16. Finding Your Core in Times of Change

What we've learned from our careers in transition

(Not actual footage of Shannon and Kevan…but that would be cool though.)

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At Bonfire, we support companies and individuals in figuring out their core stories and how best to tell them. In order to do that, we talk to our clients about some pretty squishy, existential concepts. We talk about dreams and feelings and raisons d’être. We ask why a lot. And we get the privilege of listening to founders, marketers, creatives, and entrepreneurs share what lights them up. What they’re excited to put into the world. What they love to do. 

Because that’s what we love to do! We love the craft of storytelling, and in creating Bonfire this year, we get to do this whole storytelling thing in a new and different way from other periods of our lives. For the both of us, storytelling has always been the one essential thread that’s tied together all our different jobs and careers. 

When we were reflecting on this together at the end of 2023, we realized that de-identifying with our various professions (marketer, writer, arts administrator, journalist, tech worker, etc.) and instead identifying with a “core activity” has allowed both of us to be nimble and creative in how we conceive of our careers. Our core activity is “storytelling,” but yours might be “people management,” or “problem-solving,” or “building from scratch,” or any of a billion profession-agnostic activities! (Share yours in the comments!)

We’ve talked before about toxic productivity culture and the dangers of over-identifying with your work, and we’ve definitely had our share of 4 a.m.-stare-at-the-ceiling crises as our careers have…wandered over the years. But, at first by accident and then very intentionally, we’ve each strung together a series of jobs/careers that have this storytelling component in common. So instead of asking, “What’s my next marketing job?,” the question becomes, “In what other ways can I do storytelling?”

Waaay broader possibilities! 

Basically:

If you’re clear about what activities you love to do, you can be creative about all the different ways you could do those things in any number of professions.

So, in honor of the new year, and as a way to reintroduce ourselves to our newsletter community (Hi, friends!), we thought we’d share a little about each of our journeys in order to stand with you in solidarity if you’re searching for what’s new and next in 2024.  

Shannon’s story: 

I wrote my first poem in kindergarten. It’s insane. Please enjoy it here:

(Note: I have corrected the numerous spelling and punctuation errors of the original.) 

In a kitchen warm and snug,
A piece of cheese lay on the table. 
Rather strange in a way, 
And moving slowly, strong, and able.

What is 6-year-old me talking about? Alien cheese? A possessed piece of cheese? Is it not really cheese? Now, at age 35, I cannot know. But I’m struck by how even these first verses are telling a teeny-tiny weird story. There’s exposition, there’s intrigue, and there’s a twist! Beginning, middle, and a cliffhanger ending to boot. 

Fast-forward to me in 2011, moving to New York City with a master’s in arts management, a bachelor’s in theater and creative writing, and a for-profit arts administration internship that paid me $150 a week out of the petty cash box. Obviously, I needed anywhere from 2 to 16 additional jobs in order to, you know, exist in New York City. For years, my whole life was so utterly consumed by finding additional streams of income at all times that to this day, more than a decade and financial stability later, I cannot help but pause on every HELP WANTED notice posted in the window of a cafe or shop. 

In between the job at the restaurant and the job at the insurance and securities office and the job as a personal assistant and the job as a social media consultant and the job as a freelance article writer for my university’s alumni magazine, I was trying to “do art.” I wrote plays and musicals and song cycles (unpaid). I evaluated script submissions for a theater company (unpaid; but hey, free tickets). And I was a dramaturg and script consultant for theatrical new work development with independent playwrights and artistic teams (sometimes paid, sometimes paid in hugs and wine), which I loved more than anything I have ever done—ever.

I will let you guess which of the things in that list I got to do most and least often. 

I was spending 95% of my working life doing jobs that weren’t the thing I loved so that I could barely survive in the place where I could do the thing I loved 5% of the time. 

The math, as they say, wasn’t mathing. 

