Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the episode today, we have Rai Hyde Cornell. Rai, welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It is my pleasure. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. So, it’s a little bit of a complex answer because I run two businesses, so I’ve been doing copyrighting and content creation freelance for about 15 years and I’ve been self employed since I was 17, so I gradually grew my freelance business into a full service content marketing agency, which is what we do at Cornell content marketing, we provide organic content marketing services for mostly product based businesses, but a few service based businesses and consultation firms. And then over the years as I grew my team, I also kind of naturally fell into this mentoring role which was just insanely fulfilling for me. And so I separated that out into a separate business, Chiron Consulting, which is where I mentor aspiring freelancers and self employed creatives to build healthier, happier, more profitable businesses without hitting burnout.
Thank you for that. First thing that sort of jumps out at me is very young to be self employed, so is there a story there as to why you were entrepreneurial at that age? Yeah, it’s, so I was always notoriously independent as a kid, even from the ages of 3, 4, 5 years old, I would just go run off and do things and didn’t seem to need anyone, you know, to check in on me or something like that. But as I grew up, I kind of had a strange upbringing, I was raised by two police officers and because of their demanding jobs, my father was a patrol officer and my mother was a gangs detective, they weren’t home very much, and my family structure kind of broke down over the years. My mom was quite angry and violent and abusive and I actually ended up getting kicked out of the house at 16, so from there it was kind of like balls to the wall, gotta figure out how to provide for myself and take care of myself and I still wanted to go to college and so I just learned how to hustle and by the time I got into undergrad, I Left home at 16, dropped out of high school, went to five different community colleges in San Diego, which is where I grew up and got my high school diploma and also did my first year of college at the same time.
And so I entered undergrad at 17 and that’s really where I started freelancing. I had had kind of like side hustles and you know, as a coffee barista and I was a flower delivery girl and things before that, but at 17, when I went to college, that’s when I really started to employ myself as a freelance writer and a web developer at the time. And after I was assaulted in college, I developed horrible PTSD and that led me to throw myself even more into the freelance world and I kind of gave up on the W-2 traditional employment world and freelancing became not only the way for me to provide for myself, but it also became the mechanism for me to heal from everything that had happened in such a short period of time between my household falling apart and then, going through some rough experiences in college and beyond that. Well thank you for the answer. I’m sorry that the circumstances were not ideal or far from ideal.
Whenever I hear someone going through tough times, I always ask the same question because I feel like it’s beneficial for someone who’s going through the same thing. So for someone who is in that particular scenario PTSD or, getting kicked out at a young age, what advice would you give them? Yeah, I think the thing that really carried me through was deciding like this internal, kind of, almost rebellious decision that this was not going to be my life, I decided that I was going to focus on something in the future, and for a while, that was graduate college, I wanted to graduate as quickly as I could and get off of that campus as fast as I could. Once I did that, then it was okay grad school, okay, and then another grad program and whatever you need to anchor into the future, a positive future in particular, that’s okay. The important thing is not to sink into those layers of depression and anxiety and woe is me that can be very easy to follow into at the time, but that’s not going to serve you.
And so you can have your cries, have your bad days, that’s okay. But always keep that end goal of whatever is positive and driving you, keep that in mind and that will pull you out of that hole every time you need it to. Thank you for the answer. I think it’s a great one, but it actually ties nicely into something that I was going to ask you about, which is your life’s purpose, and I don’t know whether it’s a common thing, but it’s certainly something that I’ve sort of mulled over, which I’m not really too sure what I’m supposed to be doing. And so I feel like it’s a good question. How does someone know what they should be doing or what their purpose should be? Oh, that’s such a deep question. How does someone know? I think so, I think there’s how do you know, and then there’s how do you figure it out? So when you know what your purpose is, it’s like you’ve been hit with this lightning bolt of knowledge and information that seemed to come out of nowhere.
