How I Thrived as an Entrepreneur Without Home Internet
By: Paulina Sjöberg
Tags: Lifestyle, Growing Up, Life Lessons, Internet, Entrepreneurship

When I was 16 I woke up one morning and audibly told myself " I’m going to do it all". And that, I did.

I immediately started looking for runway opportunities, started amping up on my writing and researching how to record my music, as well as searching for opportunities to get hired as a photographer. Everyone had always told me I should be a model and I finally took the plunge on that and many more things that I was passionate about and still am. I was able to brand myself as an entrepreneur at the age of 16 and now at the age of 25, having spent almost a decade on branding myself, being a socialite in Houston and being recognized as a hard-working woman in various creative industries, I still feel there’s a lot to accomplish but one thing is for certain; I did it all without having any home internet.

The extent that I went to become an entrepreneur and build websites, create graphics, logos, edits and post-process video and photography proves that you do not need accessibility that others have to make your dreams come true, to meet your goals or to make a name for yourself. I certainly did it, and I did it on a very slow laptop that served me well for many years. Programs would take minutes to load, sometimes the simplest editing actions could take anywhere from 3 to 15 seconds to complete, I would wait seconds even minutes just coding HTML for my websites because I was accessing the internet using my phone’s hotspot which at the time, was extremely slow. Uploading images into a website sometimes took hours. I would stay up until 5:00 maybe even 7:00 a.m. working on my websites, my branding and my marketing. It’s a lot for a 16-17-year-old to take in but I knew going into my entrepreneurship that it was not going to be easy because I never had it easy. My mom taught me for my very young age that I had to work for what I wanted and thankfully I was blessed with a parent who never pushed me to go to college or convinced me that I would be a nobody if I didn’t have a degree. Eventually I got a new laptop as I entered adulthood but even then it couldn’t handle the programs I was using.

Earlier this year, 2020, We were finally financially stable enough to get home Wi-Fi. I immediately got to working on a few projects but because of the Corona virus and how it’s hindered me and my creative process, that was short-lived. It just comes to show that maybe not having things available to you and struggling can actually push you to work harder. I think it’s a mindset in which we believe that pain equals success in which case, may be true. To be fair, and earlier this year I also had to switch over to my brother’s gaming laptop after my old one failed, which is now failing me as well. I still don’t have all the tools that I need to comfortably make my success a reality but I am still making it a reality despite all of the set backs that I face.

A lot of people say it’s about who you know, but I think that sometimes that is not true. It’s about how much work you’re willing to put in to show that you’re worth other people’s time to listen to. But I also think that if you have something solid, something worth being heard by the world, it doesn’t matter what anybody says. It’s a double-edged sword and it’s one that I’ve learned all too well in my industries. But it’s what I had to learn in order to succeed. Know when to hold’em, when to fold’em.