Love Your Work
Who am I?
I’m Joanne Barratt. I’ve been a professional photographer for most of my life – though it took me a while to find my own path. I’m a single mom to a daughter who is on Team USA for skateboarding and is hoping to be one of the first female skateboarders in the 2020 Olympics, now 2021 Olympics, next summer. She is my inspiration for this book as she is still trying to figure out what to do after her competitive skateboarding career.
My vision for this project started as I was looking for positive role models for her and this idea has now grown into a book to share and inspire girls everywhere, including my daughter!
Why am I creating this?
When my daughter was younger, people always asked her “What do you want to do when you grow up?” She had no idea how to answer this and was left wondering what the options were for what she could be. Children, young adults, and even us grownups spend a lot of time wrestling with this question. Really, what we all want is to be happy – to do work that is meaningful and that rewards us both emotionally and financially.
But many of us followed a long, twisty path to reach the work we want to do. My goal for this book is to show those paths, so that girls – and women who feel stuck on their current path can be inspired by the stories of women who have found work that they love. I want to show girls and women that there are more kinds of work than they ever imagined, and that it’s okay to create a new kind of career that never existed before. I have interviewed women such as a neuroscientist who became a florist; a woman who is building a career as a spear fisher-woman, and women who have made places for themselves in typically male dominated fields like sports, film-making and business as well as women that are leading in their industry.
