Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alister Miller. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alister, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I took a risk and decided it was time to quit my safe, full-time office job in order to pursue the freedom to work for myself as a creative. I was scared to try and start my own business, but I was more terrified of being locked in a corporate environment working for someone else forever and feeling my energy and motivation drained every day.

I had been working at the same company for 6 years at the beginning of 2022, and the claustrophobia of the corporate culture made me feel like my job was suffocating me. I was overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, exhausted when I clocked out and needing hours to recharge, and my Sundays were constantly spent dreading waking up on Monday mornings. I felt like the never-ending toil of work was preventing me from even being able to take time off, for fear of the buildup of emails and fires I’d have to deal with upon returning. I spoke with my manager candidly about being at the limit of my bandwidth, but didn’t feel heard and nothing improved after our conversation. I felt trapped by my job.

Meanwhile, in late 2019, I’d started dabbling in a new artistic medium in the form of resin. I’ve always been an artist and a creative person, and over the years I’ve channeled that creativity into different mediums as my interests and hobbies changed. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with friends since about 2016, and in late 2019 one of our campaigns did a Secret Santa gift exchange. I decided I wanted to make special character-inspired dice for each of the players, so I picked up some resin supplies and set about learning what I could about making dice. After the gift exchange was over I still found myself enjoying the hobby, and began making more sets of dice in my spare time. I started posting my work online to share as I improved, and as the interest in my work grew I began considering selling the sets I’d made to help pay for the hobby.

I opened my shop on new years of 2022, stocking premade sets of dice that I’d made in the previous months and opening up a few commissions if anyone was interested in having me make dice specifically for them. I was so nervous to launch, and scared that my work wasn’t good enough. However, my shop sold everything out within the first hour, and even crashed the site because my servers weren’t expecting the amount of traffic that it received. I couldn’t wrap my head around how successful the shop launch had been.

I continued to treat this as a hobby-turned-side-hustle, working on it in my spare time while my office job grew increasingly more demanding. But I was having fun doing this work, and the stark contrast between how I felt excited about working on dice versus anxious about my day-job was striking. I started researching information about hobbies-turned-hustles, how other people turned their side income into their small business. I was still very anxious about the idea of striking out on my own and not having the safety net of my stable office job, no matter how bad it was for my mental health. I wasn’t sure how I’d know when it was time to take that leap of faith, nor if it would actually work out.

In May 2022, I had a Teams meeting scheduled with my manager and HR to discuss scaling back my job responsibilities, because I couldn’t handle the increasing workload anymore. After discussing the pay decrease and how much they were offering for me to stay, I took a breath and told them I had better opportunities working for myself. The rest of the meeting was a blur and I think I dissociated until I hung up. It wasn’t quite so much a leap of faith, as it was that I felt like I’d intentionally set a ball rolling in motion, and now the metaphorical rope attached was going to drag me over the edge of a cliff. We agreed that I’d stay on for a month while they transitioned me out, and then I’d be able to start working fulltime for myself. My last day drew closer and my nerves grew with it, until finally I was clocking out for the last time and stepping into a whole new world of self-employment.

The first few weeks were honestly scary. I was freshly ‘unemployed,’ and the fear of surviving in the great big capitalist world made me feel like a tiny boat tossed into the ocean. But I knew that I couldn’t start to put that fear to rest until I saw successful results, so I threw myself into the work and kept a running list on my phone of little reasons I found that quitting was good. The little silver linings kept me going through those first few weeks: I no longer felt like the entire Sunday was wasted because I was dreading going into work on Monday; I had the freedom to run errands or go to the gym during the day, instead of trying to cram them in after work when I was previously exhausted and upset; my sleep schedule slowly fixed itself and I found that I was waking up at a decent hour with no alarm, feeling refreshed, instead of being unceremoniously roused by my alarm and still feeling tired; I took some time off over the summer for my wife and I’s wedding, plus some travel to visit friends and family. I kept thinking how good it felt to be able to focus on wedding planning and then being present on the day-of, instead of worrying about emergency emails piling up while I was supposed to be taking time off. Quitting prior to the wedding ended up being the best wedding gift I could have given myself.

I’m now in the middle of planning for next year, taking the whole year at a time and realigning what I want my business vision to be. It’s the perfect time to wrap up my work and reflect on how this all started in earnest a year ago, what choices I made along the way, what opportunities I felt I missed, and how I could set myself up for more growth and success in 2023. At this point, I’m fully dedicated to doing what I’m doing fulltime. I took that leap of faith, and my little boat is still floating just fine out on the great big sea.

Spending my time this way is more rewarding to me, personally, and I’m glad I trusted myself enough to try.

Alister, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Alister, and I make custom handmade dice for tabletop game roleplayers through my small business, CatMage Dice!

I got into dicemaking when I wanted to make gifts for my D&D group, but I’ve always felt the craft is about more than just making dice. Just like D&D isn’t only about slaying dragons and getting obscenely rich but about the story you craft along the way, I wanted those dice to reflect the characters that my friends created, with all the story and context that we’d built and shared together throughout our campaign, to make something that they could cherish even after our heroes retired.

Since then, I’ve grown my passion for the hobby into my own small business. I aim to capture that same storytelling element in the work I do now for customers, creating small pieces of art that hold much more meaning than just the numbers on their faces. I’ve had so much fun getting to work on dice commissions because each one is a little peek into an entire story, with its own characters and worldbuilding that clearly mean so much to the people who share it with me.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I almost didn’t start my own business because I felt like I wasn’t good enough. Good enough compared to WHO?; I have no idea. Maybe I thought it was because I didn’t go to business school, or trade stocks, or already have a history with 3 successful tech startup companies, or come from a rich family that could give me a small loan of a million dollars. I had these ideas in my head about what a successful entrepreneur looked like, and I certainly didn’t fit the bill. I’m just an artist who likes to make things. It had sort of always been ingrained in my head that I wasn’t that kind of person; I couldn’t just start my own business, that’s something that only really smart economics majors do once they graduate and have a network of investors lined up.

But I think I needed to re-evaluate what running my own business meant to me, and also what I would define as success. I didn’t want to pursue starting a business in order to grow it into a multi-million dollar company. I just wanted to make a stable, modest income doing something I loved, and not feel like I was wasting my years working at office jobs where I felt trapped, overworked, and unappreciated. I’d consider it a success if I continued to feel excited and fulfilled by what I was doing, and was able to make a living doing so.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The unabashed ability to create for the sake of creating. Humans are creative by nature, some moreso than others, and a lot of us creative people have always found that we expressed ourselves through a variety of hobbies and interests. Whether that’s drawing, painting, photography, sculpting, writing, acting, etc., it’s rewarding to create something. I saw myself slowly losing touch with my drive to create, losing motivation and energy to spend on it, as my workplace job demanded more of me and my time. I came to a sad realization that I didn’t have enough mental resources left to be able to find the joy in creating art anymore, because everything else had already been used up just trying to get through the work day. One of the deciding factors to pursue my creative passion fulltime was because I didn’t want to lose that part of myself for good. I’m intentionally carving out a financially responsible lifestyle in which I have the room to explore creativity, in whatever form it takes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://catmagedice.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catmagedice
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CatMageDice
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/catmagedice