My road to current ‘freedom’ (I call it current cause I always know it can disappear) must always be worked on; I never take it for granted. If nothing else makes sense, remember this: follow your passion, give it your all!
My turn around starts with this: instead of killing myself and letting my family collect a $250,000 life insurance policy, thinking they may be better off with the money than struggling with me, I decided, I might as well go for it now, and going for it now meant being the best at advertising, marketing and helping businesses and nonprofits get their message out—bringing value in multiple ways.
I always wanted to get into advertising, but no one was going to hire me. They wouldn’t believe I created the Everything Bagel (I did) and even if they did, I couldn’t survive on the low pay. While the Everything Bagel is nice, my branding and marketing passion came from LEARN—“Let’s End All Racism Now”. This is a message that has been in every New York City school and around the world, but certainly needs to be spread louder – with loving hearts and greater understanding. At its simplest; I’m not telling you to LEARN; I’m asking you to say Let’s End All Racism Now, too. The more people say, Let’s End All Racism Now, the more children will learn. We all know about racism, we can’t keep away from it if we wanted to…I’m convinced that it’s a great idea to educate and inspire the future to oppose racism.
The Everything Bagel; and especially LEARN led to 516Ads.com & 631Ads.com—Long Island’s Business/Community Network. On one hand we ignite business to create smart business activity, provide resources and help businesses turn themselves into a resource. We call it a mixture of web and warmth—using multiple on-line tools (website, email, blogging, social media) but still going ‘old-school’—to bring people together; face to face – in breakfast, lunch and evening formats – to make introductions, build relationships, and hope to bring value to all who attend.
All of that is nice, but it’s all business. The kicker is we attempt to use our platforms to spread positive instead of negative. That might sound eye-rollingly nauseating, but in a world and media where “if it bleeds, it leads”’ and hate and controversy make headlines—it’s certainly needed. You can’t make a “good newspaper”; it sounds nice but doesn’t work. But if you can help businesses; then you can use your platforms to spread positive instead of negative.
That’s our passion; what’s yours? Whatever it is; I’m confident Valentina’s book will be helpful in moving you in the right direction.
