 Hello, my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. And because the decade is coming to a close, I thought it would be fun to do like a decade and review type of video, mainly because I've seen people doing decades in reviews on Instagram, so why not? So I'm going to divide this video into a couple of different sections. So the first will be what actually happened in the last decade. The next one will be regrets slash frustrations from that time. The next one will be lessons learned and then the final section will be what I'm grateful for. So if you're not really interested in hearing about the logistics of the last decade, I will put a time somewhere on the screen so you can skip ahead and I'll also have timestamps in the doobly-doo below. So I've actually written a list of what's happened over the last decade to make sure I don't forget anything. 2010 was the year I moved to Paris and let's take a step back actually because I finished university at the end of 2007 and then I went straight from my exams to moving to London. So in December 2007 I moved to London and I was there for about 18 months and had a really good time and then when I went back home to Australia and started looking for work, I really struggled to find work and I think it was a combination of the fact that I had all of one job on my resume and it was also you know post-GFC time, so a little bit of a difficult time for new graduates. So what I ended up doing was I'm very lucky to have a very successful, very well connected mother who was able to get me a contracting role with some of her former colleagues slash friends. So I was in this administrative sort of role where I ended up doing some internal comms stuff because I was a writer but it wasn't really fulfilling, I was just biding my time there. So this is where I am at the beginning of 2010. I had decided at this stage that I was ready to go to Paris, I wanted to get a working holiday visa, go there for a year and teach English and I think I told my then boss as early as February but because one of the requirements for the visa was getting a police check I believe and Victoria Police had this huge backlog, I ended up waiting for like six weeks or something ridiculous to get my police check done before I could even apply for the visa. So I didn't end up leaving until around May or June which meant my poor employers at the time like they wanted to give me more stuff and I'm like well you really want to give me more stuff when I'm leaving so very sorry about that but I ended up going to Paris for a year where I lived and taught English and then 2011 was when I went back home and I... things happened really quickly when I got back home actually within three weeks I think it was. I found a job as an SEO copywriter which basically meant I was writing articles every day and publishing them under different names with links that pointed back to my company's website so it looked like in Google's eyes we were an authority in that space. I also met my then boyfriend now husband just around the same time so it was within a month of me getting back to Australia so things seemed to be going really well but within two or three months I started getting a bit frustrated at work. I felt like I'd already hit the ceiling. I've learned everything I needed to learn to do that role really well and there wasn't you know there wasn't anywhere else for me to move from there then later so I worked at an Australian office of a company where headquarters is in the UK and they decided to start re-centralizing their marketing stuff so when I started I had all of this stuff to do and then maybe five or six months in they re-centralized back to London and suddenly I had nothing to do like when I started I was doing five six articles a day and in my last couple of months I was doing three a week and I was just so bored and so frustrated so I ended up looking for another job and in 2012 I went on to another copywriting type of job for an online education company and what was interesting about this one was that there was much more work to do it was much more interesting work I was more interested in the education space I really liked a lot of the people on the team but still within two or three months I started getting really frustrated again and wanted to wanted to do something else and if I'd been single at the time I probably would have gotten another working holiday visa for somewhere else and gone and taught English for another year and just flitted from country to country until I was ready to settle down unfortunately or maybe fortunately I was withdrew and didn't want to throw out my relationship with this really great guy just because I was a bit frustrated at work and this was what sent me down the path of entrepreneurship and starting my own business so the back end of 2012 I was doing a lot of learning a lot of online courses a lot of research I was trying to get some freelance copywriting work but really struggled to figure out how to break into the market and this brings us to 2013 where I was still frustrated in the same job and I decided to enroll in a very expensive business coaching program called Become a Key Person of Influence and this program was actually what started my business so I started the program wanting to get a start at freelance copywriting and build up more of my clients and figure out how to market this new business but the program is structured around becoming a leader in your industry and they have five different steps you're expected to complete and one of those steps is writing and self publishing a book because when you're a published author you automatically have more credibility so I was in this group of I think 55 people who weren't writers who all had to write books and I was a writer so I asked the like mentor host of the program whether I could stand up at the end of one of the days and pitch myself for editing services so I pitched my services to the room that led to my first couple of clients and then I started getting referrals from within the community and that's what led to me starting grammar factory so I think I got my first client my first editing client in around April or May of 2013 and then at the end of that year I decided I have enough business that I was going to try doing it full time so this brings us to 2014 which is my first year of doing my business full