Hi all! I'm starting a (very) small business in the near future, and I am looking for some advice (or just encouragement or reality checks, anything helps). For clarity, I'm in the US and want to make/sell products of my own design without screwing myself over through lack of planning.

Has anyone here ever tried to start a small business like this? Or interacted with the US patent system?

Any advice or anecdotes are welcome!

I've got a "holy grail" TT faculty position at an R1 university, but I'm seriously considering leaving academia. It's a fit issue, and I've had a major mental health development that has definitely changed the equation for me. I would welcome non-academic or non-TT or non-faculty input as well. It would be an immense life change for me and my family, so I'd like to look at it from all sides, and I think Tildes would be a great place to do that.

Please let me know if you're interested in a discussion or just give freeform advice. I'll update this post with specific questions if this gets any traction.

My thanks!

Businesspeople of Tildes, what do you do? I want to hear about people running and owning businesses, whether they have employees or are freelancers.

What do you do? Where are you based? How do you find your customers? Can you live 100% from your business? What do you like most about it? What would you do differently? What bothers you the most about it? How did you get the idea?

Found myself working a bit too hard lately, started to experience some stress from my pointless busywork white collar job. Remembered this time to wonder why am I stressed about something that doesn't matter?

Perfect timing, my boss decided today to let me know that he won't be approving any more vacation for the rest of the year because even though we have unlimited, apparently the limit is 20 days.

We've got a deadline coming up and honestly I'm just gonna take a break for the rest of the week. I need it, I deserve it, I've been busting my ass for no reason cause the end result is the same and no one uses our product, a year from now it probably won't even exist any more, and five years from now I'll have to go back to school and retrain to do some other job.

I was really doing fine until today. I make great money, I work from home, I actually get vacation, I know I can just take a sick day with no planning and that's fine, it's just so fucking stupid that they WANT me to take an unplanned day off or quiet quit for a few days when I need it instead of just allowing me to plan some fucking vacation.

Edit - this blew up, I don't mean to be all doomer. I'm just upset. There's beauty to life outside of my work situation.

Hello!

I need some advice about work. I'm 34 and I have a child. What direction do you think I should be looking in job-wise? Because of AI, I'm not sure whether it's worth staying in IT and on top of that, my department was recently shut down at my company, so I'm out of work.

My goal is to be able to rent a decent place, cover health/medical costs, food obviously and to take my child on holiday at least once yearly (I couldn't affort it before).

I'm based in Europe. Right now I'm actively learning to knit, just in case.

Could you suggest what kind of work you'd recommend so that I can be that "man of the house" for myself and support myself properly? If it matters: I'm celibate and I don't plan to enter into a relationship, but I need to get my child on their feet and I honestly have no idea which way to move.

My salary has always been low, I'm tired of it and I'm responsible for a child. So I'm ready for anything. Ready to learn anything, do anything!

Thank you!

I've been thinking a lot lately about burnout, ADHD, autism, work, and where I go from here.

My background is in entertainment design, print-focused graphic design, commercial printing, project management, production coordination, and over the years I've picked up a multitude of tech oriented skills with automation, software development and programming, mostly at hobby levels but still extremely useful.

I started out designing graphics for sets, props, and production, then gradually moved into the coordination and project management side by filling the gaps between creative teams, vendors, printers, clients, and production crews. Over time, that turned into a career built around helping complex visual and print projects move from idea to finished product. And I like it, I like being able to turn intangible ideas into reality.

But a lot of what has worn me down has not just been the workload itself. Print is stressful by nature, and I understand that. Deadlines move fast, clients change things, files come in wrong, and problems have to be solved quickly.

What has worn me down more is the pressure to work in a way that does not match how I work best, while also being hired for skills that depend on me seeing systems differently in the first place.

A major part of my career, especially as I moved into coordination and project management, has been my ability to understand systems, notice inefficient workflows, and find ways to improve them. I tend to see where information gets lost, where effort is duplicated, where confusion is being created, and where a better structure would help everyone.

