I’m learning, as I move through this process of personal and business evolution, that my sole purpose for doing this, for doing anything, is to aim for the heart and to keep learning to move from that place. The world done gone crazy, y’all, and I’m not sure i have any other tools to change it than operating in this way. Here’s how I keep from tearing my hair out.
On a small business forum I’m on, entrepreneurs have been having a frustration/giggle-sharing thread about the proposals they’ve gotten from potential clients. Some of these proposals are absolutely riotous – even more so because at one point in our careers, many of us actually accepted these proposals – product trades, ridiculous retainers, free babysitting, jars of marijuana (disclaimer: I live in a place where this is okay)… these are some of the more gentle ones, honestly, and on surface-level, they sound more like sweet community barter than business exchange. But what’s really being said here, in many cases is, “I need what you do but I don’t want to pay you for it,” and it comes as an insult – especially when you literally witness a client spending lots and lots and lots of money elsewhere. Eventually this process smooths itself out and clients come to you with a-game in place; but it can be a bumpy little road getting there.
For a moment I got swept up in the fervor. I probably opted-in to someone’s mailing list for a second, and I did run out and get myself a Chromebook (because honestly – the places I like to travel, I’d rather someone stole my Chromebook), envisioning that eventually I, too, would be traveling with my wife somewhere even more awesome than where we already live, and in the mornings my wife would go for a run and grab something fun for breakfast and my daughter would have some super cool local nanny person a few hours every day so I could work my entrepreneurial magic via Chromebook and she could learn Spanish (or Portuguese or French or Croatian or Samoan or…) by immersion.
Moments ago, I was so struck by this quote from Carl Sagan I felt compelled to write. It sent me down an amazing path of self-inquiry.
At this point, I no longer feel the need to spend a month’s worth of rent (I live in a small town in a small place) on my handheld device, especially when obsolete in a few years… And let’s be honest – while I’m good at what I do and well-paid, I’d rather spend $800 going to the coast for a few days, where chances are I might drop my phone in the ocean.
It’s true, I pull a few shifts at a really nice local restaurant, and people ask me fairly frequently why I do it when I’ve got so much else going on. I fully trust my own professional skills, but there are a whole host of reasons why I keep an partially-employed foot in the “human” world, and why I still wait tables. Here are a few of the biggest:
