Businesses are messy.

Because anything run by a human being runs the risk of human error — because we, as beings, are fallible.

Which means that our lives can be messy too.

But it is in this mess that we find ourselves.

There’s one lesson that one of my creative writing professors taught me that I’ve never forgotten, and it is the truth that inherently, the story is in the tangents.

In the messy tangents. 

The unexpected little moments happen in between the bigger parts of our lives. That is inherently where our story lies.

My story is in these moments. It is in the morning coffees in our small one-bedroom rental condo, in the quiet moments on my bed with my book in my hand, in the sound of the cars passing while I type away at this email, and in the laughter that fills my 8 pm work sprints with my friend Nafi.

It is also in the longer, but really important tangents that weave their way through my story. It’s in my 12-year-old self, standing in the Best Buy, convincing my Dad to make the switch from film to digital. It’s in the 16-year old me, waiting behind the counter at the Henry’s camera store, to hand over my precious dollars earned from months of working at Mcdonald’s to purchase my first DSLR. It’s in the never-ending spring afternoon when I not-so-casually took my parents out for a walk in the park so I could break the news that I was going to focus on my business full-time.

It’s in these tangents, away from the scripts we direct that dictate our lives, where we find both ourselves and the important stories.

It’s in these stories, the ones we get to leave behind for our future generations, the legacies we create for the world that we live in, where we can truly exercise our ability to shape better futures.

The histories of the future will be shaped by the media we capture right now, today, in this age. The stories we capture are the new narrative, so when we master the tools we have so readily available — for the first time in well, ever — we can use them to not only make our voices loud but HEARD.

Because when we strip away the fear that comes with these tools and equip ourselves with the knowledge to use them, it can be incredible.

So this is really one long tangent to say:

I want you to have the power to harness that.