Meet Claire Sinelli

We were lucky to catch up with Claire Sinelli recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Claire with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I spend a lot of my time hyper-fixating on things I’m interested in, which I think translates into work ethic. When I’m not doing that I tend to be overly focused on less productive things, like frantically cleaning or starting projects or rearranging furniture, so I try to use my focus for things that are beneficial like my career.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I primarily am a social media manager for an Oyster Bar and a Tattoo shop, as well as taking wedding and engagement photos. I’ve been a photographer since 2014 and have been shooting weddings since 2018.

I’ve always had an interest in doing social media for a living in some way, wether it be Youtube or some other personalized platform, and as of this year I’ve had the opportunity to branch out into a partnership with a new app called Lemon8. I’ve been making home decor content for their app which has grown to be now about 50% of my income. This is super exciting of me because it monetizes my love of home decor and content creation into one platform, and keeps me motivated to continue working on my other social accounts, which the app has had me do some promotions on as well.

I really love the personal content creation because it feels way more free and I can really create in any way I want so I’m super stoked to keep exploring that creative avenue of business and finally have it begin to pay off financially after years of creating just for fun.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
One thing I really value is how I don’t like to just stick to one hobby or have one “thing.” I’ve always been a jack of all trades to a degree and people have always recommended that I find a specialization. I probably did do that with photography for a while but for me I need to be doing lots of things to be happy. I’m glad I never fully killed that spark because that’s what let me begin doing social media for businesses, and to work at the micro influencer stuff to get to what I love doing today.

I am also proud of how confident I’ve become. Always was the shyest person in the room in high school and college and went the entire time never raising a hand or adding to a conversation unless forced to. I’ve leaned that I have valuable things to say and can contribute confidently to topics I am knowledgeable about and don’t need to be ashamed of differences of opinion. I’m not always right but that doesn’t mean I’m usually wrong either.

Another is to learn to set your role models high–very high. Higher than you think you need to. I think for a lot of people if you have the personality type to be highly motivated in a creative career, you can skyrocket pretty quickly with a skillset. If your role model or mentor isn’t a great person and a great artist it can be easy to reach your goals and then kind of plateau. Its so important to keep challenging yourself, literally forever, If you want to see growth in your own work. Humility is so important to being able to critique yourself too, and thus improve. We can learn a lot from masters of a trade but I think we can learn even more from people who made mistakes and even from people who give up or fail.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
I think over the past year I’ve kind of been able to boost my motivation with my personal social media accounts. Getting a new brand deal with an app was a massive milestone for me and so I feel finally validated in my focus on that side of my career. I love photography but in all honesty it would be dream to be able to just focus on mainly personal content creation as a full time job.

I’ve also gotten a lot better at learning how to judge when I’m taking on too much and to take a step back. I’ve had some health related issues for a while that I finally resolved but its resulted in forcing me to take sudden long breaks, and so moving forward I have gotten better at prioritizing rest for myself and not overworking.

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