Maggie Frank-Hsu - Be About Something: Unlock Your Big Idea to Catapult Your Business to the Next Level

This book is not a series of writing tips and prompts so you can get the creative juices flowing.

This book is here to help you answer the question, Whats next?

The process in this book will help you identify your Big Idea and use it to differentiate your business in the marketplace, and attract the attention of the people who need you the most.

You use your Big Idea to be about something in business. Being about something also raises your profile, allowing people to recognize you as different among all the people who do what you do. That transforms your business as well as transforming your audiences lives, and attracting new clients and new opportunities to you.

By the end of this book, you will identify your Big Idea. Youll figure out why you dont talk about it publicly right now. And youll understand how to share it publicly going forward to transform your businesss position in the marketplace from one in a crowd of generic service-based businesses to the only business that solves a problem with your unique mix of personality, experience, and expertise.

Plus, I talk about death and sex, too. Not your typical business book topics. (I dont know why.)

I include four exercises throughout the book. When you read the book and do the exercises, you should go from having some confidence that you might have something to say about your industry to:

1. Articulating, in writing, your biggest ideas about your industry.
2. Understanding why you get tongue-tied or feel writers block as soon as you want to share your Big Ideas.
3. Understanding the importance of expressing your biggest ideas publicly, to a wide audience.

Its best if you go in that order. You can do the writing for the exercises in a notebook, or you email me (youll find my email address at the end) for a writeable PDF. You can write in your journal.

Where you write your responses is not as important as the fact that you write them. Thats taking action.

If you do the exercises in this book, youll be practicing self-care, because youll be giving yourself permission to make space and time for your biggest ideas.

But doing thatgiving yourself permissionis much bigger than self-care.

When womxn stop being quiet, and start giving voice to their biggest ideas, we are dismantling patriarchy.

Thats because we are claiming space for our bigger ideas, and were modeling how to claim space so that other womxn can do the same. (I use the word womxn to include all people affected by misogyny.)

I want you to know that I know to Be About Something isnt easy.

It took me 20 years within my professional life before I actually developed a writing practice where I shared my biggest ideas publicly.

I dont want it to take you 20 years. Thats why I wrote this book.

So, what was I doing for those 20 years?

For some of that time I was writing and getting paid for it. National magazines and online outlets published my work. I published my own work on my blog. But writing for money didnt make me a professional writer.

Im talking about turning pro in the way that Steven Pressfield describes it. You turn pro by deciding you are a professional, not by waiting for some job or other external source to anoint you.

For most of my career, I never believed I could be a professional writer.

For one thing, I knew I wasnt the best writer. Who ever lived. How could I turn pro if I wasnt the best? That was my absurd bar.

Yet it held me back for two decades.

Meanwhile I pursued a non-writing career. I never considered starting my own business. I truly believed that setting a vision and carrying it out was something that other people got to do. It was their destiny to set the agenda. Not mine.

But something changed a few years ago when I had my first child.

From the moment people found out I was pregnant, I transformed from a person to a vessel that carried a person. Even before he was born, people asked about the baby; not about me.

I felt erased.

After he was born, I would walk him in his stroller around and around the neighborhood after work. (I didnt really know what else to do with him.) The people I passed stared through me like I wasnt there. Sometimes they peered into the stroller to peek at the baby. Otherwise, moving out of the way so the stroller could pass annoyed them momentarily, like a fly buzzing by their ear.

I couldve been wearing one of those Chewbacca masks and I doubt anyone would have noticed. I felt angry and hurt. But I also felt liberated.

For the previous 34 years or so, I had felt a lot of pressure to look and act like an attractive, pleasant female. But if no one could or would see me, then that pressure dissolved, too. I started to get dressed and put on makeup for me. I ate things that tasted good to me. I only laughed at jokes that I thought were funny. I only smiled when I was pleased to see the person in front of me.

For most of my life, Id been pretending I didnt care what anyone else thought. But, after a few months of being a mother, I was living it.

But at the time, I didnt register myself as confident, exactly. My internal monologue went something like this:

Did any of these people who stare right through me while Im pushing the stroller wake up at 1:30 this morning to breastfeed a baby, then get up at 5:05 a.m., go to boot camp class, run home, breastfeed the baby again, get ready, get their baby ready, pull out of the freezer breast milk theyd extracted from their own bodies, put it in a cooler, deposit him and the milk at daycare, and then drive home all BEFORE they clocked in for work in the morning?

No?

Cool. Let them erase me then, I thought.

Even as the months went by and I started to feel less erased and more like I was regaining my identity separate from my songoing to social events and date nights without himI retained some of this confidence.

I founded my business. I struggled with it for years. But every time I almost gave it up, I would tap back in to my postpartum confidence. All of these people who ignored the fact that I existed--it actually wasnt their responsibility to give me permission to exist. It wasnt their responsibility to claim my personhood separate from my roles as wife, and mother, and as a worker.

Only I could give myself permission to do that.

So I stayed in business. But now I know that whether I had closed up shop on my business or not, I couldnt really go back. I was ready to turn pro, not just as a writer but as a person who shares her biggest ideas with the world. So, I did. I gave myself permission to voice my Big Ideas and make them public.