How I Learn

I went to college - no surprise - to make my parents proud. I lost my scholarship because I decided to major in procrastination, manipulating teachers, World of Warcraft, pushing the boundaries of how much I can get away with, and partying. "Hi, my name is Tatiana. And I like to party." Also, accounting and finance classes were only the most boring thing I ever sat through. I dropped my Business Management major because I fell in love with the idea of working on a cruise ship and going to all these cool places... And then I realized Hospitality & Tourism was also a Business school major and I still had to take... accounting and finance - which I had failed out of like twice. So that is the - very short - story of how I ended up in a Political Science major; it had the most overlap with the credits I had already earned and I could graduate one semester late after all of my shenanigans the first two years of school.

Learning out of a textbook is one thing in life that I abhor. I have flashbacks of reading textbooks and feeling like I was reading a foreign language. I could read the words, and understand what each one meant individually, but the message of all the words together was lost on me. It felt like someone was trying really hard to sound smart and make the reader feel stupid. It was everything your English teacher told you not to do: run-on sentences that were 13 lines long, using all your big vocabulary words in one go to complete your homework assignment. The academic gobbledygook was a major contributor to my disconnect from my college studies. It was the worst way for me to learn.

As I am mulling over the decision to apply for my MBA, I am seriously considering whether this torture is something I am willing to endure again. There is the fact that the program is 100% online, and online classes were the very few ones that I excelled in back at Virginia Tech. But even with the evolution of online learning, especially over the last two years, I know that reading something - digital or printed - is not how I learn. I learn by stumbling, falling hard, and learning how to get back up again. Sometimes that method of learning sucks... but the lessons stick the best.

The funny thing about owning a small business and being the sole proprietor is you have to do your own accounting. *insert maniacal laughter here* I love accounting. I love accounting. I love accounting. WHO AM I KIDDING?! I screwed up my books sooooo hard for 2021. In 2020, it was easy - I had four months of transactions that I managed in Excel. I tried to wing it for 2021, but when I found out I owe thousands of dollars to the IRS... I realized that I had to do it the right way. So, I bought QuickBooks and I have been spending hours laboring over all my transaction data over the last week and a half. The hands-on experience has given me so much more insight into accounting and balancing the books that I haven't had before. It is sort of embarrassing, but also so necessary if I intend on growing my business and tackling bigger ventures in the future. How can I be trusted with a multi-million dollar company, if I can't handle a 25-30K company?

*insert two week break here because of PTO and hours of working through this challenge*

*completed upon completing my bookkeeping - praise the number lords!*

So after the daunting task of combing through hundreds of transactions, I finally completed my bookkeeping for 2021 with a sigh of relief. What a weight off my shoulders. I have also gained additional perspective that reinforces the decisions I made last year to stop certain forms of business. I was doing social media live shows and for the effort it was taking, there was hardly any reward. Hours of pulling inventory, showing each item, keeping track of sales, invoicing individual customers, managing payment plans... I should've been charging ten times the cost of each item for all that work! After realizing it was burning me out, I stopped doing it. And when I was going through my books, I realized what a headache it was from a numbers perspective, too. The data was being duplicated, it was extremely difficult to match up payment plans with invoices, and the data import was absolutely mindboggling to get through. So from both, an effort and an accounting perspective, running the business that way was extremely inefficient.

Now, I run everything through Etsy and the integration with QuickBooks is nice and seamless, captures my discounts, refunds, fees and categorizes them for me. It's a breeze! And about a year ago, I decided to move all my business to Etsy. So for now, this solution works best for me, for my passion for it, and for my bookkeeping. Also, it has allowed me to reconnect with my love for photography, which is much more appealing for my creative spirit than it was sitting on video for hours, trying to sell crystals, and all the rigmarole that came with that.

While it is easy to look back and recognize all the time and effort lost, I am grateful for the lessons from those experiences. The hands-on fail, learn, apply, fail, learn, apply cycle works best for me. Recognizing that, I know I have to stop playing it safe in some professional aspects of my life. It is time to be bold, and learn by failing, and be willing to make some waves. I know I have the ability and resilience to bounce back from anything. I also know I have so much more to bring to the table than I have been.

So, look at how you learn best, and recognize where you can be in a learning and growing mindset. When certain pathways at work, at home, in a passion or a hobby are so heavily trodden, we forget to challenge ourselves by making some mistakes again. That is the only way to break out of a plateau - fuck it up and do better. Happy learning, friends!