Karmen Johnson certainly had the trappings of traditional success

She got a taste for what folks call van life—outfitting a truck, bus or van as a mobile home and traveling the country for months at a time. She persuaded her employer, Indianapolis-based credit union Elements Financial, to allow her to work remotely and way off the beaten path. She was involved in a near fatal accident in Texas that could have ended her wandering ways, but she instead used it as a wake-up call to devote more of her life to a deferred dream of becoming an artist. In addition to her remote marketing and communications job with Elements, she now takes commissions to create large-scale murals across the country through her firm Karmen of Earth Designs LLC.

In this week's edition of the IBJ Pocast, Johnson discusses the challenge of