Brooke Shapiro

My advice would be to try things, you know, not put yourself in a box. Maybe, you know, I did marketing for 20 years, and I felt like I had to keep doing marketing and marketing and marketing. But those skills were so translatable when I wrote a book, because I had to market my book. I had to push it out, I had to figure out who to send it to. And so, all the skills and whatever you do are always translatable and don't feel like you have to be put in a box of tech, or in a box of sales, or in the box of wherever you've had your experience. You can always take steps and try something new, and that might excite you versus doing something you've done for years. So you just have to keep things exciting and new in your career, so you don't burn out. And that way, it always stays fresh, and you're excited, because you spend, what is it, like, 40 hours of your week. You spend more time working than you do with your family and your free time. You should enjoy what you're doing, and you feel fulfillment from it, and it challenges you and is a new experience. So I think that's very important, too. Your title doesn't matter, it's really what you're getting out of it, how can you give to your community from your experience.

Being an entrepreneur, with all the different things I do, every day I wear a different hat, which is a really hard mind shift. You know, today it might be accounting, and I'm doing finances. Tomorrow, I might be doing the marketing. The next day, I might be doing the operations and optimizing. So those are just all the different hats you have to change your mindset, change your skills, and then knowing, also, I'm not good at finances and accounting as an entrepreneur, so that's where I need to hire someone. So that's where you need to let go and say okay, this is a moment where I need to invest in it. Other things like accountability can be really hard when you're an entrepreneur, so I'll use tools like AI assistance, you know, whether it's AI or a virtual assistant, like, through DuckPill to help me through a lot of my business challenges that I just need another set of hands. And yeah, that's what a lot of the challenges are when you're an entrepreneur, and also the lack of consistent salary when you're an entrepreneur. Some months I might be making a ton, some months I might not have anything. Sometimes a client might not pay me on time, sometimes a client may overpay. You just never know from a budgeting standpoint, as it's not a consistent number.

My values are fun, first of all. If it's not fun, you know, there's no reason to do it. Life is about fun. Family is my second value. I just love my family, and that's what's important, not necessarily my day-to-day job. They come first. And then the last two, I always say, are flexibility, so having, you know, if you spend your whole life heads down and not having fun and running around, taking kids to games and things like that, that's not really a life. You need to have flexibility of being able to create your own schedule. And then Freedom is the last one for me, where it's important. We're grateful enough to live in the U.S, where we're free, and we can stay in relationships, go in relationships, stay at a job, leave a job, we get to choose our own paths, and it's not like we have to do something. There's so much flexibility and freedom in the world.