03. MY MOMENT OF CLARITY
THE AFTERMATH OF BEING LOST FOR 15 YEARS
Welcome back to the Muse Podcast. My name is Summer. I am the CEO of Empire Builders Studio, and I cannot freaking wait to dive into the topic of my personal moment of clarity. This has been in the works for literally 15 years, and 15 years almost to be exact, like pretty much on the dot.
I don't know about the day, but I definitely remember the month. And this episode is truly going to be some of the, on a more personal note for me. And I think if you have been in my world for a while, you will understand the struggles I'm going to be sharing and talking about. And if you haven't been in my world, welcome. We're going to dive right in as to how I spent the last 15 years.
of my life searching for a purpose, searching for my moment. And that moment finally came to a head in August, so last week if you're listening to this in real time. And truly, I just want to talk to you about how you can almost not be lost the entire time because I'm going to be honest, I was extremely lost.
And I don't want that to happen to anyone else. So we're going to dive into my past, my childhood, and essentially what got me down this never ending rabbit hole of confusion up until about a week or two ago, I finally emerged on the other side as a whole and direction set woman. So welcome.
we are going to dive right in. I got my vanilla latte, or no, vanilla latte, I'm not that fancy. Although I do love a vanilla latte. I have my iced latte over here, and I'm gonna sip it throughout. So let's freaking get started. And we're gonna get back into the space time shuttle, and we're gonna travel back in time to when I was about...
12 years old and around this time was in the height of my parents divorce. I remember the divorce starting when I was I think like 11 years old and it finally got finalized at the age of 14. Of course the great fights and everything like that started way earlier but I think legally they started taking action when I was 11. 12, I remember I was out of my dad's home, out of choice, and I decided to go live with my mom. Now, my mom and dad's dynamic was very specific. I wouldn't say for the time, but I feel like it was one of a lot of immigrant parents. So when we immigrated to the States, my dad used the little bit that he had in his wallet to go out and find a job. He went to El Camino College in California, and he got a degree, an associate's degree, I believe, in computer science engineering because his master's from India did not translate over to the States. It was practically worthless. So I remember...
that he had to go back to school for a degree and he used the last $100 in his pocket to eventually move his way up the corporate ladder and then started with a startup company to eventually earn six figures. That's a freaking phenomenal story, right? And then my mom on the other hand, she was the housewife. She did not go anywhere.
She was busy raising my sister and I. And for the longest time, I was like, oh, that's how it's supposed to be. Like that is the dynamic, right? Turns out it doesn't bode very well when you are in the middle of a divorce.
So out of choice, I left my six figure income dad with who had, by the way, completely remodeled our childhood home, I say our because it's my sister and I, our childhood home and rebuilt it practically from the ground up. I remember them pouring the cement foundation when I was a little kid and hopping over the metal rails. Don't recommend that to anyone who has kids, but I thought I was a monkey swinging from the bars. Of course, this was done after hours when
all of the construction crew was gone, so I didn't get yelled at. And I just told my parents I was going to go for a walk, so yeah, it was fine, right? So I left the home with the glitz and glamour of freshly painted walls and beautiful artwork hung and a room to ourselves with an amazing loft upstairs. I left that for my single mom now, right? The divorce was getting finalized. I chose to live with her in a friend's duplex, I believe, with a shared bathroom, and we slept on one mattress. And that was fine. I didn't see anything wrong with it. She always talked to me about how she wasn't providing what she thought I deserved.
Um, but I truly couldn't see a fault in it. Like I had clothes, I had food, you know, we had food kind of, it wasn't like nice food by any means, but you know, we had the, the loaf of bread and all that stuff. Um, but she would constantly tell me about how we never had any money. And at 12 years old, I truly didn't understand what that meant. I
saw money as this abstract thing. I knew it was important. I knew it came in the form of green bills and silver coins and sometimes brown coins like the penny. And I just didn't really understand where it came from, but she made it a point to constantly stress over it. I mean, she stresses over it now. And at 12 years old, being the fixer that I am, I am just historically a fixer type person. I decided to hop on her huge dinosaur-looking laptop and I put in the search bar on Google, creative writing, analytic thought and career. I put all of those into Google and out popped a search for a lawyer.
It was a result for lawyer, lawyer career, lawyer this, lawyer that. Take this quiz if you wanna know what career is right for you at 12, okay? Mind you.
But I clicked on the first link I saw.
It was the dead of night, by the way. I was sitting on this old brown cream carpet, and she had gone to bed, and out popped the first search result, lawyer. And I said, great, I can do that. And when I clicked on it and I scrolled, oh boy, I saw lawyers made six figures.
