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How Starting My Business Helped Me Live My Motorcycle Dreams

Earlier this month, I completed my fifth annual 1,400-mile cross-country motorcycle road trip. This is my third year riding my own bike, and my third year riding on my dream motorcycle, a red Indian.

I haven’t always been a motorcyclist. The first two years of this trip, I rode on the back of my husband’s bike. But after that second trip, I decided I wanted to learn how to ride. I completed my local motorcycle safety program and got my license. We bought a Honda Rebel 250 and I set a goal to ride my first 500 miles. Then I set my sights on a bigger bike, more mileage, and a longer trip.

Living my motorcycle dreams involved a long process of incremental growth, a flexible schedule, and some money. I had all of these things because I was a seasoned business owner. While I’ve been working under the name At Peace With Money for about three years, I have a much longer history of doing independent bookkeeping work, and before that I ran a jewelry design business. The skills I gained as a solopreneur – dedication, commitment to incremental progress, etc. translated well into becoming a motorcyclist.

I also have a flexible schedule as a solopreneur, which meant I could find the time during the week for lessons and rides. And I had the ability to pay for a course, because of my financial savvy in my own business experiences. I find that solopreneurship can be full of valuable lessons, and can give you the skillsets and necessary resources to accomplish the things you’ve dreamed up. That’s why my objective with At Peace With Money is to help solopreneurs align their business profits with their life goals; because I think it’s 100% possible!

I hope this little pep-talk give you a dose of inspiration for the week. Think of a dream you’ve always had. How could you orient your business to focus on achieving it? You might also like to read How to Start a Goal-Based Business for more thoughts on this subject.

Angela

It’s Okay to Make Money

If you get my newsletter, you’ll know that this month I’m focusing on breaking down some barriers that often prevent people from striking out on their solopreneurial adventures. I decided to tackle one of the most common stumbling blocks first; the belief that you don’t deserve to make money. There are many iterations of this belief. Maybe it’s not that you don’t deserve to make money doing what you want to do, but that it will be very challenging. Or maybe it’s that you need to do something more serious instead of following your creative pursuit. If any of these statements resonate with you, you probably have some limiting beliefs around how you can make money.

Not without reason, of course! Our society puts enormous emphasis on the corporate world, tech business, and STEM education. It’s no wonder that more creative pursuits and anything else that falls outside that realm is relegated to a list of jobs that won’t make you money. These messages get transmitted to us over and over starting in childhood – so of course our beliefs around how we can make money are biased.

Let’s go out on a limb and start imagining some ways you could make money from your passion. Get creative about the possibilities. What are some ideas you have? Once you open your mind, the ideas may start to flow freely. Making a list of all these ideas can get you going.

Actioning and monetizing any of these ideas will take follow through, learning, and plenty of time and resources. My real point here is that there are many ways you can make money doing your creative pursuit. So it’s time for us to throw away the idea that you can’t/won’t/shouldn’t make money that way. I want to encourage you and give you permission to make money the way you want – whether it’s through your creative pursuits, or another idea that makes you want to strike out on your own.

Removing this barrier of belief is probably one of the most important things we can tackle, before we get into the nitty-gritty. For more on this subject, I recommend my articles “Artists Define Their Own Business Success” and “Artistry and Solopreneurship Can Coexist.”

And if you’re interested in getting into the details and figuring out how you can make the most out of the money you make, check out my Services page and schedule a call!

☮

Angela

Image Source: Paweł Czerwiński