time I also went traveling for three and a half months because one of the goals of working for myself was to be able to be able to live and work from anywhere so I did a three and a half month backpacking trip through well starting in Morocco then going through the Middle East and finishing in India which was amazing and I basically freelance part time the entire time so that was if there's ever a time in the past decade when I like I was living my dream life that was probably it so I did my big travel and then got back to Australia and then business started getting really busy so from beginning of 2014 to the beginning of 2017 I was doing grammar factory full time during that time I hired I think five different editors and two designers and my assistant he I started working with him on freelance transcription services and he was so amazing that I employed him to do more and more work for me basically hi Jake if you're watching so for those few years business was going it was both going really well and both not going really well so it was going really well in the sense that the team kept growing we kept getting more clients our services expanded and our revenue kept going up every year it wasn't going so well in the sense that even though our revenue was going up our profit wasn't I also couldn't figure out how to structure things so that I could work as the business owner rather than being the one who was actually doing the editing and ghost writing work which I enjoyed but I was really it got to the stage where I was finding the running the business side of things more fulfilling than the writing and editing and I was also just getting quite burnt out because I was doing so much writing and editing all the time the other thing was that I was a bit isolated so when you work from home constantly you do lose the social connection of going and meeting with people every day and I think the other thing was that it was going well enough for me to get lazy so because I was working from home and didn't have that much external structure and because I was burnt out and didn't have that much energy I found myself not using my time very well so one example is that if I had free time I was spending hours at the day on youtube when I had an editing project scheduled even though I had three weeks to look at the book I would often leave it until the last five days because I knew I could get it done in that time if I had to so at the beginning of 2017 I decided I actually wanted to get another corporate job and the main reason for that was because I thought that if I had this eight hours a day that was just unavailable that would force me to become really efficient and really organized with the rest of my time so at the beginning of 2017 I got a job as content marketing manager for a marketing company which um which was interesting I think it was good to have the structure again it was nice to have some extra money again I think it took some pressure off Drew because he was paying the lion's share of our living expenses while I got the business up and running I think it also it was good for him because it meant I got home and talked about something that wasn't just the business but the company was going through a stage of transition where it was shrinking every year which meant that basically every three months there was a round of redundancies so three months after I started there was a round of redundancies my role was safe but my manager was ousted and then three months later there was another round of redundancies where my role was cut from there I was very lucky to very quickly find a contracting role which was not really a career role it was more website administration so having to create web pages and make changes to the website for a company when they were requested rather than anything strategic but it was good in the sense that the people were lovely the workspace was lovely it gave me some time to recover from that blow of being a redundant which I think affected me much more than I realized at the time and it gave me some time to start thinking about Estonia so where are we now we're in so late 2017 early 2018 and then in August of 2018 was when I moved to Estonia so the story around that is that and I will put a link to a blog post in the doobly-doo for more detail but basically in mid 2017 I was at a business conference and I got home to my room at the end of the workshops one day and had a message from drew on my phone that said let's move to Estonia and I was like okay let's talk about this when I get home this is very random and the story behind this is that I've been wanting to move back to Europe for years now as you've probably gathered I had a bit of a frustrating experience in corporate I had really been wanting to travel again for ages and so we had sort of been talking about it on and off and then when I was away on this conference I think drew was struggling with work and he just had this moment where it sort of got into breaking point and he was like okay I'm sorry I wasn't ready before but I'm ready now let's find somewhere to move and he happened to see an ad on Instagram for a company called scoro which is a startup based in Estonia and he started googling and discovered that Estonia is where Skype was founded it's where transfer wise is founded taxify and bolt so a whole lot of big names and it's this Silicon Valley of Europe it's a real startup hub with lots of international companies who were looking to hire international specialists so we saw this and thought okay this is this could actually be a good option for us we're both too old for working holiday visas now and maybe a country like this would be willing to sponsor us to come over so we had this plan in the back of our minds and we were actually saving towards it because we knew we'd need some like capital to cover our expenses back home and to get us over there so we'd been saving for it and then in mid 2018 he sent me a job ad one day which was for a content marketing manager at a financial company in Estonia and I had just broken my foot at the time actually I went trampolining with that adult supervision and ended up with two fractures in my foot and so I'd been stuck on the couch for something like four days and was feeling very depressed and very sorry for myself and I sent an application on a whim and the next day I had a request for an