Coffee + Convo sessions are casual morning meetups with entrepreneurs, experts, and peers; sometimes there’s a guiding discussion topic, other times, the mentor of the day (a local entrepreneur or expert in their field) will simply be present to listen to the needs and challenges of attendees and offer help and insight where they can.
[Published April 2020, updated September 2020]
As we enter a new season, we’re reflecting on the wisdom shared by Juli James this past spring. For Coffee + Convo on April 7th, we chatted with Juli, the cofounder of two ed tech companies, Playable Media and Wildcards, and professor at UNT in the Mayborn School of Journalism teaching game design, digital media, and digital design + journalism. We talked about how she balances her side hustles, main gig, and life outside of/alongside work. She shared with us a few things to identify and implement for our wellbeing as we live the hustle.
She’s also a veteran and, for a few years, was an army journalist, the field in which she began her career. While earning her master’s degree, Juli began working with game design researchers, where she met her partners for Playable Media and developed her interest in game design at the intersection of journalism, media communication, and advocacy. They earned a grant to build a web tool to support people who wanted to make and design games, leading to Playable Media becoming a company rather than remaining an academic product.
In 2019, friends of Juli’s started Wildcards, a company that creates STEM electronics kits for early learners, to enable children in upper primary grades through middle school to learn and play with hardware and coding at the same time. Wildcards was accepted into the 2019 AT&T higher ed tech accelerator, and Juli and partners spent the majority of the year working through that program.
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In short, Juli has a main gig, two side gigs, a charming family, and a social life. She notes that balancing work life, home life, and outside-of-work life is not easy, but identifying a language for handling these different areas and varying times of need for each of them has helped.
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Every Season Has Its End
Some time periods will be a “season of sacrifice,” whether that’s in the professional or personal arena. Juli used the example of meeting a contract’s terms; the contract has an end, and the period of working (maybe a bit overtime) does not last forever. During that period, however, you might have to sacrifice certain things: maybe the ability to binge watch a show with the family on the weekends or spontaneously going for walks or... you get the point.
The same goes for periods of time with family obligations. Juli talked about the early stages of her children’s lives, reminiscing about a time that she would “look out” at the world, while taking care of her still very young children at home but knowing that they would grow, start going to school, and become more self-sufficient and that the picture would look very different within years.
She emphasized that one of the main factors that contributed to maintaining sanity and wellbeing is her fortune in findining and choosing strong, complimentary partners, in business and in life. Her life partner doesn’t just “help at home”; he shares in the division of labor. Her side gig partners and cofounders understand and can empathize with the season of life that she’s currently in (as they’re in similar situations). All communicate clearly and frequently.
Know Yourself & Your Default Settings
Juli recommends identifying and understanding your tendencies, and how they affect your decision making and actions. She refers to Gretchen Rubin’s book The Four Tendencies when talking about her inclination to always say “yes” when asked to do something or be involved in a project. She jokes that, much like an iPhone, she has default settings that make her want to say “Yes” to everything immediately. Instead, now she takes a moment to be able to say “I’ll get back to you.” A major reason for responding with “I’ll get back to you” is to ensure that you’re making time for self-care.
Self-care for you might look a lot different than self-care for someone else; massages and pedicures are relaxing and fun, but that’s not necessarily Juli’s cup of tea. For her, it’s getting good sleep (and enough of it!) that is crucial to her living sustainably. Otherwise, she laughingly says, she reaches a point where her state of being is “I’m hungry; I’m tired; and I have to pee.” In her words, maintaining sanity depends on behaviors, not just a mindset or a way of thinking, but also the physical choices that you make. Things as simple as remembering to drink water, eat, and take a break can keep you from being fried at the end of the day.
Juli’s Podcast Recommendations
“Happier with Gretchen Rubin” author of Better Than Before, about implementing habits that work for you.
“Happier in Hollywood” - 2 screenwriters talk about their careers and translate/apply it to listeners’ lives
You can watch the full Coffee + Convo and hear the Q&A session here: