Ilana Jacqueline

Part of being an entrepreneur is going through different phases of a project.

The first phase is the idea. The idea part is awesome. You feel excited—you just came up with a plan for a product that NOBODY HAS EVER IN THEIR WILDEST DREAMS DREAMED OF! You are a genius. They should erect statues in your honor. Like this one. You spend all day mapping things out, making a business plan, buying websites, dreaming about the millions of yoga pants you can buy…

And then comes phase two: Working well with others.

I think even my kindergarten teachers can vouch for me sucking at this. I think it’s got a lot to do with impatience and the fact that working with others means waiting on others. And I don’t like to wait. I like to pull the plate out of the microwave at 0:02 seconds. I like to leave the house five minutes earlier than I have to. I like 1 minute grits. Because why should it take me five?

The past few weeks I’ve been in phase two and I hate it. I think it’s even worse with this particular project because I’ve been trying to work with people in different countries—and different time zones and with Today’s Teen and Materniteens I’m so used to working with people on my coast in NY.

There is a chat service that helps American customers work with China. I had finally figured it out and was waiting to get some interactions done. I waited for three hours before I realized why no merchants were online. It was 3AM their time.

I don’t get it. Does the universe really need to point out that the world doesn’t actually revolve around me?

Beyond the time distance, I have the added language barrier for some of my correspondences. When working with China my emails tend to look like this:

Dear Helen,

I would like to purchase 300 units of octopus helmets. What would the price for 300 units of octopus helmets including shipping to America cost?

Thank you,

Ilana

The emails I tend to get back are like this:

Dear Sir!

How are you ?

Here is Helen,thanks for you attention our factory product.

Yeap, we can sale 300 packs of the octopus helmet cover for you .

Pls check attached pic that is our stock,choose which one you want .

The details for the octopus helmet

Material: single tentacle, size:42*36cm, suction:1/16 Thickness:14gsm Packing: 10pcs/pack.

If just 300packs maybe need transfet by express pls let me know your address so that I can check the freight charge.
Best Regards ~ !

It’s not always very clear what exactly you’re getting, how large it will be, and when it will arrive. I can tell already that a lot of my transactions will be hit or miss (anyone want to buy 6,000 octopus helmets?)

Thankfully, you will eventually bypass this phase of your project and move onto phase three: Actually doing shit.

And if I ever get my price estimates back, I’ll let you know what that’s like.

For now, enjoy this cool picture of my dog!

But I like working from home...

A lot of the time working from home can mean working alone. So on the rare occasion I have to step out of my yoga pants and into a business meeting my frame of mind is generally something like this:

What do real people wear when they congregate in front of a projector to view PowerPoint slides? What if they wear suits and ties and pencil skirts? I’m underdressed. But wait—what if I show up in a pencil skirt and they’re all wearing jeans? I’ll look overexcited and stuck up!

At this point, half my closet is on my bedroom floor and I’m still in my yoga pants and my Your Body is a Wonderland t-shirt.

What if they can sense I’m a home-worker? What if they look at me and know I work two feet from my bed and think they’re better than me because they have cubicles and a fax machine? What if they can see right through my blazer and slacks and know that the majority of my work is spent in fuzzy socks and a scrunchie from the 1990’s?

This generally escalates into a full blown panic attack and reminds me that I should probably check into getting more human-to-human interaction. I sit in my car outside of whatever Starbucks/office building I’m scheduled to deep breath away the anxiety.

I’m going to go in there and make an ass of myself. I’m carrying too many things. I’m going to say something stupid or worse—something too smart and I’ll be taken advantage of! I’m going to stutter and have misplaced spit collecting in-between my teeth and cheeks while I’m talking. What if I forget everything and don’t contribute anything at all?

Which is never the case, by the way, because anxiety tends to make me even more talkative but less clever. So while I may still be chattering away, my mind is focusing on whether or not my stomachache will last the entire 55 minutes I have left in this meeting. And still I talk. Still they laugh. Still I get my message across and something—usually the mention of a project I’m particularly interested in—always seems to pull me into the moment.

And I forget that my shoes pinch and my high ponytail is so tight its giving me the cheekbones that god never did. I forget what I’m wearing. I forget that being twenty-one and facing down a room full of seasoned professionals is the kind of repetitive nightmare that has become a reality for me in the past few years. And for that brief moment I am in yoga pants and any of my various John Mayer T-Shirts and warm, fuzzy socks.

I guess the trick to overcoming that oh god I don’t want to die in a spitting contest in a constricting pencil skirt kind of feeling is to recognize that:

A)     In a less dramatic fashion, most people feel this way.

B)     Your expertise is not measured by your hair accessory (In most fields.)

C)     And lastly, nobody cares.

Which is actually the golden rule. Because most of the time people aren’t paying attention to your idiosyncrasies as much as you are. They’re trying to delve a little deeper into the lyrics of Your Body Is a Wonderland and figure out how many more minutes left before they can go to lunch.

You know that every other girl in the class hates this chick.

So two weeks ago as part of my let’s stop being a fat ass initiative, I joined a gym. It’s one of those new gyms that use resistance training and medicine balls instead of weights and treadmills. Because studies show that treadmills are intimidating. Studies also show that I have neither the strength nor knowledge needed to operate gym equipment.

So to join this gym I put $200 on my AMEX that I didn’t have, dug out my yoga pants and sports bras and made a valiant effort not to look like a complete ass.

The classes I’ve been taking are pretty mixed. You’ve got newbs like me who haven’t worked out since seventh grade. (What? Dodgeball counts!) And then you’ve got people who do this class every day, three times a day, for the past four years. They have abs. They have muscles in their arms. When they do their sit-ups—there isn’t an ounce of fat in their mid-section. I hate them for it, but at the same time, it’s damn inspiring.

But the most motivating factor at the gym I work out at is the rack.

See, the gym is run by these two women who are probably the fittest women I’ve ever seen. And not in a gross overly-muscled way—but in a size zero, sculpted buttocks kind of way. And to show of the fruits of their labors they created a clothing line of gorgeous, chic athletic wear. It’s the kind of clothing that if you threw it on to go to Publix, people would gather behind you in the candy isle and say, “She must be getting that for a friend.”

I want to live in these clothes. And there’s only one thing stopping me.

They’re all extra-smalls.

This, if you stop to think about it, is an excellent marketing strategy for several reasons. It ensures that anyone wearing the gym’s brand is representing the results of a hard workout. I mean, I really don’t think people want to join a gym when they see someone sitting in McDonald’s with love handles hanging out of their extra-large Fitness T-Shirt. Secondly, it provides motivation. That’s certainly the draw for me. I’m rowing and I’m staring and I’m thinking to myself when I wear those crop tees, no one is going to know that I can eat fourteen tacos in one sitting.

Which is actually kind of a shame, because it’s one of my greatest achievements.

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