Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dominic De Souza. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Dominic 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?
My parents were old school, and my dad always pointed to samurai and the code of the knights: duty first, fun later. As a teen… I probably took that took far, and tried to take over the family business. At twenty four, when I got married, we planned to start completely new lives on the other side of the world. I had a job I loved lined up, a host of tight-knit Lebanese friends waiting for us in Sydney, Australia, who were even helping us kit out a new apartment.
But then two things happened. My paperwork disappeared during the move, so I couldn’t leave the country on time, and my wife fell devastatingly sick.
Everything changed. I had nothing to my name but my laptop, a pair of shoes, and the clothes I wore. Family couldn’t handle my sudden lack of options, and punted us off to live with geriatric grandparents on a cow farm. My wife and I have become really close friends in the last ten years, hunting down specialists, trying to get her the care she needs.
But my difficulty was that I didn’t have a replacement job lined up. And to tell the truth, had no idea how to get one. More importantly, I didn’t believe in myself that I was good enough. I desperately wanted to work hard, have fun with friends, and enjoy life. Instead, we lived in a sort of quarantine, without support, no prospects, and I no idea what to do. I couldn’t even drive down the road to get a McDonald’s job, because she needed daily care.
So my inner rebel got to work being creative, and doing whatever I knew how to do. I created websites and tried cold calling. Created coloring books and tried to sell them. Spent hours teaching myself sketching and drawing for a graphic novel. And then an old friend remembered my college posters, and invited me to apply for a job.
I took it. We got our first apartment, then bought our first home. And we found a space of peace in the mountains of Virginia, and loved it. But maybe I’d been burned. Or maybe I had a taste in that short time for freedom. A freedom that comes from the inside out. I liked having the freedom to explore my own interests, make it look cool, and share it with the world. So in-between the insane amount of graphic design needed for weekly emails, monthly magazines, and website updates for a correspondence school, I discovered side projects. I wrote an ebook on my philosophy of fiction, started an online magazine, and launched a social network for historical figures.
A few years later, the pandemic locked down our communities and families. We were already used to a quarantined lifestyle, and these projects were my way to stay connected with people. So I launched a series of online conferences and a new community for a religious niche, which has continued to grow steadily. And then I launched a community for fiction nerds and an online convention, which is also continuing to grow as I collab with other communities and authors.
At the time, each of these projects was launched in a blur of fun and curiosity and desperation, and always led to a period of burnout, doubt, and doubling down with gritted teeth. I never made a lot of money. I did make some incredible friends, taught myself new skills, and learned how to collab with others.
And every one of these ‘time wasters’ led to new job opportunities. Jobs I could have never landed with an application, while sitting on my thumbs. So coming from a young man holed up in an attic on a Tennessee cow farm, putzing around with WordPress, to a decade later, working for a nonprofit and hosting multiple side-projects managed with friends, I learned something more valuable to me than a degree.
I learned that exploring things I love is the fastest way to learn. And as long as I fail forward, as long as I strive and struggle to solve my own problems, I’ll end up learning the skills that are valuable to others. Because they watch, and are impressed.
My work ethic was born in desperation, and now it’s become a critical life skill for me. It’s how I keep my sense of freedom and success. Maybe not success measured in dollars, but success measured in the freedom to do what I want, and make an impact that helps others.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about your latest project before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
For ten years, I watched the fantasy and science fiction space in the Catholic world. Those genres are my favorite – because… well, need I say more? Hogwarts, Hoth, Winterfell, Weathertop… these realms of magic and adventure stir my blood. I’d been writing novels since I was a teen, and scoured for a community that would accompany me – and challenge me – to write better, and live out my faith better.
But there were none. None I was satisfied with. There were plenty of walled gardens, full of excellent people. But I wanted something dramatic and fun. So I went and built it, and created LegendFiction. In a world where author communities try to emulate the Bodleian, we’re thinking like Blizzard games. Meaning we’re not trying to be erudite and correct, but fun and adventurous.
This space in the Catholic and Orthodox communities looks to share what we love with the world, through our stories – without being preachy. In fact, that’s our first rule. No evangelization. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about stories so fun you can’t put them down. And maybe you glean some insights about how we see the world, but that’s up to you. Too many Christians have peed in the pool of creative fiction, and we want to take the genre back like the best and brightest authors today.
