My interest in photography gave me an advantage over other sellers who didn’t care about lighting or composition. My days of being the tardy employee at the record store gave me a cultural and musical understanding that was more unique than if I’d just listened to garbage-y pop on the radio my entire life. None of these were things I ever expected to add up to something called a brand, but they contributed to all the ways in which Nasty Gal is just a little off and a little surprising. All of that flailing about, trying new things and finding out that I liked some of them and hated others, ended up amalgamating into something very real and very meaningful, and in the end, made me capable of providing a life for myself.
While I truly believe that you must have intentions to fulfill your dreams, I also think you have to leave room for the universe to have its way and play around a bit. Don’t get so focused on one particular opportunity that you’re blind to other ones that come up. If you think about one thing, and talk about it all the time, you’re being too obsessive. You might ruin it. If you let yourself meander a bit, then the right things and the right people fall into place. Some things are worth fighting for—don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely a fighter—but I really think that what is right should be easy. My dad has always said that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and it’s so true. If something’s not working out, but you keep hammering at it in the exact same way, go after something else for a while. That’s not giving up, that’s just letting the universe have its way.
Treat Your Thoughts Like Your Dollar Bills: Don’t Waste ’Em
Though I believe in magic, I’m not hippy-dippy and I generally abhor people who are. I remember I had a hippie friend once who whispered, “The cat can sense the stillness in my soul,” and all I could think was, The cat is really going to sense it if I barf because you sound so self-important. That said, if you approach everything in your life with a certain degree of intention, you can affect the outcome. At the absolute minimum, you will affect how you feel about the outcome and that is ultimately what matters the most. If I am in a shitty mood while making dinner, the food is going to taste like crap. But if I’m happy while I’m cooking, then dinner is going to be absolutely fantastic.
I also think you can end up ignoring, and even losing, the positive things in your life by focusing too much on the negative. That’s a huge drain, as well as a waste of time. When you think about people, you give them power. My ex-boyfriend Gary taught me this lesson when we first started dating. This was the heyday of MySpace, when you could always see who was commenting on whose page, so I knew way too much about this one girl—or woman, because she was waayyy older than me—whom he had once hooked up with and who was still lurking around. She was my favorite horrible thing to talk about, and I brought her up a little too often. For obvious reasons this would piss him off. When he finally got fed up with the subject, he said, “I don’t think about her, and I don’t want to think about her, but when you bring her up, I have to think about her and it makes me uncomfortable. Why are you doing that to me? Why are you doing it to yourself?”
Turns out he had a point.
Flash back to Halloween several years ago; he and I were at the Deco Lounge in San Francisco. He was dressed as a monk and was wearing this hundred-year-old Masonic robe—which, let’s face it, was basically a giant black dress with a skull on it. And I was dressed as a blaxploitation character, wearing a halter disco gown and a giant Afro wig. Not the most politically correct choice, I realize, but as I’ve said before, this was San Francisco and you picked a decade and stuck with it, even in costume.
As we were getting ready to go out that night, I mentioned this woman’s name again, wondering if we would run into her. It was unlikely, as she lived in LA at the time, but she was known to lurk up north. As soon as we walked into the bar, there she was. She saw Gary, made a beeline for him, and began to whisper in his ear as soon as she was close enough. She totally ignored me, even though I was only inches away and holding his hand.
“Hi,” I said, interjecting myself into her whisper fest with an introduction. “I’m Sophia.” I mustered every molecule of inner goodwill to put a smile on my face.
But she just turned and looked at me with a snarl. “Oh, are you his ex-girlfriend?”
“No, I’m his girlfriend,” I said, no longer caring at all about trying to be nice. “So, what are you even doing at this bar at your age, anyway?” And that, dear #GIRLBOSS, was what started the only fight I’ve ever been in.
She pulled my Afro off, I punched her in the nose, and Gary dove in between us, pulling her off me as we went at it on the Deco Lounge floor. Though I can laugh at it now—the absurdity of costumes and wigs and punches and a man in a dress breaking it up—it was a miserable Halloween and a miserable night. During the miserable cab ride home, I realized that I’d put so much energy into thinking about what I didn’t want to happen that I’d caused that exact thing to happen.
I conjured that bitch.
I have also had to learn to rein in my negative thoughts when it comes to business competition. Around the same time that I launched the Nasty Gal website, I had become pretty good friends with another girl who ran a vintage eBay shop. We talked shop, but in a way that I always assumed was friendly banter between two people who had a lot in common, and not sharing state secrets. A year after I left eBay and set Nasty Gal up with a proper website, she also decided to launch her own. When her site went live it looked really wonderful . . . because it looked exactly like mine. The design was exactly like mine, the wording was exactly like mine. Everything was exactly like mine. I’d known she was launching a website, but assumed she had enough class to do something different. I had one phone call with her in which I told her to get some ideas of her own, and we never spoke again.
After this happened, I was obsessed with this incident. I talked about it all the time while rolling my eyes and thinking about how much she sucked. Finally, I did this so much that Gary pointed out I was obsessing about her so much that I was going to make her successful. I took this advice seriously, and decided then that I don’t want to spend time thinking about things that I don’t want to have a place in my life. You have to kick people out of your head as forcefully as you’d kick someone out of your house if you didn’t want them to be there.
Naturally, every boyfriend comes with an ex-girlfriend, every business comes with competitors, but it is entirely up to you to decide how much time you spend thinking about them. Frankly, even if that girl your boyfriend used to make out with suddenly gets hit by a car (like you’re secretly hoping she will), who cares? You’re still you. The same goes for business: There’s no karmic law that dictates your business will succeed if others fail, so why not just wish them well and get on with it?