TEDx and my speaking side hustle

Back in 2018, I landed an opportunity to give a TEDx talk at Xavier University in Cincinnati Ohio. I got this opportunity simply because I happened to be on the TED website and saw that they were asking for submissions for speakers. So I filled out the application and to my surprise, I got the talk. This moment was a springboard for me.

It launched me into having the desire to grow a side hustle of speaking opportunities and over the next two years, I made around $1000 for giving different talks around my city. Because I worked my network…

Economic Hopelessness

I don’t need to tell you that 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck because with a stat like that you the reader are most likely living that out right now. I also don’t need to tell you that the average American has around 90,000 dollars in debt because you most likely are living that out yourself. And this pandemic hasn’t helped anyone with more than 10 million Americans still out of work. With statistics like this, it is easy to wonder if there is any hope for someone who wants to climb out of debt.

Becoming Debt-Free at 23

I recently had…

The weed of shame

Have you ever messed up and hurt those around you? I have. A few times actually. I relived a moment recently where I was told how badly I messed up. I remember the words coming from the other person about how I failed and how everyone had failed me and that I needed to start over. I remember a flood of emotions washing over me. I remember going home and sitting in my brokenness.

Feeling nothing but shame.

Shame is this internal voice that rings in our heads that tells us how terrible we are and how worthless we are…

My photography journey

I started my photography journey back in 2020 when I bought my cannon M50. Currently I still just have the kit lens and that's all that I am using. I initially bought the camera because I was doing a lot of filming at church. When the pandemic hit my church needed a way to continue online only and since we didn’t have the equipment I stepped up and began using my iPhone 11 Pro Max to film our services.

Using an iPhone to film an hour-long service in different chunks each week tho is not great for workflow. So when…

I’ve been a content creator for going on three years now. Back in 2018 when I started it came out of a necessity for me to have something on the side of my everyday life to be creative and to help me find myself again after going through a bit of an identity crisis. Thus I did two things. I launched my blog here on Medium and really started to get into writing and figuring out the platform and then I started my podcast “Coffee With Craft”

Since then I have been experimenting with content creating and discovering my voice…

Coffee With Craft

For the past two years, I have hosted a podcast called Coffee With Craft, its all about having an intentional conversation like you would with a friend over coffee. During the first few months of the quarantine, I have been putting in the hard work to get the podcast ready for the relaunch. With the relaunch, I wanted to make sure that my podcast got as many eyes on it as possible and so I decided to go ahead and run a Facebook ad for my podcast for the first time.

I’ve always been a little skeptical of Facebook ads…

The “pandemic made creative”

For my 9–5 job, I am a youth pastor at a small church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I, like many people, have seen my job change dramatically over the past five months. Before the pandemic, I spent the majority of my time planning large scale events with other youth pastors and putting on weekly student services from a youth group experience on a Sunday night and an after school program on Wednesday afternoons. That all went away when the pandemic began. …

What I’ve loved about quarantine is that everyone who has ever wanted to try something like creating a podcast now has a chance to get it going! As someone who has been podcasting for almost two years, I have come to a place where I believe everyone who wants to tell a story should have a podcast.

However, for many people who want to start a podcast, they lack the understanding of how they should go about starting a podcast. They look at the project and feel like they are staring at this impossible mountain they could never climb. However…