This is going to be somewhat like the average blog post on "finding yourself" and other categories usually attributed to the word entrepreneur. Hopefully though, I will have found a way to make it better and to reach you in a more meaningful way, while also bringing you new information you can use along your journey.
Finding our purpose in life is probably one of if not our most difficult task, really. People go about finding their purpose in different ways; some folks like to sit back and think about all of the things they enjoy doing or what they think they would enjoy doing and from there planning and organizing a plan of attack, while others just simply go out into the world, take the risk, and do it. It's probably best to utilize a little bit of both strategies to find your purpose.
But there's a key piece that is often neglected in literature; uncomfortableness. Doing things that make you uncomfortable, whether that be defined as something embarrassing, fearful, or simply stressful, can be very helpful to us as we set-off on a path of self-discovery ending with finding our purpose in life.
I don't want to get into specifics of what can make a person uncomfortable, you know yourself better than I do but I will say that for me, a great way to venture out of my comfort zone involves helping other people I come across on a walk or around the college campus, travelling to a foreign country, trying new foods, or simply starting a conversation with a stranger and making an effort to understand their life through a sometimes brief passing.
My journey has been all over the map; the first company I launched was landscaping, lawn-care, and snow-removal when I was a kid. About the same time I developed an interest in website design. My first website was dedicated to gaming and specifically to cheats in games for a variety of gaming consoles and PC. It was a big success! My work started slowly because this was around the year 1998 and there were few resources available to help me so I had to learn as I went. Every night I would log in and work on adding new pages, content, and sometimes graphics as my skills matured. After I got to a point where I thought I could be proud of it, I learned how about ad creation and basic marketing. Not too long afterwards, I had e-mail subscribers and thousands of visitors monthly and before I knew it, my website had become one of the most visited websites in the world for gaming cheats! Pretty cool!
Things didn't stop there! Major magazines began sending me free subscriptions and stuff through the mail, people were contacting me about the site and wanting to get in on the action. My biggest competitor at the time was another website called CheatCodeCentral. A cool organization that did the exact same thing I did but with greater resources and a full-time staff. I was a kid with other responsibilities so I couldn't add content at the same rate they could. Eventually, my interest dwindled and as a result, so did my customer base, but I was alright with that.
I launched a few other websites, but none of them reached the same level of success. The takeaway here is that I was able to become moderately successful through doing something I liked. I didn't view it so much as work as I did as something I enjoyed doing. It was fun and rewarding for me.
My lawn-care/landscaping business was hugely successful in the mean time. In fact, it was more successful than I ever hoped for! My strategy was basically to obtain clients by beating my competition at the margin. I designed and printed ads on my computer using regular printer paper and distributed them door to door almost every day. I would usually print and then distribute about 40-60 a day working street by street all around my house. It grew incredibly fast, especially as word spread about the quality of work that I did. Mind you, I had a push mower (push, not self-propelled or anything like that, just simply a push mower), a weed eater that I either carried or placed on the handlebars of the mower, and a five gallon container of gas that I would place on the mower deck and I would push it all block by block to each house whose lawn I mowed.
Eventually, the furthest I would venture was about a mile from my house because any further would take too long to travel to since I was pushing my way from house to house! As I got older and obtained my drivers license I would get clients from other parts of the city and drive over, eventually I had to hire my older brother to help, and then a couple of my friends, and then a couple of my brothers friends. It was a huge job! I had more money than I knew what to do with so I saved every bit of it that I could and reinvested it in my business through buying more mowers, maintenance, tools, materials and supplies, and of course paying everyone a fair wage.
I grew tired of it though and sold everything, my brother took over most of it but he also grew tired of it and eventually dissolved everything. But my strategy had paid well. I ended up with more business then I could actually handle, I made great money, and great friends. Enemies were made as well. I'm very competitive and viewed the competition with a look of disdain, I undercut them, many of them severely, and would go out of my way to help people for free in order to keep clients. As a result, my competition made it clear how they felt. Some of them attended my church and others were neighbors. Most of them had clear cut established businesses, some of them were in their 30's and 40's, and they did not like me at all. But hey, I beat them fair and square. They weren't willing to negotiate and make less on the margin like I did, and my income came from the number of jobs that I had and through the special jobs I would outside of typical lawn-care.
Now, I find myself in a place where I'm not really sure what I want. I have studied finance extensively, math extensively, economics fairly extensively, I know how to program in Python, R, and other languages, and have set myself up for a fair bit of success in quantitative finance but alas that's not really what I want to do. I like the basics of finance and creating charts and graphs and analyzing companies and doing valuations. I think what I really enjoy is more hands-on stuff that isn't purely hands-on; construction management, and business consulting. I love teaching and helping others, especially small business owners. I don't think I could ever go back to staring at numbers and charts all day every day, there has to be more of a hands on side to compliment that very quantitative aspect of work that I typically do. I want to be able to speak with people and go out and use my hands and knowledge outside of the computer and digital world. Maybe project management or consulting is where I should go. I love teaching as much as I love to learn so if I could be something like the next Sal Khan, I'd be happy.
Well, this quickly turned into a rant and something else like a journal or diary entry but it helps me to clear my head and hopefully you will get something out of this as well.
