We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Genesis Hernandez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Genesis thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.

I’d like to start off by saying, “everything happens for a reason,” or should I say, “everything happened for a reason.” I’ll start back in the year 2008. In 2008, I had just turned 17 years old, and I was at the end of my junior of high school. Meetings with my guidance counselor became more frequent and the pressure to chose my major and apply to colleges began. I remember my peers talking about what they planned to major in and the colleges they would be applying to. In discussion of our plans, I mentioned to a friend that I was considering dental hygiene school. Truth is, I had no interest in dental hygiene school but considered this major because my older brother had mentioned that the pay for this career path was decent. She then informed me that the nursing career pay was similar, and had a lot more job security. So I decided I’d go to nursing school. My Mom made me enroll in the local community college to complete my pre-requisite courses. In addition to the college courses I was required to take for nursing school, I chose several electives that first year. I took a video editing class, public speaking, and a writing course. I remember dedicating 17 hours to edit a 3 minute self shoot video and loving every second of it! I looked forward to preparing speeches and presenting in front of my peers. I found so much passion in writing. On the contrary I hated biology, and chemistry, yet five years later I became a registered nurse!

In conversation with my Mom a few months ago I was discussing how it took me moving nearly 3,000 miles away from my hometown to realize that I was not living in my calling. When I moved to California I was unable to work as a nurse because there was a delay in the process of endorsement of my license and then a delay in my start date at my new place of employment. It was the same situation with my husband and his practicing license. All in all, we were both unemployed for a total for 6 months. This was the roughest season of our life together. This season literally brought us to our knees. It was at this rock bottom moment where we began to dig deeper into what God actually wanted us to do with our lives. We always discussed how we didn’t want to work in our individual fields for much longer but we didn’t actually know what we’d do instead.

The more I spoke the more I realized that I became a nurse out of pride! Thinking back to my first year of college, I had already told my family and friends that I was going to become a registered nurse and I didn’t want to be viewed as the typical college student that changed their major. I didn’t want to be perceived as a quitter or a failure. What I didn’t realize was that I was failing myself for choosing to keep committed to a word I had spoken before I even knew who I was and what my real passions were. I was being hard on myself for not knowing who I was at the age of 17. I allowed pride to determine and dictate 14 years of my life.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself, “it’s okay to enter college with ‘undecided’ in place of my major, in fact. It’s okay to take a year before deciding to enroll in college. It’s okay not to go to college at all. It’s okay to not to know what you want or to change your mind when presented with new career paths.”

I think the best advice I could give someone is never to chose a career path based on pay, but to go after the profession you’d pursue, if finances did not depend on it and learn later on how to make it a profitable career. Take all the time you need to discover who you are. Never let pride be the reason you do something. Pride is the enemy humility. With humility comes wisdom.

As I began with, every thing happened for a reason. All though my nursing career is coming to an end, I’m grateful for the opportunities that it gave me. I’ve had the chance to serve people, love them through my presence, and attention. I’ve made more of a difference then I will ever understand in these past 8 years. Now I get to love and connect with people freely in my new career as a content creator.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My husband and I got married in July of 2018 and purchased an RV a short time after and hit the road to travel the country. Before embarking on this journey, some of our close family and friends suggested we vlog the entire experience. We thought it was a great idea! We loved documenting our journey and learning about people vicariously living through us. At some point we returned home and stopped vlogging. We thought no one would be interested in our journey since we returned home and shortly after conceived our first child. The dream to continue content creation felt dead but the thought of never returning to it lingered. After moving across the country and doing some soul searching we decided to get back to content creation. Our niche is parenting, marriage and lifestyle. We share the ups and down of parenting 2 children under 2, in hopes that other parents would be encouraged. We add value to people’s lives through our content as parenting and marriage don’t come with a rulebook. We learn as we go and meanwhile have grace throughout the process. Besides creating content for our own brand. We create paid ads for brands that fit into our lifestyle niche, to market their business and help them to crush their goals!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One huge lesson I had to unlearn is that never to wait to start something until you 100 percent ready because that day will never come. For us we delayed starting creating content, for a lack of filming equipment. We had to learn to start with what we have and the rest will be added on.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We built our audience on social media by sharing candid moments and being our true selves. We didn’t create content to gain a following. We created authentic content and the followers found our brand. My advice is, do what you love, create content based on your true passions . Never let the goal of content creation be fame or popularity, as these a temporary things.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: instagram.com/projectparenthood_
• Youtube: http://youtube.com/@projectparenthood_
• Other: tiktok.com/@projectparenthood_