And this dream isn’t just mine, it’s shared by a host of authors, mentors, and writers who have signed on. Today, LegendFiction is a community, a blog, a YouTube channel, and anything else we want to be, because we’re building it together. Our mission is to do more than create a haven for a mindset, or an eddy in the current of creativity to encourage people. Our mission is to help people write. Get the stories out, get the books done, get them shared or published.
We host online events, have recently started themed seasons, short story contests that become printed anthologies, and an online convention that’s now the biggest in our space – because it’s the only one. When everyone else hosts conferences, we turned the other way and copy ComicCon. And then most of it we give away for free, because authors don’t have a lot of income yet.
My goal as the founder is to try and help solve the three main problems I see among faith-inspired authors, because they are my own: 1) to create with a community of friends, and not feel alone, 2) to discover and create the motivation to actually write and pen my dreams, and 3) to get opportunities for publication and help with promotion.
LegendFiction is a passion project shared by hundreds of other authors, and it’s amazing.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Learning how to do something because you love it, purely because you want to do it, is the best and fastest teacher. Learning how to do something under pressure, because a guardian or a job demands it, is harder and takes longer. The magic is to go with your own energy, your own interest, because you’re already flowing that way. You’re already primed to pay attention to it.
Then the task is to do it a lot. To find a way to do it over and over, and probably without being paid. The moment that your outcome is tied to a dollar, you’ll stall if you don’t have clients. And that’s a problem I see with a lot of young people starting out. They need to make income, so they hustle to create work that gets them paid. But the flipside is that if there’s no money, you don’t do the work.
All your best work will probably happen when you’re not thinking about money, when you’re not collapsing the future into your finance. The future doesn’t like that. It likes being a source of excitement and dreaming and potential. When you work on a project for the love of working, so that you can continue to keep doing good for one more person, or larger groups of people, without expecting a return, magical things happen.
That kind of generosity amplifies your message, amplifies you. It fills your portfolio with proof. It sparks friendships with surprising people, because they trust and know you’re genuinely there to help. And that leads to referrals and unexpected opportunities. Ones you could never have asked for.
So my favorite advice comes from Seth Godin. If you want to be noticed, do something worth noticing. That holds true for you as a person, and for your brand. Do cool, crazy, responsible, exciting stuff with your brand. And with yourself, find the things that are worth doing purely for themselves, because they deserve to be done, not because they make income. Follow that hobby, don’t monetize it.
It’s in that space of service to others, and service to your own creativity, that you learn lessons fastest, because you are paying genuine attention, and not keeping an eye on your bank account. Don’t get me wrong, it can be an agonizing dance. But for me, it’s been worth it, and I can’t ever go back.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
Early on, I think you should go all in on your strengths. These are the easiest paths to success, and early in life, we need to learn the lessons that come from hard work, collaboration, anchoring ourselves, and building up our community. Our gifts, or charisms, or strengths are the game card we get to play to level up faster.
But a point will come where it won’t be enough. Plenty of people will try to stay there, because that strength is what gets them applause and maybe pay raises. There’s a danger to that, though. A danger of turning into a program that runs a single line of code. Or becoming a one-trick pony. And as soon as the need for the trick goes away, it sends us spiraling into a panic.
The healthier, more wholistic approach uses our strengths as springboards. That usually happens when we dig deeper, and start doing our own inner work. We try to understand why things matter to us. Who we really are. Maybe what our actual contribution is to life. This is second-half-of-life work, the kind of things adults are supposed to do. But it can be insanely hard with the current work culture to get any sort of meaningful introspection done. Much less any sort of personal growth when you’re hustling two and from several jobs.
I can only speak for me, and my own incessant bashing of my head against a wall. I keep thinking that if I keep up something long enough, I’ll break through. In those moments, I have to learn to back away, sometimes for years on a project, and wait until something is revealed to me. I learn how to go around it instead of through. Or how to use it’s weird shape to do something unexpected.
This, I think, becomes the valuable lessons of the second half of life. The koan that says ‘the obstacles are the path’ becomes truer with time. When I was younger, I evaded the obstacles because they help me back. Went around, over, or built programs that allowed me to ignore them.
Today, I have to learn to sit in front of that obstacle, and wait for it to reveal itself. To communicate something to me. That’s hard, because I keep a packed schedule, and don’t like to wait. But this is a vital lesson. And learning to listen to obstacles shows me that these are areas where I have undeveloped strengths. They are always areas of opportunity.
But it takes time, and a willingness to be more than the strengths that got me my success. It means to be a fuller human being.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://legendfiction.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legendfiction
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/legendfictions
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBa9IPYR1ygQuHpjvwk7nFw
