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I'm glad I didn't though, because a brilliant observation about being a pro versus an amateur was waiting in the last few pages.
"...I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life."
There's steadiness in a 9-5 job that is nonexistent in self-employment. The steady stream of ups and downs are the only constant. You get used to it. You learn the pulse of your industry and match your own bursts of productivity to it. When the lull comes, it require utter patience, a careful waiting and watching and knowing when you'll need to act again.
You keep yourself occupied with the never-ending upkeep you could never anticipate when starting a company; the banking, the outreach, the cold calls, cold emails, cold social media, writing contracts, writing copy, writing claims, the back and forth of scheduling anything with more than two people, the warmer in-person coffees, the building of relationships commonly misconstrued as networking. They're not exactly chores, though they seem like it at first. Here's where The Dirty Life comes in to explain:
"The word chore connotes tedium, but that was not how I felt about them. I had missed my chores. Chores were the first taste of the weather, first effort of limbs, a dance to which I knew all the steps with certainty."The outcome is uncertain, but the steps are all familiar, whether you're just out of college or a 20-year corporate veteran. Writing is a necessary skill, market research becomes a part of daily life, conversation always holds a hint of personal and professional. The transparency takes some getting used to. In a large work environment, the buck can always be passed. The only person negatively affected when you pass the buck on your own dime is you. Personal accountability reigns supreme. You find you, which can be a scary prospect. You're not self-reflecting anymore, you're self-acting.
The part of The Dirty Life that resonated with me the most was Kristin Kimball's evolutionary loss of the meme of daily commerce. When you're off the clock so to say, time isn't an elephant in the room anymore. It isn't to be contended with. You discover a rhythm for yourself, not realizing it's discordant with the society you used to know. Kimball conveys the essence of this shift away from the "norm" with her disappearing longing for shopping:
"The last old habit to fall away was shopping. I could feel the need to shop building up in me during the week, like an itch. I'm not talking about shopping for clothes, or shoes, or any of the other recreational kinds of shopping people generally do. I mean only the oddly comforting experience of flowing past shiny new merchandise, the everyday exchange of money for goods. In the city, most of the landscape is made up of objects for sale, and it's nearly impossible to leave your apartment without buying something - a newspaper, a cup of coffee, a bright bunch of Korean market flowers. When I went for days without buying anything, without setting eyes on commerce, without even starting the car to burn up some gas, I felt an achy withdrawal."I especially feel this way when I don't get out of the house all day. I often wonder what I spent so much of my money on though. The coping coffees, the hot truck lunches appealing to that longing of wanting something "different", the regularity of eating out that makes eating in seem a luxury. The cycle of self-fulfilling commercial life sustaining itself.
I'm cognizant of being an amateur and the new beginnings I'm going through. Loss is not something you get used to easily, but it feels different when it's a shedding of habits you didn't really mean to acquire in the first place. They came packaged with the environment. A farm is quite different from a company, but I found a kinship to Kimball's personal evolution in a new environment that she only partially chose herself.