I received a fortune cookie fortune once that said, “Do what you love. Love what you do.” This certainly seems to be the unspoken motto of the three young Jews featured in this month’s column, a blogger/Internet company owner, a soccer player/documentarian, and a band manager/musician, who have all found great success by starting with what they were most passionate about — and a lot of hard work.

Success dot com
In July 2006, Sasha Pasulka, 27, focused some time — on the side from her job designing fighter jets — to launch a celebrity gossip Web site and figured, “if [she] could get 100 regular readers, that would be great.”

Just three years later, her Web site, http://www.evilbeets.com, now regularly receives 500,000 hits per day.

Pasulka was living in Los Angeles at the time, already reading a lot of celebrity gossip blogs herself, and wanted to report on the goings-on of the celebrity scene using a “strong female voice.”

“Things just sort of started snowballing,” she says.

In very little time, Pasulka, who has since relocated to Seattle, earned a committed readership and was able to sell the licensing rights to the blog.

“I wasn’t expecting to make any money, but I got lucky and I worked really hard,” explained Pasulka, who now manages the company that produces both her original project and another Web site she started, http://www.zeldalily.com.

Zeldalily, her new project, tackles a wide range of current intellectual issues and is directed at a female audience.

“It seemed like there were a lot of Web sites that were all fluff, that told women that beauty is the only important thing, and there were a lot of extreme feminist sites that spread certain messages: ‘We’re angry…we hate men,’” explained Pasulka. “I wanted to create a middle ground. Why can’t women enjoy wearing their Jimmy Choo shoes and care about intellectual issues?”

Pasulka, whose background includes an undergraduate degree in computer science and a graduate degree in business, now manages eight employees and three interns located all over the country.

Coming up with new content and answering the question, “What are we going to write about today?” are big enough challenges for now, but Pasulka says she would love to write a book or become involved in television.

With the success of Evilbeets and high hopes for Zeldalily, Pasulka is confident that future plans will also definitely involve starting new Web sites.

“I just love launching new little babies and watching them grow,” she said.

The language of sport
When Terry Kegel, 28, left to go abroad after graduating from college, he figured he would teach English for a year, maybe two, and then head home to Seattle.

However, after a year in Thailand, a year-and-a-half in Brazil, a year in Nigeria, six months in Israel, and approximately 70 hours of film, Kegel returned to the Northwest with the inspiration and the footage for what would be an 84-minute award-winning film.

His documentary, I Speak Soccer, explores the cultures, traditions, and personalities of these countries through interactions on the soccer “field,” taking the audience from a paved court in Thailand to the beach in Brazil to a half-grass, half-dirt lot on a busy street in Nigeria.

The world premiere of the film took place in June, where it won the 2009 “Audience Award” at the Seattle Truly Independent Film Festival. The film has already been selected for three other festivals around the country.

“I realized during my travels the ‘in’ that soccer gave me,” Kegel explained. “I wanted to portray the common language of pick-up, but also represent each of the individual dialects. Along the way I learned that the most powerful connections with people were accomplished through play…through seeing them involved in their passion.”

Throughout the film, the audience is exposed to these “dialects” through Kegel’s narration and one-on-one interviews that reveal how much variation there is between countries in how fouls are called, how victories are declared, and what happens after the game. Personality differences between the countries emerge throughout the film through the different ways pick-up is played.

The audience’s intimate exposure to the game and its variety of players is a product of Kegel’s love for soccer and his determination in showing the culture on the field.

In Thailand, Kegel had to travel 30 minutes each time he visited the field, only to find out some days that the games had been rained out. In Nigeria, he played with the same players on the same field for eight months before even bringing out a camera.

In Brazil, however, Kegel got his first footage just two weeks after he started playing on the beach, a pick-up game that included shooting the ball between goals made of large rocks placed in the sand.

“Playing the game on the beach with the Brazilian players was so reflective of Brazilian hospitality and culture,” Kegel said. “The Brazilians were so excited to teach people about Brazil…but soccer also took the relationships [I made there] to a deeper level.”

Despite his passion for traveling and documentary-making, Kegel doesn’t have any set plans for future trips or film projects. Having just finished graduate school, he plans on becoming a kindergarten or first-grade teacher next year.

“I would love to use film in my teaching,” Kegel said. “For me, it was a great way of processing and expressing the abroad experience. For kids, writing can be overwhelming or can come with a lot of pressure. As a teacher, it’s important to encourage kids to tell their stories. Film is a great way to provide different options for them to do that.”

By the power of music
Eli Rosenblatt currently owns “just seven” musical instruments. He has a story for some of them — like the ukulele he bought for $50 at a garage sale — and has performed on many of them in front of thousands of people over the last four years.

Rosenblatt, 28, who founded, and recently left, the Seattle salsa band Picoso, is a talented musician, but also clearly a natural performer.

“Playing music is much more intimate than anything else,” Rosenblatt explained. “You’re so immensely vulnerable while you’re doing it, but also the focus of attention for 400 people. When you’re up performing, you want to cause a response — an ecstatic fervor — and then filter that back into the music.”

Rosenblatt started playing guitar when he was in 7th grade, but did not start performing until after he had finished his degree at University of Washington. After being given a Tres guitar, he taught himself how to play, learned how to perform salsa, and formed an eight-person band that consistently played shows in Seattle and beyond.

“I just wanted to make people dance,” Rosenblatt said. “I wanted to be producing music that people couldn’t stand still to.”

And that’s what he did for about four years. Added to the challenge of being a musician and performer was the new experience of managing a lot of people in a band, finding gigs, and arranging all of the behind-the-scenes logistics.

Having recently left Picoso, Rosenblatt is exploring new types of performance, such as being half of a Klezmer-inspired duo that plays at restaurants, performing with an internationally recognized violinist, and solo busking at the Pike Place Market. Just to show the true variety in the music Rosenblatt plays, he describes one of his current projects, Saint Siren, as “Tom Waits meets Bob Dylan on acid in Transylvania.”

“Being the mouth piece of a larger band, [with a bigger audience] you feel like an amazingly powerful being,” Rosenblatt said. “I also like playing solo. It’s more all-inclusive of my personality.”

Rosenblatt explained that in playing large Salsa performances, the audience is there intentionally to see you perform. When playing in a restaurant or a farmers market, Rosenblatt describes the success of when the band manages to catch the attention of people who hadn’t come with the purpose of listening to music.

“It’s pretty amazing when there’s no performance involved, when you get their attention by the power of music only.”

While he enjoys having the opportunity to play with smaller bands and explore solo performance, Rosenblatt acknowledges he learned during his time with Picoso and that it is not easy, particularly in the current state of the economy, to make a living as a musician.

“It is pretty amazing to make a living by doing this thing that comes out of me naturally…that I would definitely be doing anyway,” he said.