It often happens when you’re trying something new, when you’re expanding out of your comfort zone, when you are drawn to something, maybe it’s a course, maybe it’s a particular trip. Maybe it’s seeing a particular movie or reading a particular book, you’re just drawn to something for some reason that you can’t explain and then in that experience, you get hit with this download of information that says, oh, this feels right, This feels like where I belong. This feels like I’ve already known how to do this my whole life, even though this is my first day doing this and it’s that, try new things, go outside your comfort zone, follow your intuition, that is the process of how you figure out what your life purpose is. But the actual knowing, you won’t know until you know, and then when you know, it’s like, there’s no question and it might not make sense to other people, It might not fit in with your current business model, it might not fit in with your current family structure and values and all of that. But you know, and that’s a rock that you can anchor on to.
So would you say if you’re confident that you’re not currently on the path of the correct path, whatever that might be, that it’s just about trying things that you think might be, is that accurate? Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be something huge. I mean, I know people, I have friends who did the whole eat, pray love yourself around the world kind of thing, but you don’t have to sell your home and invest your whole life savings into this grand exploration, you can do that, but that’s often a limiting sort of circumstance that a lot of people tend to feel like, oh well if I can’t afford to do this and I’m just never going to find my life’s purpose. That’s not the case. Start small. If you are feeling like you just want to start to tip toe into the waters of this exploration of what is my life purpose start small, flip through a new magazine by a new book, watch a different tv show.
Talk to someone new, Just follow those little inclinations that we get when we’re sitting there and we’re feeling bored or restless or dissatisfied with where we are in life. Think about, okay, what do I actually want to be doing right now? It could be something as simple as go for a walk and that’s when you bump into someone on the sidewalk who changes your life. It’s it’s those little nudges that you need to follow and would you say that your mentoring is your purpose? Yes, I would say it’s the mentoring and it’s also the different tools that I build and things like that, I would say my life purpose is helping people free themselves from the prescribed life path. That’s aside he puts on us. So, you know, when I was growing up, I was told you got to go to college, you got to go to a really good college, you know, my family name is Cornell, I was told you got to go to an ivy league school because we’re related to the founder of Cornell University, I did not go to an ivy league school by the way, but that was what I was told over and over and over again, it was drilled into me, go to college, go to college, get a good job, better if you can get a government job or a county job, you know, I was on track to be a counselor in the prison system and that was what I was told I should do.
But if you find yourself doing those should throughout your day, throughout your life, it’s probably not what you actually want because you’re not doing it because you want to or you have some sort of passion for it, you’re just doing it because you should, so where is that should nous coming from? That’s what I help people explore and figure out and understand what’s actually them and what has been layered onto them by their family, their religion, their society, their culture, their authority figures in school and at work and once you can tease that out, you can figure out who you really are and what you really thrive at, then we can build a business around that and then you can have everything that you’ve ever wanted. Is there any major misconceptions that you hear about the kind of advice around the topic of life’s purpose. I think the only real misconception that I feel strongly about is that oftentimes we think of life’s purpose needs to be something monumental, you gotta save the world, I’ve got to, you know, eliminate hunger and cure cancer and you know, you’re meant to do these vast, massive things, but sometimes your life purpose is to impact a dozen people or 50 people or 100 people or even one person, maybe your life purpose is to help one person who is going to do something huge, but help that person realize what they’re meant to do, it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be this, you know, one for the history books sort of thing, it can be whatever you really driven to do.
I mean for a friend of mine, she feels strongly that her life purpose is to rescue dogs and that is literally her whole life, she rescues dogs, she works at a veterinary clinic, she helps the canine world and in doing that she makes other families very happy and feel whole because they get to keep their canine companions around and that’s just one seemingly mundane example, but she impacts dozens of families every week by her work and for the better Yes, a great answer and I have heard that even if you, you said um you know, 50 people or whatever, even if you impact 50 people that can have a ripple effect from more than that, so even if those people go on to help one person, then, you know, that’s another 100 people, so it quickly escalates, but I can imagine you being a bit of a grit entrepreneur at that age meaning not a lot of resources and a lot of hard work if someone else is in that scenario, what would you tell them in terms of how you got around?