interview and within seven days I had a job offer and they wanted me to move over in six weeks so that's how Estonia happened so in at the end of August I moved to Estonia in 2018 Drew joined me about two months later after packing up our lives back home and he needed to tie up some things with work as well and yeah 2018 was the year we moved to Estonia where we still are over a year later this brings us to 2019 which is this year and honestly of the last decade this has probably been the biggest year in terms of I want to say like in terms of transformation but that doesn't really ring true because from an outsider's perspective where I am now December 2019 is exactly where I was in December 2018 so still living in Estonia still have the same marriage still have the same job so what has changed so I went to a Mindvalley event in May of this year the end of May and one of the workshops was a journaling workshop where we did this exercise and you have to answer 17 different points and I'll find the exercise online and put a link below in case you want to try it one of the points was where do you want to be in the next three to five years and I immediately knew I wanted to be writing fiction and in three to five years I want my first book to be out I want to be have other books on submission and want to be making a career for myself as a fiction author and then you needed to go to your future self in three to five years and ask them what did you need to change or let go of in order to achieve those three to five year goals and my future self said I needed to let go of my business so I needed to let go of grammar factory which was not what I was expecting in fact this event the theme of it was expand your influence so I thought perfect I can claim this as a business expense there'll be lots of people there who are wanting to write books I'll get new clients out of it and instead on morning two I get this message saying no it's time to it's time to let this business go and yeah at the end of a few days I realized it was time to let grammar factory go so I originally was just planning to wrap it up but then someone at the event said look why don't you try selling it you've put all of this work into it and I actually didn't think it would sell I thought the business was too tied to me there were too many flaws profit yeah we hadn't had a great year actually last year was really good but this year hadn't been so good so I thought oh it's not really attractive an attractive asset for a buyer but I felt what the hell so I listed it on a couple of different business sales sites and quite quickly I had a gentleman called Scott reach out to me who thought the business sounded great it was exactly the field he wanted to get into and over a couple of months we negotiated the sale which was finalized in September at the same time because I knew I wanted to start writing again I did camp nanorimo in July and finally picked up a book that had basically been in my head for 10 years I did the first draft when I was 19 so in July I did camp nanorimo got back to this draft and spent July August and September working on it finished it at the end of September I'm still very scared of looking at it it is in a drawer and I don't really want to see I don't want to see what I've done I know I know it's a mess and then October was preparing for nanorimo and at the time of filming this video I'm still working on the nanorimo project so even though like things from the outside haven't changed like I've this year I let go of a business that was taking up all of this mental and creative space that was stopping me from writing I started writing again after over 10 years of wanting to be a writer and because of those two changes what I found is I'm so much happier at work in my day job even though the job hasn't changed and I'm even happier living in Estonia whereas as recently as six months ago I was anxious to leave I felt really trapped I wanted to go traveling again and I actually I was planning to resign from my job on the 18th of December and give a months notice and then I was going to go traveling for six months which 18th of December has come and gone and I feel like I don't need to like I feel like I could easily stay here for another three six maybe 12 months just because like I finally started doing what I really wanted to be doing again so that's a recap of what's happened in the last decade so the next thing I wanted to cover was regrets slash frustrations I feel I don't like the word regret because that implies that you know I wish something had never happened and obviously the way things have turned out is perfect it's made me into the person I am today I've had so many good experiences because of the way things have turned out and I've learned so much because of the way things have turned out but if I could do it again there are certain things I'd do differently so what I've written down is the first one is not keeping up with my writing I really struggled with this as soon as I started to work professionally as a copywriter which has been my entire career I've been writing since I left university and I always said it was just because I was so creatively drained and one of the reasons why I wanted to start the business was to so I could have this income generating asset that would free me up to be able to write not realizing that that would also take creative and mental energy having said that like I said in my last video about writing when you work full-time there's a good chance that if I waited to have the time to write if I waited until I was no longer writing for a living then I probably never would have started writing again and now that I know that I can write a little bit a day most days of the week to keep to keep learning to keep producing things I really wish I'd done it earlier and it frustrates me because I think god if I'd kept writing from when I was you know 21 years old to now like I'd have an extra 12 years of writing experience under my belt I'd probably be decent but there's nothing I can do about that now it's just it's just a frustration um the next one the next one I've written down was actually related to grammar factories so I loved running a business I loved having a team I loved the clients I worked with and the books I worked on it was such a good experience having this business and there are so many things