If I had hunkered down in academia I might have found a comfort zone, but then again, comfort zones are breeding grounds for mediocrity.
November 25, 2007: check out Jon’s podcast update to this chapter.
I can hear the people who know me stifling a laugh. How can I possibly advocate “lifestyle businesses” given the absurd nature of my own existence?
Fair enough: I wouldn’t wish my lifestyle on anyone. But I have no doubt that these principles can be successfully adopted by folks with a more balanced approach. One of my role models is an Internet book publisher who makes a very good living in his underwear. He optimizes his web site for Google when he gets bored.
It bothers me when people turn away from these ideas because of how hard I work. The only reason I work like this is because I made some fateful decisions a long time ago that turned into a pretty big hole. Don’t step in the hole, and you won’t have to work like I do. So where did I veer off? To sum up this cautionary tale, I was not raised to be an entrepreneur. And if you don’t understand the entrepreneurial approach to life, you probably won’t succeed. Even if you do, your success will be precarious, as it will be based on the blessing of fickle institutions rather than on ownership of your own creations. These are strong statements, but I’ll back them up before this book is done.
It’s possible to be educated and have no clue: I graduated from college with absolutely no idea how to finance my creative ventures. The job I was most qualified for? Grocery bagger. My degree had an astonishing impotence, but I didn’t wake up. I idealized the fact that I had no strategy and no financial competence. I would simply “do what I loved” and “the money would take care of itself.” If anyone reading this feels the same, I would urge you not to jump off that particular cliff; the ground will rise up and smack you good.
To enter the economic world without an economic strategy makes no sense. To see yourself as an employee in a world that caters to business owners is an even more terrible mistake. I made both of them. Even when you’re somebody’s employee, you must never lose your “owner’s consciousness.” There has to be a side project out there with your name on it; you need an asset to call your own. Simple? It took me a decade to get that, and that’s ten years after I graduated from college. I know some professors who should be ashamed of themselves.
The “do what you love” doggerel of liberal arts fantasyland haunted me well into my twenties. When the bill for those illusions came due, it was mighty steep. My “clawing up the cliff” lifestyle is not a judgment on the quality of the ideas in this book, but it is a damning indictment of the combined incompetence of family and schooling to prepare me for the life I have chosen.
I can’t romanticize my own bad decisions either. I call those self-limiting acts “piling on”; it’s the worst form of betrayal you can ever feel. The only thing worse than my own predicament has been watching my friends twist in the economic wind. If I had hunkered down in academia I might have found a comfort zone, but then again, comfort zones are breeding grounds for mediocrity. Academia can be a great career, but for me, it would have been a cop-out.
Now, at 39, I’m a long way towards digging out. The excavation is still a 24/7 project. The reason I push so hard? I’m determined to live a life beyond the stereotype of the meek, “I’ll settle for this” white collar existence that some seem to find acceptable but I see as total capitulation. I know it (and it’s not fun to type this) because I’ve lived it. Disclaimer: one of the biggest misconceptions of all is that you succeed in life by outworking people. The upcoming phrase is full of cheese, but the corporate trainers are right: “working smarter” is more important, and we’ll return to that theme.
For now, let’s steal one from Charles Barkley: I am not a role model. But you can appropriate these philosophies without becoming Jon Reed. Think of me as an overweight gym teacher; you can make these moves a lot more athletically than I did.
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