A lot of this has actually stemmed from me adapting to my ADHD to create frictionless workflows for myself to help myself manage my life. But it translates well into systems and workflow because I understand where that friction is for a lot of people and how things get missed.

The frustrating pattern is that I often get hired partly because a company wants better organization, better workflows, better communication, or more efficient processes. Then when I start identifying those issues and trying to improve them, the follow-through fades.

Management may not fully support the changes. The existing culture may push back. Or one coworker who is deeply embedded in the company reacts badly and turns the situation into a conflict.

Eventually, I end up being pressured to operate inside the same inefficient workflow that was causing problems to begin with. Then I start looking ineffective in the exact environment I was hired to help improve.

That is where ADHD and autism make the struggle especially difficult. It is not that I cannot work hard or solve complex problems. I can. But when a workplace is unclear, reactive, socially political, inconsistent, or resistant to process improvement, I spend a huge amount of energy just trying to function inside it.

Then the anxiety builds. I start worrying that I'm going to be blamed, misunderstood, pushed out, or fired, even when I'm trying to help.

The hilariously frustrating thing is that I used to have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria from relationships stemming from my ADHD, I would get anxious and paranoid when sensing a change in behavior patterns or tone or whatever, and I am very happy to say I have overcome that in my relationships and am much more secure. HOWEVER, in a hilariously frustrating turn of events, those exact rejection sensitive dypshoria senses have moved entirely to work. And I start panicking at a manager's tone change, or email.

I get in this mindset of expecting to be fired at any moment, where I can hear and see my manager pulling me in to give me "the talk" before being let go.

And frankly I think that burns me out more than anything.

Like right now in this current job, I was hired to improve the processes and inefficiencies, because the print shop I'm working at is using software literally from 2001 all run on ancient Windows 7 computers and has been unsupported for over 15 years, and their process is so painstakingly inefficient that I was hired precisely because they knew.

However here I am 6 months into the job, and I haven't even touched any process improvements and I am now expected to work entirely off of paper and a 25 year old unsupported software, both of which is so far away from my skillset and how I function that I'm struggling every day just to keep up.

Meanwhile, the HR woman who is also a project manager, has outright refused any process improvement and has forced me to work EXACTLY like she does. She's forced me to use her spreadsheet, she's forced me to handwrite everything(I have dysgraphia too, I struggle writing by hand but typing is second nature). She has thrown me under the bus. I created a synced spreadsheet using Microsoft 365 so we didn't have to send emails with spreadsheets every single night that clogs up our inboxes, and she just straight up said "I'm not using that." I can't even search through my emails for client or project keywords because it picks up her daily "Schedule" emails because her spreadsheet has an archive sheet with 20 years worth of jobs and clients. Every time I search my email I have to sift through 100s of her daily schedule emails, and I've been told I'm not allowed to delete them in case we ever need to go back.

Meanwhile I have been self hosting ERPNext and on my own time wrote a custom Printing App with custom forms for estimating, jobs, and project management, even tracking equipment maintenance, to mimic our current workflow as closely as possible while keeping everything digital and consolidated, yet nobody seems interested in that.

So now I'm coming into work every day, struggling to be functional, and questioning if it's me, the job, or what. And it's frustrating that this has happened at just about every single job I've had since 2020.

I have real experience and real value. I've worked across graphic design, commercial printing, production, prepress, project management, account management, estimating, vendor coordination, branding, marketing support, workflow systems, and automation.

I know how print projects go wrong. I know how to prepare files, coordinate specs, communicate with printers, work with clients, manage production details, and help avoid expensive mistakes.

That is part of why I've started seriously thinking about freelance work, print brokerage, design support, print consulting, and workflow automation.

On paper, it feels like it could make sense. It would let me build something around the parts of the work I know I'm good at: helping people plan print projects, prepare files correctly, source vendors, manage production details, improve workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and make the process less confusing.

I'd also get to manage my own time, my own processes without being judged or worried about being fired. I have so many ideas on finding clients, helping clients, and I've got skillsets that would set me apart from my competition.

