors. I do copy editing, copy writing and social media content.

EKO: What prompted you to start your own business?
Alyssa: Last fall I didn’t land a business job the way I thought I would [Alyssa and her husband took a year off from their jobs to travel to Costa Rica and Mexico to grow their Spanish fluency. When she returned, she didn’t find a job as quickly as she was expecting to.]

I started to think back to conversations Matt and I had when we were traveling, we talked about our dreams and what we would do if we didn’t have any limitations. Those conversations prompted me to do more writing while we were traveling, and I even picked up a few freelance jobs and an editing project for a family friend while we were gone.

But when we got back, I tucked that away. The easiest route was to go back to what was comfortable, what was known, and what made consistent money – the corporate world. But when those traditional doors were closed, it forced me to re-ask the questions we’d asked ourselves while we were traveling.

By early October we made the decision I would really invest in this, in starting a copy editing business.  Doing more than an odd job here or there, I moved day-by-day into the details of starting an official business.

EKO: How have you leaned on others who have gone before you?
Alyssa: Heavily – very heavily. Prayer has led me to wise counsel. I’ve met other editors, other freelance editors, other entrepreneurs – there’s something I can learn from everyone. I don’t know how much to stress how much I’ve depended on other people, helping point me in the right direction as a result of what they’ve done.

EKO: How do you approach people for help? What do you ask them?
Alyssa: I just ask people to do coffee and then I listen to their story. I think sometimes when I ask specifically for advice it gets a little awkward, they feel pressure. But when I ask them for their story, I hear “I started at my kitchen table.” Or “I didn’t get my LLC until 4 or 5 years in.” I can glean a lot of advice from their stories without them feeling pressure to say something really profound or wise.

When I first started, I thought there was ONE WAY TO DO FREELANCE EDITING. Turns out, there are TONS of ways.

EKO: How would you encourage other women thinking of starting their own business?
Alyssa: I would really encourage them to “Start with Why” – Simon Sinek’s concept. Why do you really want to do this? What is your real vision? How does it work with your natural skills and abilities? Does it line up with your long-term goals?

Once all that checks out, then go for it! Trust the Lord. It’s scary! At one point I was in a parking lot crying “I don’t know how to get clients… what am I doing? Matt’s going to think I’m a failure.” But I knew that all I could do was be faithful with what I’ve been directed to do by wise counsel, and trust God. I’ve learned not to let worry or anxiety consume me. I have to operate on faith – without faith it’s impossible to please God. (I took that one from the Bible).

Thanks Alyssa, for your time, and for sharing what you’re learning about starting your own business.

Anyone out there in need of a free-lance editor – check out Real Eyes!

Stop and... Listen to Bono

Ahh, it’s time to ease back into this blogging thing. I'll start with a softball post in the “stop and…” category. Let’s stop and listen to Bono talk for 3.5 minutes. There’s so much in here, I think the term “softball” is misleading. He starts out talking about living in the midst of tension between who you are and who you want to be. He also talks about what part of the Lord's prayer is most poignant to him (which is one of my favorite parts too).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUvt_5ob3zg

What stood out to you?

This video was posted by my friend Joel Clark (check out his awesome new book - Awake! – the book you can watch)

Joseph, can you take a message for your wife?

This post is part of the Rachel Held Evans synchroblog event “One in Christ: A Week of Mutuality.”  You can follow this event on Twitter by entering #mutuality2012 to read the entries by participating bloggers.  Isn’t it telling which accounts from the Bible we use to shape our understandings of God, ourselves and our place in the world?

Earlier this week, author and blogger Rachel Held Evans made the point that “when it comes to womanhood, many Christians tend to read the rest of scripture through the lens of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 rather than the other way around.[1]”

11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

I was just reading the first few chapters of Luke. The angel Gabriel visits Zechariah and tells him that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a child (improbable because of their advanced age). Then a few months later, Gabriel visits Mary and tells her she will carry the Son of God.

