Category Archives: The Union-Recorder

As much as you may love the idea of working for yourself, you have to also think about the realities of being self-employed. For starters, there are often a lot of really hard days. Until you fully get off the ground you have to do a lot of hustling. Be prepared to have some periods of extreme highs that give way to many more extreme lows.

Working from home does keep your costs down. However, it doesn’t always make it any easier. The temptations to stay in bed are often over-powering and if you don’t already suffer from depression, you can experience for the first time, emotions that you may not realize or understand. It takes a lot of self-motivation and fortitude when working for and by yourself. Sometimes you forget why you decided to make the plunge and if you can make it long-term. Those are the times that you have to really dig deep. If you’re in a situation where you aren’t able to pay your bills, you should really consider other alternatives with regard to supplementing your income while embarking on the road of self-employment. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been several months now since the passing of my grandmother. Hers is a death that I was dreading and one that, in a year of many changes, was the last thing in the world that I wanted to have happen. In one’s youth, when left to our own devices to fantasize about adulthood, always furthest and obscured from our thoughts is the pain that comes along with being an adult. Sure, we can stay up as late as we want and do the things that we want, but they always come at a price. I wanted to believe that when I became an adult life would be easier, more in my control, simply more. But what I’ve found is that in the shroud and hope of our youth there sometimes lies the inability to cope with things in our adulthood.

Last year was a mess. We all have those trying times in life where up is down and things just don’t seem to add up. I went about the most trying year in my life enduring any number of emotions and frustrations. Everything I had known was flipped upside down. Losing my grandmother felt a bit like scenes in movies where the villain fires his finishing round into the heart. I’ve had my good days but never far from my mind was my grandmother and the realization that I am only moving farther away from the life that had her in it. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few weeks and months there has been an increase in the national dialogue of what it is to be black in the United States. Police brutality, Oscar snubs and the like are among the topics that are being flashed across the headlines. What does it really mean to be a person of color in the US? Are the issues with race relations still as much a part of our present and future as they were of our past? We are more than the color of our skin. America is still a melting pot of many races and creeds.

I must give a nod to my upbringing in Jamaica. It’s motto, “out of many, one people,” is how I’ve lived my life. Sure, I too have my own quirks regarding whom I like or don’t like, but what is not a part of that list of quirks is the color of someone’s skin. To be honest, when I moved back to the US at the age of 9 I remember my first best friends, they were white. That shifted over time and then shifted once more. By the time I was in high school I had an eclectic mix of friends. By that time I counted Caucasians, Asians and homosexuals among my closest friends. I had fewer and fewer friends of color. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent Forbes.com article, over a half a million small business get started each month while more shut down than start-up. With this statistic it’s not a surprise that some would be leery in joining the almost 30 million small businesses in the United States. It may also come as a surprise that over half of the working population works in a small business and that most small businesses are home-based. Why then do people start small business with these kinds of odds? Because many of us are still deciding what we want to be when we grow up. And once we’ve learned that, we choose to make a go of it on our own.

Starting a small business or a home-based business is not something that should be entered into lightly. More often than not you’ll go through a long period languishing while trying to make your business viable. As with many big decisions in life, starting a business is a very big risk. There’s never an assurance of success. Rather, it is expected and statistically likely that you’ll fail. However, if you’re willing to work at beating the odds and fulfill a professional goal, this may still be the route for you. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always so interesting how quickly a year seems to go by. Here it is, the day after my 34th birthday and only days away from 2015 and as is often the case for most of us, I’m looking back on the past year and looking forward to the next. This year has been one of the most challenging in my life. If I weren’t already depressed one could argue that this year gave me several reasons to be. I resigned from the company I’d worked at for over a decade, sold my home, moved to a new town, changed careers, lost my grandmother. There are so many reasons to feel downtrodden and less than optimistic going into the New Year, but I’m not. The world may not always seem fair, but that’s the thing about life, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

So maybe those last few words were lyrics from a song but as so much of life is, they are quite poetic. We go day by day in the drudgery of life sometimes feeling like we just don’t have the strength or the encouragement we need to persevere. What I’ve realized over this difficult year is that even in the darkest periods there are always some light. Whether it’s kind words of comfort even kind deeds, sometimes we get so bogged down by life’s difficulties that we don’t always see life’s blessings. Read the rest of this entry »