Lionel Church's Biggest Business Mistake

Hi, my name is Lionel Church, and you can find me@lionelchurch.com and the biggest mistake that I've really made in my very brief career in life was graduating college accidentally. Accidentally. Yep, I said it. I graduated college accidentally. I had no intention of graduating college when I actually did. But through a strange and interesting circuitous route of events, I finished my coursework prior to actually realizing, prior to my expected date of completion. And so I ended up finding myself for about a year, figuring out, what the hell am I going to do next? And it was a time of soul searching, and it was a time of really trying to evaluate, well, what am I interested in and what do I care about? And, of course, I didn't have that whole year of being in school to prepare for it, so I had to figure out, how do I support myself while I'm figuring out what it is that I really care about and what it is that I really want to spend my life contributing to? So I got to ask a lot of interesting questions, and what actually ended up happening shocked me. What ended up happening is that one of the brilliant people that I had done volunteer work for simply asked me if I would be willing to help them start their next big project. And so I became a project manager with Ocean Robbins and what became the Food Revolution Network by simply showing up and being a person who was passionate and caring about the work that he had done. So, much to my surprise, simply showing up and being a big force in terms of my energy and my spirit and my desire to contribute is all it took to make it in my first two years out of college. And for that experience, I'm so grateful now to have it no other way.