By reading this passage through the lens of 1 Timothy 2:11-15, we might have expected this account to play out differently. Luke tells us that both Zechariah and Elizabeth were “righteous in the sight of God” (Luke 1:6).  Wouldn’t we have expected Luke to say that Zechariah was righteous, but that Elizabeth needed to be saved through bearing this child (1 Tim 2:15)?  And we might have expected that Elizabeth would be silenced, so she couldn’t disrupt the work of the Holy Spirit, rather than Zechariah being rendered mute until Elizabeth had spoken the name of their son. But that’s not the way it happened.

And then consider when Gabriel told Mary she would carry Jesus.  If these events had met with the expectations of 1 Timothy 2:11-15, Gabriel would have appeared to Joseph instead of Mary, right? Given him the message for her? Or at the very least, wouldn’t he have reminded Mary to “check with your fiancé”? Gabriel probably wouldn’t have told Mary “you are highly favored” (Luke 1:28), but instead he would said “if you do this, you will be highly favored. God will save you if you have this child.” Salvation for all of us comes through her childbirth – because she bore Jesus. But it’s not like she had to do this to earn God’s favor.

But that’s not the way it happened either. God chose to speak straight to Mary through Gabriel, to ask her to do something very important. He didn’t do it through her husband, and He didn’t tell her that this act of obedience would save her. He called her personally and directly and asked her to do something that took courage and strength, just as He continues to call other women personally and directly too –  throughout the Bible and into today – to do things that required courage and strength: Miriam, Deborah, Mary Magdalene, Corrie Ten Boom, Elizabeth Elliot, Mother Teresa, Christine Kane, Margaret Feinberg, Katherine Leary Asdorf, Stephanie Summers.

The church needs to be a place where the direct and personal call of God upon women to act on His behalf is celebrated. When Christians use one or two passages (like 1 Timothy or 1 Corinthians 14) to shape our worldview of women and their roles in society, we are failing to embrace a wholly Biblical view of how God spoke to women and acted through them, and continues to do so today.

 

[1] “Who’s Who Among Biblical Women Leaders”, Rachel Held Evans,

Cheating... just a little

In his new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely explains how his experiments with 30,000 show that “only a few people cheat a lot, but a lot of people cheat a little.”

In a June 4 interview on NPR, Dr. Ariely describes an experiment he conducted where people were asked to self-report the number of math problems they answered correctly. They received $1.00 for every correct answer.  People generally responded that they got six questions correct, when, on average, they only got four problems correct in the time allotted.

“Across all of our experiments, we've tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000.”[1]

Do you cheat … “just a little”?
I was amused by the radio segment on the drive home - the stories were funny and Dr. Ariely seemed to have a good pulse on human nature.

But when I thought about it more critically, I knew he had a good pulse on my own human nature. I think we all let ourselves get away with “minor infractions” – stretching the truth on our time sheets at work, lying about why we’re late getting to a meeting, using the printer for personal purposes and justifying it with “everybody does it” and “it’s not like I’m really stealing - it’s just some paper.” Interestingly, Dr. Ariely also talked about how not seeing a real monetary value assigned to something made us more prone to steal.

But the Bible doesn’t say, “it’s okay to do this little stuff as long as you can be trusted with the big things.” It says the exact opposite. In Luke 16: 10-12 (NIV), Jesus is speaking to his disciples about stewardship. He tells the story of a debt collector who worked for a rich man. The debt collector gets “creative” in collecting his master’s debts, and Jesus says:

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?"

So when I demonstrate that I can’t be trusted with the “little” things, like lying to coworkers about why I’m late, can I expect God to entrust me with all the “big” things He wants to call me to do?

I believe it’s a lifelong battle, but I know I want to stop cheating “even just a little.”

 

[1] NPR Interview: The “Truth” About Why We Lie, Cheat and Steal by NPR Staff, June 4th, 2012.