You mean to say the six figures that my dad makes who is seemingly never stressed about money? That and that moment itself, I had solidified in my 12-year-old brain, I was going to be a lawyer.
Now pause for anyone who had a normal childhood. You're probably like, girl, you are insane. That does not, like, what are you doing as a child? Do you even know how to use the internet? And the answer was, I probably shouldn't have. I probably should not have began my lifelong, I would say, crisis at 12 years old, but I did.
Because I was in I was panicked. I was in flight or fight mode Constantly and I knew that I had no power and When I saw the word lawyer pop them pop up on my screen, and I saw how much money they made I Said that's it. That's what I'm going to devote my life to and from that point on Whenever someone asked me summer. What do you want to be when you grow up?
I ditched my passion for writing and I said lawyer. And if you want to talk about how your subconscious influences your conscious mind, let me tell you everything from that point on, all the classes I took in high school, all of the extracurricular activities, the first job I ever got was to be an assistant for a lawyer at 16 years old. So
when I say I was going to be a lawyer, I was going to be a lawyer. And it's crazy because even into college, I picked a pre-law kind of route. I did criminology and behavioral neuroscience and a plus cognitive neuroscience. And my whole rationale was because criminology was gonna teach me the criminal.
justice aspect of the world. And Neurosci was going to be that resume booster, which I enjoyed doing. I truly did, I did it for two years. And it will make me stand out on law school applications. And that, sure. I mean, you all have your passions when you're younger. You have like...
those wild fantasies of being this and being that and the first astronaut, but I was so dead set on being a lawyer. It influenced every part of my life and being. Now, fast forward a little bit into my second year of law school. And this was, I would say, my first chipping away at
the sculpture that was my life and truly taking the chisel in my own hands and saying, no, it's my turn. So in my second year of college, I had just finished working for a criminal defense attorney. I know, I know. He was as crazy as you could imagine. This man was by far
in need of a therapist. And when I say like as a full grown adult, like maybe I should be in therapy. No, this man was in his 50s, like so messed up. He drove me as crazy as he was. And it's crazy to think back to that time because I was, I drove. Okay, let me tell you.
to work at his office over the summer because he said he needed someone, I drove from LA all the way to Irvine, California, every Tuesday and Thursday with the used car I saved my money up for, which was close to dying on me at any moment because I was so ready.
to just be part of that world. This man was barely paying me for the gas to get there. And I rationalized it as being experience. So why would I not take it? If I could give baby Summer a hug right now, I would. But I did it. And I stayed with him and worked for him for about, I wanna say like six to eight months.
And it was the second quarter of my second year of college. And I said I couldn't do it anymore. I freaked out. I told myself that I did not want to be so terribly unhappy. And I was like genuinely having a midlife crisis. I said, if I'm not gonna be a lawyer, like what else am I gonna do with my life? And that's when my best friend at the time sat me down and was like, Summer, well, you can do anything you want and to be this unhappy, it's truly not worth it.
So I took a day or two, I thought about it and I came to the conclusion that she was right, like most of the times in my life. And I said, okay, that day itself, I told myself, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I don't want to be a lawyer.
I just wanna be happy. And the amount of weight I felt come off of my shoulders was unimaginable. I had just lifted off this huge responsibility that no one asked me to put on myself, but I did it. And it had been woven into every fiber of my being. And the second I said, I don't want to do this,
I was so happy. And it's crazy to think that it's times like this or that and moments such as these that we are given the chance to choose and we need to take full power and authority over it. And I cannot, I couldn't imagine what my life would be like if I didn't listen to myself in that moment. I said, you know what, screw it. I can do it.
I'll just get over it, the money is worth it. So I said in that moment, I'm not going to. I refuse, I'm not going to do it. And after that, I leaned into my passion, which was writing. It still is to this day. And I said, screw it. If I'm going to make money, I might as well make money doing what I love.
So the rest of my college passed. I loved it every minute of it. I fell in love with it. And I could see the picture getting clearer and clearer as the days went on. After college was when I started reading more about how can I own my own? Because if you think about it, I switched from cognitive neuroscience to journalism, literary journalism.
And when it was nearing the end of graduation, I realized that unless you were really lucky or had been doing it for a while, kind of like how I devoted myself to being a lawyer, if I had just devoted myself to writing and being a journalist, I could have had something lined up. And it became clearer and clearer to me that the starving artist theory was
not just a theory, and that because of my terrible relationship with money, I did not want to end up being a starving artist. I couldn't. I absolutely was the one at the time with my full-time job, the one who would be
financially available for my family and I just I couldn't stomach the idea of not making money whether it was for my passion whatever it was I was I'm a child of immigrants I'm an immigrant myself and that's just not what we're doing in this world so towards the end of college I remember on my overnight shifts I would read books I would read so many books about entrepreneurship
the four-hour work week. I was just engrossed in it and I realized that I wanted to be wildly successful.