Broke and despairing, I Hail-Mary applied to be a 27-year-old intern at a branding agency because the job description mentioned something about telling “compelling stories” for companies. “Huh,” I thought, a bit flabbergasted at finding that wording in a corporate job posting, “I bet I know how to do that.” 

Turns out, I did know how to do that. And it also turns out that with a full-time job and health insurance and a 401(k), I had just as much if not more time to do all the artistic things I had been doing, now without worrying if I was going to get a paycheck or just a firm handshake at the end. Go freaking figure. 

When I left the agency world to be the first in-house marketing writer at a tech startup, I used the same angle: “I know how to tell a compelling story. Hire me.” It worked, and this focus on linking the core activity of what I was doing from job to job kept working for the last 8 years. From copywriter to editorial director to brand director. While I have the same healthy dose of imposter syndrome as everyone else, the leap from agency work to the tech sector and into different verticals never felt too scary, because what I woke up and actually did every day wasn’t all that different. It was always storytelling. 

Founding Bonfire with Kevan, I get to do the same thing…just remixed again! I’ve considered a few times where I would be if I’d viewed my career vertically rather than horizontally—probably running a team at an agency right now. Would that be bad? Likely not! But would that be less interesting than pivoting to tech and pivoting to entrepreneurism and pivoting to…? 

Rather strange in a way, 
And moving slowly, strong, and able.

Best I can hope for!

Kevan’s story: 

The first college major you see, alphabetically, when looking through the course catalog is accounting. Now, choosing one’s college degree based on alphabet ranking is not recommended but not altogether worse than the way that I chose my college degree, which was “what degree will make me the most predictable piles of money.” Either path – lazy or greedy – led me to the same place: starting my college life as a wannabe accountant. 

About two semesters in, once accounting got real and the calculators came out, I realized my mistake. Turns out, I didn’t want to spend my days finding unique ways to write things off of people’s taxes (although, talk about a good application of creative thinking!). I wanted to write. I wanted to express myself creatively. I wanted to see my name in headlines. 

So I went from finance, one of the safest fields, into journalism, one of the most fraught. 

Journalism appealed to me because I got to tell stories. I got to see how things worked, to take the components of a story and piece them together in a satisfying way, to make sense of the world…and to get into events for free with a press pass. I was going to be the next Bob Woodward. I would give Robin Roberts a run for her money. 

But as I started to learn more about the newspaper industry, I got a grave picture of what I was in for. I was on track to be a sports reporter, which meant late nights on deadline in a cramped office, fact-checking sports scores and fielding calls from parents of high school athletes who demanded we print corrections on the spellings of their Jaxons and Tiffinis. Though I loved crafting stories about these Jaxons and Tiffinis, I did not want to spend late nights and weekends at work, grinding, forever.

Also, the newspaper industry was not too concerned with storytelling in the 2010s; it was concerned with staying alive, at any cost. I wrote for a newspaper in Seattle, Washington, that stopped existing a few years later. I saw very few actual job openings and many more peers leaving to do something, anything, else. The ones who remained weren’t exactly beacons of hope – too many responsibilities, too little pay, too much ambiguity about the future. 

Was it too late to go back to accounting? Kidding not kidding

Through it all, my love of storytelling never waned. I continued to write – blog posts and essays and creative writing, most of which were terrible but some of which actually turned into opportunities. I built a community website that got me in the door at a new media company. I turned that into a content marketing job. I turned content marketing into Head of Marketing, getting very lucky along the way to receive amazing opportunities but also to be in places where storytelling mattered. 

Storytelling definitely matters at Bonfire. Shannon and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And while starting our own business is a new adventure, it feels strangely familiar – we’re still storytellers, after all; we’ve always been storytellers.

(Also, as fate would have it, I am doing some accounting for Bonfire. So even that story has a happy ending.)

Over to you…

What’s your red thread? The spine of your career? Your core activity? We want to hear in the comments how you’ve pursued it creatively from profession to profession—and what you’ve learned!

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Say hi anytime.

Kumbaya,
Shannon & Kevan