Maybe lack of help? Yeah, So I think there’s the financial side of that and then there’s the human side of that. A lot of people think, oh, I can’t start my own business because I don’t have seed capital, I don’t have startup funding. I don’t, I don’t even have, you know, $100 to invest in this software program or whatever it is. I started with nothing. I started building my business just with my brain and my hands on a keyboard and you can do that as well. Maybe you’re not a writer or maybe you are, maybe you’re a designer, maybe you’re very good at organizing complex big pictures, maybe you’d be an excellent via an excellent project manager. You have all the tools that you need within yourself. You don’t need to go out and get a $10,000 business loan and put yourself in debt and take on that stress and pressure. Don’t have to do that. So there’s the financial side of things in terms of that grit and tenacity to succeed.
And then there’s also the human side of it meaning because especially my family was so adamant that I go to college get good grades, get a good job with some large official government entity and then I deviated from that. I had no moral support. Even my friends who I all met, I met through college didn’t understand that they wanted to go on and work for big accounting firms and big marketing agencies and things like that. I didn’t care about working for any of these big brand names. I wanted to work for myself, I wanted my time and my freedom and the space to heal and if I had a bad day that was okay and I didn’t have to wake up and be at an office at ADM. And so when you find yourself in those situations where you feel alone, you have to know that the bright people who understand you and who are going to support you, they’re going to come into your life at the right time and anybody who doesn’t support what you’re trying to do, they just don’t get it.
It doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, but it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. Either. Their path may be perfectly right for them. Some people are meant to be employees. Some people are meant to be these great powerful cogs in the big machine and that’s great for them, but don’t judge yourself or your own success metrics based on other people’s measurements reminds me of a quote, which is if someone says that you can’t do something really, they’re saying that they can’t do it. I don’t know if that was what you were going for, but the way of putting it, That part of your story makes me think when you, when you’re just starting out and you’re, you said you’re in that business 10 or 15 years, is that right? 15? Yeah, I’m 32 since I was 17. So there’s lots of stuff that can happen in that time frame. How quickly do you, do you grow and when do you start taking on team members?
Oh that’s a great question. So first of all I need to put a little asterisks on that. A team is not for everyone. There’s this great book called The Company of One. And in the beginning of the book he talks about how there’s a friend of his who he went surfing with ones and they’re out there waiting for the wave and they’re talking about their businesses and his friend is an accountant or bookkeeper or something like that and he says, oh yeah I’ve made all the money I need for this year. I’m good. Like it’s august, I don’t have to work until january and he was so happy with his life that was facilitated by this unique business model with him being the only person, only employee, only contractor, only person in his entire business and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I think facebook ads and instagram and things like that, especially in the entrepreneurial world, they romanticize this idea of having a team of, I’ll just hand that off to my team and I’ll have my team do that.
Having a team is very difficult. It’s very stressful. You have to rely on other people, you have to make sure that you’re bringing in enough revenue not only to pay yourself but to pay the people who are supporting you. And I personally love it. I love my team. I wouldn’t exchange any one of them for anything. I love my team, but that model is not for everyone. So with that said, it took me about Say about 10 years before I was ready to hire a team and the reason for that, I think I didn’t realize this at the time. But looking back, I would say that was because my business was constantly evolving. I was constantly changing things, changing what I was doing the services I was offering my prices, who my ideal client was, where I was getting work was changing everything probably once a month. And so if I had a team member at that time, I would have driven them absolutely crazy. I needed to figure out what I was doing and what I really wanted to build long term before I could bring someone in download the information from my head in a way that they could then absorb it or someone later after them could absorb it.