But in what? That was the question. I could do anything I put my mind to, I knew that much. But what was I gonna do? And so I started toying with the idea of, okay, if I love to write, why don't I just write and make a crap ton of money? So I started looking up copywriting. This was around the time that I began talking to my now husband at the time boyfriend.
And I was so close to moving abroad for journalism. And right when I was going to, I couldn't. COVID was beginning to happen. My mom shared that she was going through financial difficulties and I just straight up got scared. I got scared that since I was the one who always provided for my mom when she needed money, if I didn't have the ability to do that.
I didn’t know what would happen. I had already gone through so much loss with her. I didn't know if I could stomach it again. So I packed up all my stuff and instead of moving thousands of miles away to Madrid, Spain, I drove my car thousands of miles to Florida to be with my husband.
And I, for the longest time, if I'm gonna be very honest, I felt like a total loser. I felt like my future was so limited. I had moved from having an amazing job, like amazing job as a 22 year old, full-time job, to practically nothing. And this was going to be the moment where I either made it.
or I fumbled the ball. And I'll be completely honest, I dove head first into copywriting because I'm just a go charge at the wall type person. I've always been that way. And I was more lost than I had ever been. When I first started my copywriting business back in 2020, this was, I wanted to clarify, late 2019, I invested in my first copywriting course slash business course, kind of.
And the beginning of 2020, I launched. I was like, I'm ready for my 10K months. I can do it. If all it takes is a little bit of hard work, I have enough in me. I don't have children. I don't have anything better to do. So let me just grind this shit out. And boy, oh boy, I was successful.
Very successful, I made $8,000, okay? Eight grand, more money in one sitting than I had seen in one paycheck for two weeks of really hard work. And I made that in the first two weeks of my business. I was like, oh my God, I hit the gold mine? This is jackpot? This is what I should have been doing the entire time. And that is
what started and sparked my two and a half year journey, just rolling down this hill of unhappiness and self doubt for two and a half years after. So after I made the money I made, I hated what I was doing. I dreaded getting on sales calls.
I dreaded writing copy. I dreaded every bit of it because it wasn't my passion. My passion was and is investigative journalism. And I realized that if I was writing anything else, I would not have any type of purpose or passion for it. I would just be writing to write it. And I started to like truly dislike the act of writing.
I began to lose myself because I wanted money and I wanted success and I put that over my happiness for two and a half years. So yes, while it was wildly successful, I hated every moment of it afterwards. And I started to really doubt myself. I started to really question myself. I was so, so unhappy.
I would cry all the time. I sat in our bedroom and I would stare at the wall. I would lay in bed and not get up. And not only was the act of copywriting really difficult for me to do, I lost who I was as a person because I had gone from being gung-ho ready to take on the world.
Interviewing sex offenders, interviewing homeless people, getting their stories down and gritty, hard work to essentially being lost. College gave me the opportunity to finally express myself and then I felt as a victim and victimizing myself at the time that the real world just was in it to take it away from me.
And for two and a half years, I tried, I stopped, I started, I restarted, I drank energy drinks, I cold emailed, I offered a whole bunch of stuff, I tried social media, I tried Instagram, I tried TikTok, I tried everything to reignite my desire to own my own business and...
is specifically copywriting and I fell so short. I actually at one point had to go get a part-time retail job because I was so wildly unhappy. Every time someone reached out to me to inquire about copywriting or my services, I would have no effort and I would not want to show up for sales calls.
And I'm sure that it seeped through because I just reeked.
of desperation and anger and almost this, I'm actually not interested in helping you kind of vibe. And it was very apparent to me and anyone who really spoke to me, I would speak about my business like I loved it and I would want to punch my computer screen when I got home. I was so wildly.
unhappy and I wish I could have just said no sooner. Looking back on it now, like the answer is obvious, right? If you're not happy doing something, do something else. Like no duh, but it's so difficult, especially when you've been told like, oh my gosh, you're such a hard worker, you can do anything. Oh my gosh, you're so good at this, you can do this. Like you can absolutely do this. And the thing is it's like, yes.
anyone can do anything that they want, but to what extent and to what level of happiness? Because if I'm just working to work, I essentially had traded for my copywriting business one shitty job for another. And if I'm gonna be honest with you, up until that moment, I had never had shitty jobs because I always went gung ho for the thing that I wanted. The second I realized it wasn't working out,
I quickly shifted gears and I attacked the thing that I said I actually wanted. But for some reason, when I left college and I moved to Florida, that part of me didn't exist. I had essentially replaced it with this pity, this self-victimization, like, okay, I guess I didn't get what I truly wanted to get, which was going to do journalism abroad in Spain.