that I'm grateful for and so many things I learned from it in hindsight though I realized that I it wasn't set up well it didn't have the foundations to grow the way I wanted it to you know if I'd made a few different decisions early on it would have been in a much better position earlier this year and I might not have had to sell it so the big one I can think of is that at the end of 2014 I hired my first editors and what I should have done was actually doubled my prices and so I should have started by doubling my prices and seen if the demand was still there and then if it was then I could have hired editors and the benefit of doing it in that order is because my prices would have been so much higher there would have been extra cash flow so I could have cut back on my own workload and focused on training the editors and reviewing all of their work because whenever I hired anyone I spent so they did first did trial books which was usually a month or two of work and then for about six months I would review everything they edited so that's quite a bit of extra work beyond what I was already doing now because I didn't raise my rates though I needed to keep up all of my own editing work to ensure there wasn't enough cash flow to cover all of this the other thing was that when they started I was paying them hourly but charging a flat rate to clients so I was actually losing money on the work that they did and one of the problems was that even though I realized this wasn't working I only increased our rates incrementally like it was a hundred or two hundred dollars at a time which wasn't enough to make a difference and it meant that for a good three years maybe four years even I was constantly on the back foot with the business and I felt like I could never get ahead financially and no wonder I felt so burnt out whereas by the time I did get my head screwed on straight and realized what I needed to be charging it was the end of 2017 and by that point it was probably a little bit too late for me I'd already mentally checked out of it um another regret slash frustration is letting myself get so out of shape so I'm like I'm not overweight by any means but I and honestly I've never been an athlete or anything but when I was in school I did a lot of ballet I did a lot of karate and I was much more active than I am now and then when I started working especially when I started the business I basically stopped doing anything and over the past year or so I have been going to the gym and have been trying to get back into shape but one of the things I feel when I look at myself and I see how out of breath I get even still after a year and I look at myself and thank god if only I'd you know just kept it up rather than letting it go and the final regret is I wish I hadn't been so fixated on making it or being successful so you might have picked up on the fact that I felt like I needed to make it financially before I could write I needed to have enough money sitting there to support me so then I'd be free to write and I think part of that might just be me and having you know lack of trust in the universe or maybe lack of trust in my ability to manage multiple things I think part of it's also the family I was raised in which is very both of my parents are in IT my sister and brother are both in IT so very corporate family very stable careers and then I'm the creative one who wants to be an artist and I think that meant that I spent all of my 20s so focused on figuring out my career and figuring out my finances and trying to get ahead that I didn't really take the time to be in my 20s and now I look back and go god I wish I'd partied more I wish I'd slept with more people I wish I wish I'd traveled and not worried about wasting time because at the end of it like that wouldn't have been a waste and there's no reason why I can't do that now I suppose but I think you know I think it's a little different when you're a bit younger and you do have more freedom and now I don't have the same level of freedom like I have a husband who I love very much but I have a husband so I have commitments um we've got a house back home that we need to pay the mortgage on maybe there'll be a time when I have that freedom again maybe when we win the lotto or when I get a million dollar book advance but who knows when that'll be and sometimes I feel like I lost that opportunity a little bit so the next section is lessons that I've learned from the last decade the first and the biggest one which I just learned in the last year is that I don't need to fix the world around me to be satisfied and happy and fulfilled or whichever word you want to put there like I said earlier where I am now from the outside is almost exactly where I was a year ago I still have the same marriage I still live in the same apartment I still have the same job I still live in the same city and yet my level of satisfaction and contentment with this life is you know through the roof um this time last year I was thinking about whether I could survive here for another year before resigning from my job and going traveling now I'm perfectly content to stay here I'm really I'm really enjoying work I love my team I'm enjoying the city I love my husband and it's because I started writing again like and yes I've established some other more positive mental thought patterns as well but the big part is that I always wanted to write and I was frustrated that I was writing and simply incorporating that into my existing life means I'm so much happier in my existing life I didn't need to throw away everything in order to be happy so big big positive lesson learned the next lesson is that it's better late than never and you would have noticed from my frustrations the main ones were why did I let everything go why did I let these things that were important to me go and now I'm playing catch up and that is frustrating and it's probably going to be frustrating for the next couple of years until like I make up for that last time but it's better to do it late than never and another thing I said in my video last week about working full-time is that Chinese proverb about how the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago when the second best time is today and yes it would have been better if I'd kept writing over the last 10 years it would have been better if I'd stayed in shape over the last 10 