Whether I was expanding my team or if I had to replace that person and then also give them the direction to let them know, hey, you see that place over there, that’s where we’re headed. This is the end goal. If you don’t know what the end goal is, there’s no way you can have a team because otherwise your team is just gonna be running around like a bunch of scared chickens. I have no idea what’s going on. So some people will, especially for those that I work with, some people will expand into having a team after a year of being in business, others like myself, I needed those 10 years to sort myself out. So there’s no right time line and there’s no right, you know, once you hit $10,000 a month or once you hit $20,000 a month, there’s no right number that says, okay, now you’re ready for a team. It really all depends on what do you want to build and can you articulate that to someone else? And do you have tasks that you’re ready to delegate? 100% agree and I empathize with what you’re saying just because when you create something from scratch meaning, you know, I’m just going to invent this thing out of nothing, you have to actually figure out how to do it yourself, even if you have the skill set, you have to figure out how to create loads of different things and then, as you say, there’s a whole process, which It’s subjective, so there’s no way you can say at what stage you should definitely hire to someone.
If you should hire someone at all. So 100% agree with everything you said in terms of challenges, biggest challenges for you in your business, what comes to mind? Oh, I think it has to be the team. It’s funny that we just talked about that. But as much as I love my team, I love my writers, I love my editors, I love my V. I. S. My husband is actually getting ready to retire and he’s joining our team as our project manager. He’s already been our web developer for several years, but he’s coming on to take on more responsibility. But when it comes to running a business, especially in my situation, I anticipate a lot of people listening to this. If you’re running a creative or service based business, there are a lot of things that you can predict. You can expect, you know, okay, I’ve done logo design or I’ve done blog content. X number of times, I can predict that it’s going to take me this long to finish this project or I can anticipate that if I send out this many hold outreach emails, I can get this many responses.
You start to build those models in your brain. What you cannot predict is your team, For example, last year. So in 2021 I had four team members get pregnant and have Children within four months of each other. And so not only did I need to, you know, I was celebrating with them and we’re super excited and you know, there’s all of that aspect, but then there’s also, okay, they’re gonna be going on maternity leave, they need to decrease their workload. Um there were tons of missed deadlines because morning sickness is not predictable either. That’s just one example of how the human factor, it’s always changing. You never know what’s coming up in your life, let alone someone else’s life. And so balancing multiple people within that ecosystem of your business gets very challenging and there are systems and, you know, communication channels and things like that that you can put in place, but inevitably there’s always going to be something unexpected.
So if you are planning to build a team of your own, just know those challenges are going to come and you just have to approach them with patients and really make sure that you’re treating people the way that you would want to be treated because this is not a traditional W two employee sort of situation where, you know, we hear all the time about these toxic workplaces and unfair, you know, treatment of employees and, you know, there’s all these legal measures in place to protect those people, you are your business and so if you treat people with integrity and kindness and compassion, then your business will exude that it will only be more attractive to new team members who if you’re building a team based model you need in order to survive. So how did you get around that issue of four staff members leaving going on mat leave?
Well luckily they were all in different areas. So one was a designer, one was an editor, one was a project manager and another one was a V. A. And so well the project manager and those are those very similar. Um But I was I luckily have redundancies built into my business. So I almost always have two of everything. I have two editors. I have at least two writers at least two copywriters. At least two designers. Um And so I was able to talk with our non pregnant team member and say hey are you able to take on a little bit more work if something happens? And you know so and so misses a deadline or has to spontaneously go on bed rest or you know the baby comes early or something like that. And then while that person was in agreement and said yep I can absolutely do that. Which I was very fortunate that all of my team members are always eager for more work with us.
Um I went out and I found someone else to come in and replace that person either temporarily while the original team member was on maternity leave. Like in the case of our editor or indefinitely. Like in the case of our designer and project manager who decided that they wanted to be a stay at home moms, they didn’t want to work, they didn’t know what their first baby was going to be like and they just couldn’t commit. And so naturally you have to find ways to allow the operation to keep moving forward while still honoring, you know, their life decisions. It’s a good answer you prepared for it basically is how I interpret that. So congratulations on preparing for it. And Preparing early. I think that’s the thing is because I had no idea, I mean almost my entire team is in their late 20s, early 30s. And so we had no idea that suddenly everyone was going to be getting pregnant but having cushions in place, you know, giving yourself buffers on deadlines and having those redundancies built into the systems of project management.