So I might as well just accept whatever else I get. And I tried to make lemons, I tried to make lemonade out of lemons, but I was screwing up the entire recipe. So I was like, just eating the lemons instead of squeezing them. And somehow that was like everyone else's fault that I didn't use my two cents to figure it out. And
Now I can say this looking back, but in the moment it was very real to me. I felt like everyone in the world and my life was out to get me. And it didn't help that, you know, money became increasingly less resources were dwindling and all the money I had saved up to move to Spain and stay there ran dry in the states.
So there I was two and a half years later from my original date, sad, lost and confused as to what the hell was I actually supposed to do in life. So there was one moment when we, my husband and I went back to California to just visit some family. It had been the first time in the entire time that I had moved that we went back. And I was truly reminded with my friends around, being around my family, who I was. And it wasn't someone who self-victimized. It wasn't someone who threw herself pity parties. It wasn't someone who was fake about her life and tried to make it seem like glitz and glamor. And it definitely wasn't someone who took other people's shit because I took a lot of shit being in Florida. Things that I would normally say no to, I accepted as being my new reality because apparently the real world is just like this. And so after that trip, I got back to Florida and said, screw it.
I'm gonna take a deep audit of my life and find what truly makes me happy.
And after going through it over and over and over again, I realized that helping people understand their marketing was extremely valuable to me. Helping other people build their business was extremely important to me. And so I tested it. I took on, I opened my doors to almost 20 new clients. I helped them. They were able to scale. They were able to get people on their sales calls when they were unhappy doing cold emails. They were greatly appreciative of my insight and I for the first time at that moment realized that a fire had lit under me again. And I continue to follow it, continue to follow it, continue to follow it. And about a year and a half later, which was my clarity moment.
I realized that the aha moment for me came when I finally merged what I was happy with, what I desired out of life. I finally merged it with the way I presented my service in my business.
I'm gonna take a minute to unpack that, just to stay with me if that was a little too crazy. Because when you find, when you say as a business owner, I want to provide ex-service, I want to be known for ex, I want to leave ex-legacy, that's great. You can say all that, but.
It's still confusing. It's still frustrating. It's still like, what the hell do I even do to begin that journey, right? You can be as clear about the vision as you want, but until you can make actual steps to get there, it's still just a vision. It's still just a goal. And for the last, I wanna say like six months, that's what it was for me. I had a clear vision. I had a clear goal. I had a clear idea of where I would like to be. And it wasn't until I had what I believed at the time, and I still believe now, as like almost the perfect service suite that I could step back and say, this is truly what's going to allow me to reach that goal, the legacy that I want to. And I love it. I put my notebook down, I closed my laptop that Monday and the overwhelming sense of peace that I had was nothing I had ever experienced in my life. I had finally calmed the...
fight or flight response, I had finally said enough, I'm not gonna play these games anymore. I'm going to now be able to take steps towards where I want to be. That's what I think I needed to hear when I was younger.
I needed to hear, it's not your responsibility. It's not your job to be the financial provider.
It is your job instead to take a look at what you truly want out of life. What type of life do you desire? And then begin to reverse engineer to fulfill it based on what you love doing. Personally, I still love to write. I'm still a creative at heart. I do love the, I love buyer psychology. I love the psychology of economics. I love marketing psychology like I always have. I knew that spark existed when I took my first econ class in high school, but I never thought that was something I would revisit almost 15 years later, more than 15. Ah, yeah, just about 15 years later.
I never knew that. So if you're still lost, if you are still confused, if you are still like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Like, it's okay. It's okay. But if I could say anything, I would say take some time to think about the life you want. Do you wanna travel? Do you wanna have kids? Do you wanna spend time with your kids? Do you want long vacation days? Do you wanna work two hours a day? Why do you want all of those things?
When you understand the why, then you can start reverse engineering and fill in the blanks with what you're already good at. Because I promise you, there's a way to make money with what you love to do. It's just the way you package it. And Monday, that Monday, when I said I'm done, I had finally found my way to package my knowledge that will eventually...
help other people and serve a bigger purpose. And that was MMF. So my self-study course basically takes every person who has a side hustle and then turns it into a sustainable business. That was, that is it. I finally packaged my purpose in a digestible way for other people.
And that is what brought me more clarity than anything. So if you want to learn more, if you want to chat about clarity or passion or where the two lie and intersect, give me a holler. I'm always available on Instagram. And that is it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a little bit more about me.
I can't wait to talk to you about things that you know, are a little more structure-based in the next one. So marketing and business structure in the next one, this one was all personal. Talk to you soon and be safe out there.