Image by Harrison Haines from Pexels
When to close, and open, doors in your life
Doors close for a reason, right?
You open the door, then close it. But sometimes you see a door ahead of you, and right before you get to it, it closes shut with no key to unlock it.
That might be an awfully realistic example of the famous line, “When a door closes, another one opens,” but often, just like real life, even if we try to get somewhere we’re dreaming of going, that door is logically shut with no key in sight.
As I think of this practical metaphor, I think back to my first time wanting to start a solopreneur business. I was 17 at the time, and watching tons of drop shipping videos, the best side hustle am I right!
During that time, I had just started my Graphic Design college courses a few months prior, so I was wanting to start something that would show my progress but that I could also sell.
Since I was a newbie designer, I knew that starting services right off the bat wouldn’t help, so I stepped into digital products.
While I had no knowledge of product ideation, research, and marketing, I did have a problem with my desktop space. When seeing the clutter of icons on my desktop wallpaper, I correlated the wallpaper and the icon placement to think of a new way of arranging icons… using the wallpaper itself!
The first door
Unbeknownst to me as a young adolescent, desktop wallpaper organizers were a thing. But to me, it was as if I discovered a new rock on the moon.
For the next 6 or so months (beginning January), I set about measuring the space between folders and icons on my wallpaper and placing those into a grid in Canva. Then, I collected to my heart’s content a range of desktop images from Unsplash, as well as different ways of organizing the icons like rectangles and circles.
Image of desktop icon measurement from Author
At the end, I mixed and matched the rectangles on top of the wallpaper in just the right way so the image behind — whether it was a mountain, or the beach, would stay the focal point.
Desktop wallpaper organizer example designed by Author
The whole creative process was super fun, to this day I don’t regret having the inspiration to create them. In fact, designing desktop wallpapers taught me a lot about design from just experimenting. Yet, as I set up a Shopify site and kept up-to-date on Instagram, no sales rolled in.
I played around a ton, setting up different Instagram accounts (before being banned as a bot, for some reason) and interacted with aesthetic gals on there whom I had no interest talking to, and yet it seemed like a failed effort.
From Summer to Autumn I had a decision: Leave Instagram and my niche for desktop organizers to go after a new pursuit, or stay to soak up any spilled orange juice.
Well, orange juice is never fresh being on the floor, so I moved on to pour a glass from a newly picked orange to start, well, fresh 🍊
Leaving the 1st door for the 2nd
I don’t remember how the next hustle happened, but I happened to have a Twitter (what it was called about 6 months before turning to X) account and realized something unbelievable — I had my account for more than 1 year!
Ok that might’ve come from left-field, but for some background info (that I hadn’t known until it popped up on my screen), you’re considered a bot on Twitter/X unless you’re either A) Have an account for 1 year or B) buy their membership and show facial ID.
Knowing this, I felt that I had really dodged a bullet having the option of “A”.
Starting Twitter was something really new to me. I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish, but I had a sliver of an idea: Building my personal brand to post my WIP’s.
Even though it took a month to transition from having my comfy Instagram account to suddenly feeling alone in the woods of Twitter, I friended some design folks on Twitter and have felt more at home ever since.
Not only did I learn so much more with this route, but I’ve transitioned to my Notion template biz and have earned my first internet income on it!
In this case, when I opened a new door, the old door was meant to close.
Shut without a key
There have been plenty of hustles that I have wanted to start, but things like time, money, and resources got in the way.
Have I regretted not taking more time to find the “key” to open this door? Nope!
Not only have I found a more, surprisingly, enjoyable hustle, but I feel as if I’ve learned more on this path than any other.
Realizing now, the other doors would have led me to much frustration in starting and then continuing to build those hustles. Leading me to lose my time, energy, and peace. But having now organized my routine to incorporate Medium, Notion templates, and college, it’s the right door for me to keep strolling through.
Not all doors shut without a key need to be walked through, you just need to prioritize when they do.
Image by George Becker from Pexels
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