Hello World
As many of you know, I am pivoting in my career from a public policy data scientist to becoming a full-time artist and business owner. Which is a giant shift in what I get to do for my work and how my day to day is structured. I am beyond excited about what I get to do in my day to day as an artist and business owner: creating art, traveling and looking for inspiration, organizing my inventory and supplies, sharing my artwork with others, the freedom to choose how I want to spend my days (mostly). However, I’m a bit nervous about the loss of structure that comes with being self-employed and pursuing a creative business: no more task lead or manager or team to report to and keep me accountable and many, many less meetings that force structure on my time. I know that I excel under tight deadlines, having structure, and feeling accountable to someone else besides myself. Also, what I really enjoyed in my corporate job has been the opportunities to meet and talk with my colleagues; providing and hearing status updates on tasks or projects, discussing next steps and new ideas, talking about career progression, and simply chatting about our lives. So, to help myself with some challenges that I foresee I will encounter as I pivot into a full time artist running a creative business, I figured maintaining a blog will help me stay motivated and accountable.
As I see it now, the purpose of this blog is for me to provide my family, friends, and close colleagues updated on how my pivot (what I am going to consider a big experiment) is going to keep me motivated and accountable. Also, I’ve found that most of my friends and family do not use social media (I think a selection bias based on my personal preferences), so I thought this would be a great way to keep them up-to-date. I’ll talk about topics that I would discuss on 1 on 1s and check-in meetings: status updates on what I’m working on, progress I’ve made towards career goals, what I have coming up in the future, blockers to my progress, etc. I’ll also include some more personal things like what books I’m reading or general life updates that might not be related to my art. I’ll probably also ask for advice and guidance, and I’ve enabled the comment feature to my blog posts, so anyone can comment and share your thoughts. A rule about comments though: be nice. Also, because I don’t really like oversharing with strangers, this blog will be private and password protected. So if you’re reading this, it means that I’ve personally given you the link to the blog and the password because I feel comfortable sharing this level of information with you and want to stay connected with you. This is implied, but let me be explicit: Please don’t share my blog with others. There may be a moment in time where I will feel comfortable sharing this with a broader audience of people I don’t know, but that moment is not now. If you do want to share my artwork and progress with your friends and family (which I would really appreciate if you did), you can always show them my Instagram account (@margaret.luo.art), my TikTok (@margaret.luo.art), or my general website link (margaretluoart.com) and they can sign up for emails. I’m also hoping that, by keeping this blog private to those I have directly shared it with, you’ll feel encouraged and comfortable to comment on my posts, using your first name, so I know who’s talking to me. That all being said, this is going to be a casual blogging effort. So expect typos, bad grammar, bad English, and stream of consciousness typing. My plan right now is to write a blog post once a week, but I’ll revisit this schedule depending on what I think is working for me and my business.
So onto the first weekly update, which will probably also change format over time as I figure out what works best for me.
What I’m working on right now:
A collection of beaded embroidery hoops. I’ve just started on the 7th hoop out of 7 of the collection. I still have to embroider 2 hoops that I only put beads and shells on. I’m hoping to be done with all 7 hoops by the end of this week, but being realistic, they probably won’t be finished until another week.
Inputs
I just finished listening to Atomic Habits by James Clear
I’m about to read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
Outings
I’m going to Chicago Friday - Monday and attending Lollapalooza on Sunday and I’m very excited
That’s all for now. I’ll be back in a week for another update!
