Pursuing Financial Freedom through Creatorship with Samantha Demers

And so I think that because of that, I don't really equate myself with I'm a creator, since I'm not painting or writing a book or doing something else creative, even though I do paint and write and I'm a musician, but when I was thinking about it, even in my job, As an admin and anywhere that I've worked, I've always tried to find whatever's the creative element in my work and do something creative. So I would work on improving forums or streamlining things.

And that was a way to get my creativity out, which I didn't really think about until I've been pondering your question of, if I consider myself a creative or.

And also with the people that come in the space and the questions that I pose, some of the spaces are more interview style. And so I'll ask questions and I think I'm starting to realize that I'm more creative when I'm co-creating with someone than when I'm just sitting and trying to create something or to write. I'm sorry. More where I shine is when I'm with somebody, it feels more easy to create.

Right now, once I have some. Offer for a personal brand that I want to put out, then I think I'll use those other areas and, and probably take some of the content that I've been creating on Twitter and just transfer over the stuff has resonated well, or that kind of fits with wherever I decide to go. Yeah.

And also the dream 100 concept is just a great concept that a lot of companies don't use, although after we started and I was the copywriter in our business model, we decided to pivot from that and then try a few other things. So we've retired that whole idea, but the whole purpose was to go on and connect with other businesses because it's a great for B2B service.

But time flies when you're in high school that maybe we'd like to live somewhere else. So we'd rather build a business where we could go anywhere else and not have to worry about north American time. In case we decide to move elsewhere. We have some affiliate sites and since he knows a lot. The health and wellness space. We have sites that are very niche in the health space.

And so a lot of my time now is spent researching the different areas of products or the health issue that could be related to whatever products we're trying to promote. So I spend a lot of time researching papers and writing content in an easy to digest form. And so that's how we are monetizing. Right. Awesome.

Full-time I don't think that it's entirely scalable. And part of my motivation in life is to have freedom and to be a build a business. That's scalable. Although I love working one-on-one I know that at some point it's not scalable unless I figured out some kind of group coaching or an ample product, which could happen, but I'm not sure I want to do it in the marketing space. There's a lot of people that do it. So I'd rather find somebody who just thinks

So then I was able to extend my contract with her, get hired on part-time and within six months landed a full-time job because there was an internal opening and I was able to apply, which is really rare, even though now it's about maybe 15 years since then, but back then, it was still rare that you would be able to get such a great full time job when you're so young and then you can retire at 55. So I thought that. Stay there. Cause I, at that point I hadn't had kids yet.

And that then I had kids, my ex-husband's a singer songwriters. So me having a stable job allowed him to pursue his creativity and work part-time and you know, if he decided to quit his job, it wasn't a big deal because I had a stable income. We can get a mortgage and all that stuff. Yeah. So at some point we got divorced. I kept my stable job and had a mortgage and then. And so Paul, my current husband, he's a marketer and an entrepreneur, and it's always been something that I've wanted to do.

Like when I was younger, I'm a musician, but didn't love it enough to pursue music full-time. So I took a course to be a sound engineer, but I decided I want to have kids. So I better not like work evenings and weekends for the rest of my life, but I really didn't want to have a radio. Job, but then he fell into a regular job. And at the time when I took it, I thought that I would love to open a music studio and I would help produce music because I just love finding talent.

I love seeing other people's shine and I liked performing and I like creating things, but I more love to get that out of people anyways, but then I got the full-time job. Worked for the government. I mostly did admin work and office managing and I administered tests for second language. And then I found out there was a job there that was an event coordinator. And I thought, let's amazing. I'd love to do that job and an opening for the admin. And that job came up.

So I did the admin job and a couple of years later, that lady retired. And so I applied and I got hired. So finally, after all this time I had my dream job, which wasn't my dream. When I was 17, I was a third year old. That was my dream to be an event coordinator. And what I loved about doing events was that yeah, it had the creative side. They seem cool. Even if they're boring, you can be creative in some ways.

And also I'm really organized and structured, and it's rare to find a job where you can be creative and organized and structured. And it makes sense to put the two together. So I have lots of people that would say, oh, your job is so cool. I'd love to have your job, but they don't realize it's really hard. Like it's a lot of movies.

