After mentioning your aspirations of opening a boutique spin studio, your friend Rebecca Hedley had a lot of advice for how to follow your dreams, despite the fact that she recently completely gave up on her own.
“You know what you should do, though,” Hedley said, as if you hadn’t considered anything she was about to say. “You should really have a fully thought out plan and consider the financial consequences of working for yourself.”
Hedley, who had her own dreams of becoming a novelist until she didn’t want to work any harder than she already was at her receptionist job, offered her unsolicited two cents.
“When I was pursuing my dream of writing a book, I took stock of all the challenges I would likely face,” Hedley said in her characteristic tone of I-know-better-than-you, honed at her full-time job at a dentist’s office. “I’m really into pros and cons lists. And the cons list was so much longer which is why I gave up on writing my novel. But you should make a list too because who knows maybe it’ll work out better for you!”
Hedley, who spent three years at a top creative writing program before ultimately becoming the full-time receptionist at a dentist’s office, insisted she knew what was what and that you’d be remiss to not listen to her. After all, she literally took a whole two concrete steps toward her dream – she bought a leather-bound Moleskine notebook and a brand new Macbook Pro – before she gave up at the first instance of resistance – not having a single idea about what she wanted to write about.
“I’m just saying, it’s harder than you think and you really need a game plan going into it,” she continued. “Like knowing any of the actionable steps you have to take to make things happen for yourself. I had a really good game plan and, sure, I gave up my novel, but the game plan thing is still true.”
Hedley continued to dispense useless information to help you on your specific career path, despite the fact that your MBA and background as a fitness trainer make you uniquely qualified to run a spin studio.
But her advice wasn’t all tough love!
“Yours will actually probably be much easier, since it’s just opening a business,” Hedley offered. “Becoming a published author requires so much more mental real estate. So you’ll probably actually be very successful.”
