Fun Friday Post: What Influenced Your Career/Business?

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Your Business Epiphany: What one moment influenced your career or business more than any other?

Each Friday we have a quote, comment, picture, etc. as a springboard for thought at the Business Channel. Then we can take it in any direction we wish.

 What influenced me? I’ve had or have many careers (author, quiltmaker, teacher, wife/mom/grandmother) that it’s a challenge deciding upon a defining moment. Yet they all seem woven around my desire to be a writer. No matter what I’m doing, I find time to write and research.

 Even though my mother urged me go to college to become a teacher (“writers don’t make enough money to live on”), she encouraged me with my writing. Her father had been a writer, but made his living as a farmer.

Father’s Intervention

 My dad never said much about it one way or the other. However, during my first year of marriage, after I graduated from college, he came to me with a advertisement for a correspondence course in journalism.

 “I think you should take this course,” he said.

 I read it, then replied, “But we don’t have the money.” Jim and I were living on a very short shoestring while he finished college.

 “If we go the monthly payment plan, I’ll make the payments until you can pick them up. I think you should take it.”

 So for the next two years I worked on that class while we moved across the country with Jim’s Air Force career. I also was able to pick up the payments. When I received my certificate, I wondered what I’d do with it. Journalism wasn’t the writing career I’d envisioned when I originally dreamed being a writer.

Mother’s Suggestion

 However, my mom called saying she’d recommended me to a publisher who was starting a weekly newspaper in my hometown. We connected, and I began writing my “Country Kitchen” column for him and eventually another column.

That was the beginning of a career in journalism as a columnist, reporter, editor, freelance writer, and eventually blogger. I also have become a children’s writer (my original writing dream) as a result of my dad urging me to take another correspondence course. I still write “Country Kitchen” for two newspapers!

What are defining moments?

You usually don’t recognize them at the time. However, they start a career or business, set us on another path, get us thinking of new dreams and goals or help us achieve the one we’ve always had.

Looking back, I realize these two defining moments…starting a journalism class and writing for the country weekly…began my writing business journey.

(Amazon image; click on picture for details)

(c)2008 Mary Emma Allen