So tasks don’t fall through the cracks and team members can support each other. That’s not only good for if everyone gets knocked up all at the same time, but it’s also good for, you know, if someone has an internet outage or if someone gets Covid or whatever the case may be, it’s just better to have some layers built in. Thank you for the answer a bit more of a positive question. This one your biggest wins. Oh Well we’ve got 15 years to cover. So how much time you got? I mean, I think because it’s very fresh in my mind and because um It’s it’s probably the biggest thing that we’ve ever done. I would say my biggest win is building a business that is allowing my husband to retire. So he has worked for Fedex for 20 years since he was 18 and he is insanely smart and doing work at Fedex.
He drives a big rig and he delivers heavy weights and things like that. M. R. I. Machines and helicopter engines it’s just not stimulating for him. And so Once he hit that 20 year mark it was like you know this just light turned on for him where he goes, maybe I don’t have to work for Fedex, maybe I don’t have to rely on a corporation for health insurance benefits and building my business to the point where he can retire, he can join my team. He has very specific technical skills that are insanely valuable and I can pay him a salary that replaces Hispanics income and then being able to provide our own health insurance that’s funded by the business that all of that was just, it all happened in the last month or two. It’s been so fulfilling because it’s like we were not only working hard, you know we’re not working hard for a company that isn’t ours and we’re not working hard just for a paycheck or just for health insurance business, health insurance coverage.
We are working and pouring that energy back into ourselves and we also get to pour that energy and that investment of time and money into our team. We get to build these really great close relationships with and help them do more of the same. And so it’s just becoming a completely self funded, self sustaining household in all aspects that has been Insanely rewarding and something that I never foresaw this coming when I started this 15 years ago when I started it was a survival mechanism and now, it’s. it’s like a dream come true and every new adventure we are making that happen for ourselves. It feels very magical. Well done. I love the answer because, and also that is very rare for someone to say, you know, my biggest wins have all been about the amount of money I’ve gotten out of it.
But you referenced the fact that you’ve created something and it’s been beneficial for other people and that’s the biggest win and nice answer. So well done for that. I do feel like I’ve gotten the impression rightly or wrongly that you’re a very hard grafter hard worker and it’s always good when speaking to someone who does that Well, they think about burnout so to ensure that you don’t burn out what your tips on that topic. So for a long time I felt a lot of pride when someone said, oh you’re a hard worker or you work so much or you know, you just never seem to stop or how do you do it all. I felt a lot of pride in that. But Over the years, especially the past, I’d say 4-5 years, I realized that’s not what I want. I don’t want to just work hard my whole life. I want, if I sit down and I think about what do I really want? I wanna have experiences, I want to make memories with my husband who’s my best friend, my soulmate, I want to go explore the world.
That’s what I really want. I don’t really want to work hard. And so looking back on it once, I really that I had hit burnout, I had burned out multiple times in college after grad school. I have burned my business down to the ground and started from scratch because the way that I was doing things early on wasn’t working. And I think you have to get to a point where you realize hard work is not the goal. We’re not meant to be hard workers. And this really goes back to what we were talking about the beginning of around purpose. You have to figure out what is your purpose. Your purpose is probably not to work really hard and stress yourself out and You know, work 18 hour days and get no sleep and when you do sleep, you dream about the clients and the projects that you’re working on and fretting over, that’s not the purpose. You know, we’re meant to feel good and make others feel good and expand ourselves, expand our minds, pass on knowledge and leave the next generation better than we found the world.
And so with that in mind, you have to prioritize yourself. So in everything that I do on the Kyron side, when working with freelancers and self employed creatives, we always start with, what do you really want? Even if we’re doing like a self employed creatives business plan, even if we’re doing pricing and rate sheets, even if we’re doing, you know, who is my ideal client and how do I find them? You have to start with, what do you want? It’s not. If you go to google and you type in, you know, how much should I charge for a blog post? You’re outsourcing that information, you’re going to google and saying, hey, tell me what I should charge, tell me what I’m worth. That doesn’t work. That’s what’s gonna get you to burn out. If you compare yourself to all the people who are putting on a fake facade on facebook ads and instagram and all that. You’re outsourcing. That’s going to lead you to burn out. You have to look inside. You have to sit with yourself and ask yourself, what do I actually want, what do I actually value? What are my actual measures of success and then design your business based on that because only then will you get the money that you deserve and that is equitable to the energy that you’re putting out so that it is this cyclical give and get relationship between you and your business because your business is meant to support you, not the other way around.
