31: The Joy of Making It, with Jen Duffin

The JOMOcast with Christina Crook

“It’s so important for folks to carve out time to be creative in their lives. I think it’s something that’s missing right now.”
Jen Duffin’s nom commercial is the imagination-stirring Nova Mercury, derived from her youngest daughter of the same name whose birth precipitated the maternity leave during which Jen launched her entrepreneurial venture. Creating a home business was the perfect pivot for Duffin, whose fibromyalgia made a traditional 9-to-5 job unsustainable.
Today, Nova Mercury is thriving, due in large part to Duffin’s social media positioning- with over 90,000 Instagram followers and over 3500 sales and a People’s Choice Award on Etsy, the digital marketplace is central to her success. On the JOMO(cast), Jen discusses her entrepreneurial journey and the careful blending of creativity, business, and family she learned along the way.
Key Takeaways:

• Creative art-making is accessible to everyone. You don’t have to sell what you make or be a virtuoso; everyone can create something.
• Creative art-making is inherently a mindful activity. Creative activity at any level gives huge dividends in better mental health, improved focus, centering, stress reduction, patience, discipline, and more.
• Entrepreneurs use social media as a tool, not as a place to spend their creative and personal time. Successful creative merchants like Nova Mercury draw bright lines around the time they need to spend on social media building their brand and doing community engagement- and make sure their priority is on the creative work itself and other sources of genuine joy.

Favorite Quotes:

• “It was this huge leap of faith, and all I can say is that my intuition was overwhelmingly telling me to do it.”
• “I’m really lucky in the sense that I get to do a creative grounding process as a big chunk of… how I make my living.”
• “...the tactile experience of making things can really double as a mindfulness practice. It’s very grounding, it requires you to be really present in the moment with what you’re doing so I think there are so many mental health benefits to art-making of any kind.”
• “I’m in a space in my life right now where I try to have pretty firm boundaries on my online time. It can get away from you very quickly.”

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Christina Crook
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cmcrook
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thechristinacrook
Credits
Hosted by Christina Crook
Produced by Christina Crook and Thomas J Indge
Editing and Music by Thomas J Indge, www.tindge.com
Executive Produced by Christina Crook and Rebecca Wigaard, with production assistance from Natalie Semotiuk
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