Illustration by Alex WolkenKaitlyn McConnell's job is telling other people's stories, whether through her work at CoxHealth or on her blog, Ozarks Alive.
Leadership
Advice and Whiskey with Kaitlyn McConnell
In 2015, Kaitlyn McConnell created Ozarks Alive, a website devoted to chronicling stories that celebrate the culture and the history of the Ozarks. She does all this on the side, as she’s also the Media Relations Manager at CoxHealth.
By Jeff Houghton
Mar 2019
“People devote time to things they care about, really what is important to you is obvious through how you devote your time. Overall it’s up to each of us to fulfill what we’re passionate about and use our life to further that.”
“This has taught me to live more in the moment and appreciate every day what we have here in the Ozarks.”
“I’m grateful to myself from three and a half years ago that I went ahead and jumped on this. I could have said, ‘Oh, that’s silly, no one is going to read this, you’re not going to make any money.’”
“Don’t wait to have permission to do something. You really don’t know what tomorrow brings; you never know when something in life may change.”
“Money is a way of earning something for a service, but for me I’m also earning something besides the cash, I’m also earning the joy I get from doing each of these stories, and in the grand scheme of things, isn’t life about accumulating experiences?”
“I always look to change it up a bit because you always want to grow.”
“Honestly, the biggest obstacle is time. My personality is such that if I’m interested in something I could spend hours and hours thinking about it and studying it and never get tired.”
“To me it doesn’t feel like work. It’s easy to invest time in it because it’s fun.”
“This is the perfect time for me to be able to have done something like this, how would an individual start a news source before this time? Especially when you factor in social media, it’s the only way I could have grown this.”
“Don’t wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow may be 20 years from now, and whatever it was you had passion to do never came.”
