Ronii Bartles Ronii Bartles

I’ve been seeing people's New Year’s resolutions all over social media. We’ve seen them all from loose weight to be more grateful. Allen even made a resolution this year! Like, that’s a Christmas miracle in and of itself. He is striving to be more positive this year. The other morning before he left for work he said to me, ‘I know I’m supposed to be more positive, but this day is gonna suck.’ You gotta start somewhere.

We all make hot + heavy New Years resolutions and after a few weeks those resolutions fizzle out like your high school summer romance. Although some of us are committed enough to keep going, because you know what they say? {cue the cliché} What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I don’t know about you but 2016 has been heavy. Heavy in emotion, heavy in energy, heavy to carry. I’ve just kinda been going through the motions of writing blogs + sending emails because that’s what one is supposed to do. I’ve been a terrible friend to you for that. That’s not helping you or me. I’m not going to go into all the gory details about the year but to sum it up… it’s been heavy.

But always the optimist that I am, I felt a shift recently. A shift in momentum. Finally, I feel more focused + want to work on projects that excite me rather than going through the motions. That’s why my word for 2017 is Famous.

Pivoting sometimes sucks. But the beauty of being an entrepreneur is that we are nimble + flexible and can pivot our business quickly + easily. Embrace it! After you wallow for a hot minute of course.

I know this is a controversial statement I just made because we are taught to be encouraging + find our passion to be happy. BUT, hear me out before you tar + feather me over this. There are all these cliches about passion; lack of passion is fatal, follow your passion, do what you love + you’ll never work a day in your life, etc. I’m not disputing these are not true but research has proven that passion alone does not make you happy {or make you money}. I think that when we are chasing the "follow your passion" dream what we really are looking for is happiness + fulfillment. I’m very passionate about looking through the dollar bins at Target for their cute pens {which, everyone seems to be snatching these days} but that’s not providing me an income + most of the time not really making me happy, just frustrated when I can't find them.

Adulting is hard. Like really hard. And that elusive work/life thing doesn't always balance out in the life of an entrepreneur. Danielle LaPorte writes, 'I no sooner want to be balanced than I want to be a “good” girl. “Balance” is not something I want to live down to.' There are all kinds of articles out on the interwebs telling people how they can achieve work/life balance by just doing this one thing. Tips for work/life balance make for really good SEO because people always wants tips + tricks. But many would argue that work/life balance is b******t {me included}. Balance assumes that all things are equal. All things are not equal. And never will be. There is only flow. Going with the flow of your life + how you want to look + feel.

Entrepreneurs are an interesting breed. We work ALL the time. Ideas are floating around in our heads all the time. I just had one yesterday while walking Lucy. We plot + plan + stress about how many followers we have on Instagram. Totally an arbitrary number, we do actually know this, but our brains are always on the ‘please like me’ mode so the number is important and the world will end if someone unfollows us. We have day planners {sometimes multiples}, notebooks, sticky notes + monitors cluttering our desk with post-its sticking out everywhere and week old coffee mugs next to our laptops. We have laptops because you know, we’re entrepreneurs and we can work from anywhere in the world we want. Except we never move from the little corner of our home that is our ‘office.’