years but I didn't and the second best time is to realize that now and to start today lesson number three is not getting caught up in the noise so I think one of the reasons why I was so frantic and why I put so much pressure on myself to succeed earlier in my 20s was because I was getting caught up in the noise I was looking at all of these people on social media and even people I connected with in my day to day life because I was so in that business world and seeing how successful they were and how much it looks like they had got it made that I felt like I was falling behind and the truth is you don't know what's happening in their life none of us do I see you know I see people who have really successful businesses today but you know maybe their health isn't so great or maybe their relationships aren't so great or maybe everything's great and then I can just be happy for them but the truth is that it doesn't really matter how anyone else is doing it only matters how I'm doing or in your case it only matters how you're doing and your level of happiness and whether your you know with your happiness and fulfillment and satisfaction with your life is either steady on an upward trajectory as long as you are doing better than you were yesterday then it doesn't matter how anyone else is doing so learning to cut out the noise has been really helpful and I think the final lesson is that it's okay for me to want what I want um sorry I'm getting actually getting a little bit emotional which I wasn't expecting I'd do in this video um so I mentioned a couple times that I always wanted to write um and one of the reasons why I didn't pursue that was because when I was in school and I'm not putting the entire blame for this on my dad because my dad's wonderful but um I remember being maybe 16 in school and you know good talking about what you want and telling dad that I wanted to be a writer he's like oh well that's all very well and good but how are you going to make money and I think um that comment was one of the reasons why I got so fixated on getting these copywriting jobs and finding some way to make it as a writer and corporate and and it's one of the reasons why I got so focused on the business and so focused on all of these other things and so you know so focused on trying to make it and in the past year I've realized it is okay to want what I want it is okay to want to be a fiction writer even if that doesn't mean it's going to be a career even if it means like I never get a book published or I never earn enough from it to pay the bills like I can still write and I can still want to write so yeah it's okay to want what you want and the final section is gratitude so what am I grateful for as this decade comes to a close the first thing is my husband drew we met in June 2011 so it's coming up to nine years now so he has been here for most of the last decade and he's seen the ups and downs he's seen me try job after job and get frustrated time and time again he's seen me go flitting off for three and a half months back packing trips without him um he's seen me struggle to get a business up and running and then make the decision to let go of it after six and a half years and he's seen me decide to start writing and through it all he's been like so supportive and so loving so number one thing on the list is that I'm very thankful for drew the next thing I'm grateful for is and I know this probably isn't politically correct but is my level of freedom and privilege I'm aware that a lot of the frustrations and things I've spoken about from the last decade they are incredibly privileged things to be frustrated about and I know there are a lot of people in the world who don't have the luxury of being dissatisfied with a job or who want to be writing and are frustrated that they don't get to like these like I am aware that I'm so privileged to have these as my worries and yeah even though it might not be the right thing to say I think it's important to be grateful for that level of privilege and grateful that these are the things I get to be frustrated about the next thing I'm grateful for is my current job and honestly a year ago I probably wouldn't have said this so I'm actually really grateful to be feeling grateful about my working situation the role I'm in is incredibly big and rewarding I so my title is head of content and I've seen other head of content roles in other companies that don't seem to have the level or breadth of responsibilities that I have in my role I get to work on such a wide portfolio of things I have an amazing team an amazing diverse team actually so I'm Australian my the people reporting into me are Iranian American slash Cuban Nigerian Estonian and British so it's just amazing to work on such a diverse team and get all of these different perspectives and I have a very supportive boss which is wonderful who really really came through for me in the last week actually when something went wrong with bonuses in my team and then there's the fact that this company interviewed me over Skype while I was in Australia and was happy to bring me over to Estonia from Australia for this role like that's incredible so I've had so much support in this role and even if I haven't always been grateful for it I am very grateful for it now I'm also grateful for writing and even though it's frustrating and even though I have a long way to go and I have lots of days when I struggle and I look at my stuff and it's nowhere near where I want it to be and the words on the page are nowhere near to capturing what I see in my head I'm grateful that I have the opportunity to write and that writing is something that can fit around all of these other things in my life and finally I'm grateful to you so it's only been like a couple of months that I've been on YouTube but for those of you who are watching um yeah I really appreciate you watching these videos so thank you that is all from me today if you're still with me thank you for sticking with me until the end I'm pretty sure once I edit this this is going to be a lengthy video in the comments below I'd love to hear about your decades in reviews so what were the frustrating things that you experienced what are the lessons you've learned from them and what are you grateful for today other than that if you like this video please give it a like and subscribe and I will see you next time bye