And I think that probably for the two years I did the job, it kept me super busy because I had all these things to juggle and it really kept a lot of my creativeness occupied. I lasted two years. What happened was that when I was the admin assistant for two years, we did about eight to 10 events together. When I got hired, there was no longer an assistant. There was just the coordinator there was streamlining.

And then in my first year I did 16 events on my own, and I told them I was getting pretty wore out. And then a second year I was on track to do 18. And so I got through the fall and then

I'm a little bit stressed. I just need some time off. Okay. Let me give you a couple of months off. And I was like, oh, all right, I'll take it after that. When I got home, I thought, okay, I'll rest for a while. And I totally crashed. I thought that I would just need some rest, but I just, I could barely function for a little while because I was really way more stressed. Then I thought, wow. And also at the job, after I went on my sick leave, I was replaced by three people.

So then it made me feel not so bad, but I was telling them, Hey, listen, I can't keep this up. I'm really sorry. Yeah. So that's what happened. And then I realized, I think through going through the burnout and thinking that since I had gone through a divorce, that, okay, the hard things in life are.

I thought life was going to be easy after, and then I got depressed from being overworked at work, which I never thought because I haven't had the easiest bosses, but I always just deal with them and get them to like me and do what they want and make things work. So I didn't expect that I would ever burn out from a micromanaging boss and being overworked lesson learned, I guess. Time off and going through the burnout and realizing is this really how I want to spend my life?

Like, my job is cool, but it's not the most creative thing. And whenever I see people online that say, I quit my job and I did this or that, I now live in Thailand and have the best life I would think, oh, I can't do that. It'd be excited when I'd read it and be like, oh, I wonder if, oh no, the house is commons. It's not moving. Yeah. It's stuck in Ottawa. It's not going anywhere. I have a job here. I would be crazy to leave it.

I'm going to have a pension at 55, but going through the burnout made me realize that I didn't want to wait until I was 55 to enjoy my life. I didn't want to be grouchy with my kids and my husband because I was overworked. So all of that led me to think life's too short. I would rather spend the next 20 years. To 40 years figuring things out, trying things, trying to build something and no worse comes to worse. I can get a part-time job. I'm a responsible person. I have lots of experience.

I would rather do that than be miserable for the next 20 years until I retire and then maybe die because who knows when you're going to die. And I didn't want that to be my life. And I also knew that I would not want my kids to be like that. I didn't want my, if my daughters came to me and said, mom, I really hate my job. I wish I could do something else. Of course. Cool go do something else who cares? But for me it wasn't.

Okay. And I wasn't giving myself permission to do that, which I think is why a lot of my writing lately has been about that permission that I had to realize that I could give myself that I can quit my job, try to do what I want. I could fail and it's okay. Or I can succeed. And it's yeah.

But then I did ship 30 for 30 and realize, even though I wanted like more engagement or more Twitter followers, That my goal really had to be, am I having output every day and in between those two practical goals, my real north star is having financial freedom and flexibility as well as having some fulfillment in life. And so right now, my writing and doing Twitter spaces. Filling the void of, I would like to be fulfilled and connect with others.

And then the work that I'm doing, that little bit of consulting, I'm starting the affiliate marketing and email marketing. Those are also doing the financial freedom part. So I had to pick one north star metric for success. It would be freedom, which I think with the freedom I'd be fulfilled because that would be freedom. I would be financially independent because to me that's pretty.

I'm putting stuff out there to figure out what exactly comes easy to me. What do people respond to? And then after that, it'll be, what can I do with this? I think maybe it's because of my marketing background or just appreciating business strategy. I would find a way to monetize it once I figure out what is this thing that is just.

So I'm trying to think of how I can monetize that. So right now I'm thinking about the idea of using those skills to either do some kind of podcast or YouTube channel, or also to offer it to aspiring authors, to interview them, to come up with stories so that they can start writing there.

You can combine the skills of marketing and interviewing to help them craft much better. If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it. You get to choose the when and

So I didn't engage. I didn't build an audience or anything. So I would send a tweet back when I started. And I would say just put out something every day.