I’ve never felt completely at home in the business world.
The pen? Born with it.
The keyboard? Practically my first love language.
But business… sending connection requests to people I don’t know on LinkedIn? Quantifying my worth in a proposal for $50 an hour, then $500 a post, then $50,000 a quarter?
The English major inside me still shudders a little bit when I think about it. I had to learn it all very slowly over the course of a decade.
In the beginning, entrepreneurship and this thing called B2B marketing felt like a constant exploration. Like being launched into space, wrapped up in my flight suit and very much hoping where I landed would be inhabitable.
I met some really brilliant scientists of this new world along the way, each one boosting my progress like a hit of rocket fuel, zoop zoop.
But the whole time, it was me, slightly out of place…deeply immersed in a strange garden that would either fulfill my unspoken dreams or leave me lost and in over my head.
Well, I am definitely in over my head. But I’ve learned along the way that that’s the only place to be if you want to be wildly successful.
Reflecting on all of this led me to the perfect concept for this series of 4-5 week writing sprints on the B2BWI blog: Strange Garden, an exploration of the dense and promising world of B2B marketing, writing, and entrepreneurship from the perspective of someone who’s always been just a little too outside it. Friendly, confident, competent… but never quite fitting in and always wondering if I was missing something essential in order to be able to fully contribute.
Well, it turns out I’m not. And I’m more confident than ever that you, reading this, are not missing anything essential, either. So I hope you’ll join me exploring this mysterious and lush world… to find out how you can flourish, too.