I see a need for design teams and people to need help with print, because I've worked with so many clients in my jobs that struggle with what comes second nature to me. And because schools seem to always teach how Print is dying, the majority of graphic designers know very very little about how to design effectively for print, which a lot of my career has been geared towards helping.

The part I'm unsure about is whether this is a real next step or just another big ADHD idea that feels urgent because I'm burned out.

I know I'm capable. That isn't really the question. The question is whether going out on my own would actually give me the room to use those skills in a healthier way, or whether I'd end up running into the same patterns without the safety net of a regular job.

That is the part that makes me hesitate. Freelancing feels like it could be a way to finally build work around how I function best, but it also feels uncertain and risky. If the same issues around anxiety, conflict, communication, or feeling unsupported still show up, I would be dealing with them on my own.

So I'm trying to be realistic without talking myself out of something that might actually help. I can't keep going the way I have been. I feel burned out and stuck, and this idea feels just practical enough and just uncertain enough that I keep coming back to it.

If anyone has experience with freelancing, print brokerage, consulting, ADHD/autism in the workplace, burnout, or building a career around a skillset that does not fit neatly into traditional jobs, I'd appreciate your perspective.

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have made some version of this work. Not in a "just quit your job and follow your dreams" way, but in a realistic way. What helped? What did you have to figure out? What made it sustainable?

I could use advice, but honestly, I could also use some encouragement and success stories from people who have been in a similar place and found a way forward.

I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

Do you have a dream job/one you've always thought about doing?
Do you work your own dream job? If you do, what is something you'd like to change about it to make it even better?

This question popped in my head this morning while not wanting to dive in to a weird work thing and after a quick look, it's been ~4 years since the last time a similar question was asked by @kfwyre (who posts awesome discussion questions!), and I thought that it's been long enough to ask again for new Tilders to chime in or for whoever answered last time to come back and see if their answers are the same.

I recently started a new job and have realized I'm not entirely sure what the scope of work is. I applied to a role that I was very well suited for and had a very clear objective. I went through like 8 rounds of interviews for them to decide that the team I applied for was CET and I am PT, which likely wouldn't work. So they made me a position with a team on the US west coast, be it a very different one. The salary is still wild so I took it, particularly in this job market, but now I'm having a hard time sussing out what the extents of my position actually are.

Has anyone been in this position before or have advice on how to narrow the scope of your work if it's a bit amorphous? Cheers!

Earlier today we had a post about dream jobs, and that had me thinking, what was the best job you ever had? Why did you leave that job? Did you know it was the dream job while you were at that job or did you only realize it years later?

@RoyalHenOil's comment in another thread got me thinking, and I feel like it might be helpful for me to hear what other Tilderinos have to share about this. I've wondered for years if I might have ADHD. Any time I've looked into it, it never seems like I check enough boxes for that to be an accurate label. But I've also gotten the impression that many psychological things like ADHD might be better understood as a spectrum (or even a region?), so lately I keep coming back to the possibility that I just have some other/related flavor of executive dysfunction. Or maybe I just haven't figured out how to "adult" properly yet for other reasons. I don't know, but it feels like being able to name the way my brain works would help things somehow.

I tried for hours to write up an explanation of my experiences, but I couldn't come up with anything that felt accurate and was a reasonable length, so the five-second version is this: The thing I keep coming across and identifying with is the "hyperfocus mode" that some people report. I enjoy this but also feel like it must have something to do with my struggles in some areas. I can prioritize tasks effectively plenty of the time, but I also can't at other times. If I used an Eisenhower matrix, things in the "important but not urgent" category would mostly be gathering dust (except for ones I happened to focus on). I don't really have any control over the "hyperfocus mode" and its target changes unpredictably.

There's an exhausting amount of nuance I could add to the above. I'd really love to hear from anyone who's had experience with any sort of divergent executive function that doesn't seem to fit into any of the currently available boxes we use to understand these things.

Addendum: I reread RoyalHenOil's comment just now and I think responding to it directly might be easier than writing out my own explanation from scratch, so I'll include that response here for anyone who feels like reading it.