I love the answer. Um interested to know at what point do you become a mentor and how does that happen for you? For me, it was almost like it wasn’t my choice. It was, I had team members just coming to me and saying, you know, well, okay, so when I onboard a new writer, I always, or any team member, I always ask them, what are your rates? You tell me what you charge and I will base my quotes and proposals to our clients based on that. I don’t say we pay this much for a blog post and we pay this much for logo design because that goes against the whole. It needs to come from you. If you are a self employed creative, you need to tell me how much you need to earn in order for you to feel good and excited about this project and feel like you’re receiving equitable to what you’re giving us and our clients in return. And so I had a few writers come to me and they would say, oh I want $25 for a blog post. And I said, absolutely not that there’s no way that you can make a living on that If a blog takes you two hours, you’re making like 12 50 an hour, that that’s insane, you cannot charge that.
And so I set minimums that I would pay my team members. So if they said I want $30 for a blog post, I said no, if this is the first ever blog post that your writing and your brand new, you’re gonna get $60 and then we’re going to move you up from there. And so I think because of my attitude around things like that and just how you can tell how heated I get about it. Um, my team members seemed to start to feel like I was already advocating for them. And so when they would have another client who would say, hey, you know, give me a proposal for this. They started coming to me and saying, hey, I have this client there in this industry, they want this amount of work, what should I charge and I help them sort through that and also other, you know, difficult client questions and things like that. So it was almost like, you know, you’re a mentor when other people are coming to you and asking you to be their mentor. It’s not really something that you decide. I mean, I know the world, especially online is full of people going on the coach coach coach coach, I did this one thing once and it worked for me.
So let me do it for the whole world to me that’s not really a coach. The coach is someone who is sought out by people who see that you’re doing something a certain way and they want to learn more about your philosophy. And so when that started to happen on repeat and I was just really enjoying those conversations. That’s when I decided to take on that label of mentor and create a second business out of that. And is it going well? Oh, it’s going wonderfully. It’s um, it’s better than I ever could have hoped. It’s been almost like I created this little band of rebels of, it’s kind of like we have this beacon where all the, you know, self proclaimed weirdos and oddballs and people who don’t fit into the mold. They just find us, they just come and they’ll join our slack community or they’ll join me for one of my monthly workshops or they’ll ask about business mentoring and it’s just like we have this great little community, it’s not huge by any means, but it’s this great little community that is organically growing and people who have felt judged and alone and just unsure of how to proceed and grow their businesses, they finally feel like they have a place to get all those answers and that in and of itself is just way more than I could have ever asked for.
Well, congratulations on that as well. Lots of, lots of good stuff, lots of positive things going on, I would regret not asking you about this because I think maybe there’s one little tip in there that I can use. So it’s about doing more in less time. So what’s your thoughts there? Yes. Okay. I do have an answer for this and this is one of my favorite things to talk about doing more and less time starts with you figuring out when you do certain tasks best. And so I have a workshop called the Energy aligned success schedule in this workshop we go through this process of tracking for three days, your energy pattern. So you know whenever you wake up you say okay, I just woke up on a scale of 1 to 10. My energies out of three and then you set an alarm 90 minutes later, Okay, now my energy is at six and you do this throughout the day for three days and we graph it and you start to see some people have one spike in the middle, others have like three or four waves throughout the day.
