The first launch of my online courses is over. And it went really well.
Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to my Warp & Weave subscriber list yesterday morning. It pretty much says it all.
Dear ____,
Absolutely no sales stuff today. Instead, I want to say a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to you and the rest of the weaving community.
When I quit my job at Google three years ago to pursue my dream of making a living as a weaver and a weaving teacher, I wasn’t sure I could do it. As we all know, it’s really, really hard to make a living in the fiber arts. I didn’t want to live my life on a plane, so I decided to focus on teaching online. It was a leap of faith.
I wasn’t sure I could do it. Neither was anyone else.
Some friends were supportive. Others, less so. One weaving “friend,” when I told her my plans, said, “Good luck. I hope you like being poor.”
The last few years have had ups and downs, but I kept going because so many people told me my blog posts about color in weaving were useful and enlightening. Both of my parents are scientific researchers. I believe that one of the greatest gifts one person can give another is the gift of understanding, and one of the highest callings a person can have is figuring out how things work and then teaching that to others. Knowing my posts were teaching and helping others gave me the courage to keep going.
The response to my course launch has been phenomenal, and has given me confidence that my “friend” was wrong, and that I can – in time – make a full living as a weaving teacher.
When I was an undergraduate at Caltech, renowned science fiction writer David Brin came to speak at SPECTRE, our science fiction book club. At the end of his talk, he told us about a nightmare he’d had.
“I was at work in the astrophysics department, as usual, and my boss came up behind me. He said, ‘We’ve figured it out! You’d do this for free! In fact, you’d pay US to do this!’”
“I woke up in a cold sweat,” said Brin. “And now, I lay the David Brin Curse on all of you….that someday, you too will wake up from the same nightmare.”
Thank you, all of you, for making my David Brin Curse come true.
Tien
