Meet Trisha Peña

 

We recently connected with Trisha Peña and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Trisha, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

Being born in 1964, I was on the tail end of the Baby Boomers. Although I identify more with Gen-Xers for the most part, there is definitely one thing that I got from the Baby Boomers and that is my work ethic, or my “stupid” work ethic as I have come to refer to it. Not that I regret the jobs that I had, but I have lived long enough to see that my type of work ethic, while it was pretty much standard from after WW2 through the 90s or even beyond, is not in vogue much anymore. Ironically, in this environment, that’s actually a good thing. I came from the standard family of a father who worked, many times into the night, a mother who quit her job to stay home with me, her first baby, and did not work again until I was 16, waiting for her younger child, my brother, to start high school. School and work were what was valued by my parents, and so being the best student I knew how to be was what I did. My father got most of his education through the Navy and he never stopped preaching its value. I grew up watching him work at the dining room table after dinner, yet I do not remember hearing him complain about it. He was a Company Man if there ever was one. He was a draftsman for Sears, he met my mother when they both worked at Sears, everything we owned came from Sears, and he was there for 27 years until the world changed and left him behind. In the mid-80s, the type of work he did was being computerized and consolidated into fewer locations. They wanted him to move to Chicago but he said no, and thus his early “retirement” began, long before he was expecting it. In the years between then and being old enough for Social Security, it was hard for him to get another position but he did what he could until that day came. Computer careers for the masses became available in the early 80s and I took my first computer programming class in high school. My father was a huge proponent of me getting into computers because it was the future, so this is what I did. I wanted a good career because I was growing up at the intersection of women going to college to find husbands and women leading their own lives independent of their marital or social status. I was also fiercely independent so I wanted to always have my own money to take care of myself.

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?

No matter what I have done as a career, I always had something brewing on the side that I had hoped would turn into a business that would free me from the shackles of a 9-5 corporate job. While none of them did, I learned a lot and had some fun along the way. I had two part-time positions that really helped me enjoy my life: I was a part-time radio disk jockey and I was one of the first commercial webmasters in my town. I’ve always had an artistic bent, and both of those helped me dip my toes into the arts. I love music and singing, but ironically, I became not a songwriter like I thought I might (and tried very hard to do in the 90s) but an abstract artist and painter.

I have been marketing my work through websites and social media. Additionally, I have turned many of my works into products such as purses, silk scarves, and high-heeled pumps by partnering with drop-ship manufacturers. My thinking is that not everyone has either the space or the inclination to display artwork, but my work translates into very cool material to make clothes and accessories out of. I am very excited about the “product” side of where my art can go. I love wearing shoes and blouses that I “designed” from my own paintings and feel that could really be a niche. Almost everything I use in my art comes from Home Depot (paint, brushes, canvas for large works, etc.), that I would love to be sponsored by Home Depot, as a way to show a totally different way that their products can be used.

Now that I am between unemployed and retired, I have thrown myself headfirst into content creation for my YouTube channel, in the hopes to get it monetized this year, enough that I will never have to work for another inhumane company ever again.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The first suggestion is to take advantage of any “free” or quasi-free learning you can. If you are lucky enough to work for a company that pays for you to get certifications (if that’s a thing in your profession) or pays for college (and you REALLY want to go) by all means take them up on it. If you are in IT and are more mature (say, above 35) certs matter more than if you have a college degree or not. I am proof of that, as I only have an associate’s degree from 1983. That has no bearing on the technology of the 21st century. I have always been the one who taught herself the newer technologies and thus was able to stay employed for almost all of the past 40+ years.

My second and third suggestions dovetail, so I will put them together here. Never get in a position where you have to depend on anyone else to survive. Live below your means if you can and make sure you start putting the maximum allowed into your 401K or other retirement funds as soon as you start working. And never comingle money with a romantic partner or spouse, at least not all of it. ALWAYS have your own money that can support yourself on and protect your FICO score no matter what.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

“The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace Wattles. It was written a hundred years ago, but was a precursor to the Law of Attraction movement. I found it online in the late 1990s and it had a profound influence on my life. It led me on the path to understanding and appreciating the universal law of attraction.

Some representative quotes:
“By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it.”
“There is never any hurry on the creative plane; and there is no lack of opportunity”.
“Guard your speech. Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way”.
“You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create. Not to compete for what is already created.”
““Success in life is becoming what you want to be.”

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Trisha Peña

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