And then you make a list of all the things that you do on a regular basis for your business, whether it’s your email and your bookkeeping in all your left brain kind of stuff or if it’s your creative work or maybe it’s you know, project management handing things off and delegating tasks to a team member, you kind of categorize these things and then you think, okay does this require energy or does it give me energy? Does it drain me or does it kind of light me up? And how much energy do I need in order to do this? So it’s, how much energy do I need going in? And what does it do to my energy on the other side? And once you figure that out you can plot those tasks throughout your daily schedule to create this perfect routine that is still flexible because we all want, we don’t want to feel rigid or locked into anything. But it gives you a strategy for tackling your days in a way that just makes everything feel like it blows one thing into another. It makes everything feel so much easier when you are low in your energy and your doing low energy tasks like email or you know booking appointments or whatever that you can pretty much do in your sleep, you feel productive and then that energizes you and then that carries you into your upward swing and then you do your tasks that require more energy, your creative work or maybe your strategy work.
And then that drains you. And so it takes you down into one of these other waves where you do the low energy demanding and it’s just when you design your days deliberately and you are aware of how your work impacts your energy, You can use that information to make your life so much easier and more productive on average. Now I work about 25 hour weeks And I get as much done as I did if not more when I was working 60 and 70 hour weeks and burning out. Yeah, very clever. I kind of feel like a three would be optimistic for me in the mornings though I’d be more like a one or two for sure. Is there anything that I should have asked you about today? We covered so much. No, I don’t think so. And do you have any closing thoughts for us? Just thank you so much. This is this is the stuff that I just get all riled up and excited about and I just love talking about this stuff and I think you know these are little ideas and techniques that people can apply instantly.
Like I said it it takes no money, it takes no investment to start making these little tweaks and better understanding yourself and what you really want and it will so dramatically change your life not in a oh my God, now I suddenly have magical powers and I’m swinging from spider webs kind of thing. But in the ways that really matter, like you’re getting to spend more time with the people you love and you not hitting that burnout wall and you having a business that really excites you and energizes you rather than drains you and starts to feel hopeless over time. So thank you for letting me get on my little soapbox about some of these things and MIT just makes me happy. You gave some great answers. There is one question which I asked everyone and that is what does success mean to you? Yeah, everyone needs to have their own success metrics. Everyone needs to have their own indicators of am I on the right track.
Um, and I learned this from a mentor I worked with a few years ago where instead of looking at things like monthly or annual revenue or how big is my team or how many clients do I have? You have to determine success based on what you really want out of life. And so for me, success is getting to play board games with my husband at least once a week and getting to spend every evening with him and not having to work late into the night and getting to spend the morning outside feeding and cuddling my chickens and um, making sure that I am sleeping well, That’s another big one for me. Success is, am I sleeping well? And um, making sure that when I wake up in the morning, I’m looking forward to my day. If I wake up in the morning and I’m like, damn, like I don’t, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go to these calls, I don’t want to do this project. I know I’m not being successful, I need to change something and then recalibrate so that when I wake up in the morning I’m looking forward to everything that’s on my agenda for the day.
I think you may have answered that, but the next question normally is based on that criteria that you’ve set out, are you a successful individual? I would say so and and it’s not it’s not perfect and I would say about 90% of the time, I feel so successful and so lucky and so fortunate to have the business that I have and live the life that I live. And you know if you had asked me 15 years ago if I was happy, I would have said, are you crazy? Look at my life, but I think no matter where you come from and no matter what you’re going through, if you decide that that’s not going to be your life and you decide what you want your life to actually look like, you’ll get there and you’ll have so much more than what you ever expected and I feel very fortunate to be in that place now and I’m just enjoying every minute of it. Well done for everything you’ve created and you’ve shared some great answers today, so thank you for that.
If people want to hire you either for content or as a mentor, where do they go? Sure. So you can check out Cornell content marketing at cornellcontentmarketing.com. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you comment on anything, I’m not going to see it because I hate social media and I have a wonderful social media gal who handles all of that. But if you send me a DM or an email, I will get those and then on the Chiron side you can go to Chironconsulting.us and Chiron is spelled C H I R O N. Rai, thank you for being a great guest today. Thanks so much for having me, this was great.