7 Reasons Why “Start With Lauren”

Welcome to Start with Lauren. It’s so exciting to finally write those words.

Over the past month, I’ve been working on launching my blog alongside the help of Blair Lamb and the Blogger Mentorship Program. I can’t thank Blair enough for her guidance and helping me shape this blog into what it is today!

Getting to this blog took several phases. There was my first blog, created back in college. I set up the site but never actually wrote my first post. Then came the blog I created during my year on a fellowship in Indonesia. I wrote for a few months, but between bad internet and the stresses of a job abroad, this one fell by the wayside as well.

Through both of these blogging experiences, I had in the back of my mind this idea of what I wanted my blog to be. A place to write about things I was passionate about – productivity, goal-setting, interior design, books and reading, etc. – without feeling constrained by a need to define that place.

I also wanted to be creative, and to express that creativity outside of my professional life. I love my job and I love the field I work in (tech) but I wanted this to be a little different. I’m sure I’ll talk about some tech-y things here (can’t help myself really) but this blog has a different goal, to inspire people to just start something!

All too often, we let perfect be the enemy of good. Heck, this blog didn’t exist for years for exactly that reason. I hope this blog helps you seek out your goals, instead of delaying their attainment until tomorrow, or the next day, and so on.

I hope to have a lot of fun in these posts and I can’t wait to share all these ideas I’ve been thinking about for so long!

To wrap this up, I thought I’d include a few reasons why I decided to go with “Start with Lauren” as the name of my blog. Naming was the longest, but ultimately most satisfying part of this process. Thankfully, this baby now has it’s name.

Why “Start with Lauren”?

1. My love of new beginnings and fresh starts. I love resolutions, planning, goal-tracking, and everything in between.
2. Trying new things is a personal passion. New restaurants, new hobbies, really anything new. I love to try things out and see if it suits me, or find a new favorite something.
3. I wanted to have my name in the title. I promise that choice wasn’t motivated by narcissism.
4. The Arthur Ashe quote: “Start where you, Use what you have, Do what you can” is somewhat of a mantra of mine. If I’m feeling overwhelmed, this is a good reminder to take a deep breath, and just start by doing what I can. This quote has so many beautiful applications and it reminds me to be a bit more mindful.
5. If I’m going in on quotes, I can’t lie, I was inspired by a memorable quote from The Great Gatsby, “Life starts all over when it gets crisp in the fall.” I’m launching this blog in the fall of 2018 so it felt appropriate.
6. One of my favorite goal-setting heroines, Elise Blaha Cripe, often says about reaching goals to “Just Start.” So I took a page from her book.
7. The main reason I picked it? After so many rounds of brainstorming, this one just worked. Rather than wait for perfection, I said yes, and started.

Thanks for checking out my first post! I’ll be posting here on Mondays and uploading videos on Wednesdays to my Youtube channel.

Hope to see you around!