Tag: building a business

June 14, 2021 – Never Quit, Unless You Want to be Happy

June 14, 2021 /

This was graduation weekend last weekend and my nephew got his bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice. I love graduation, I think it is the best feeling weekend of the year. There is so much hope, optimism and genuine happiness, particularly at the higher level. Most of the graduates are in their early twenties but if you look around there are many non-traditional students as well. Everyone is smiling and celebrating. And unlike high school, blood and treasure was expended to get this degree; it was earned.

Since he lived with us from eighth grade through high school, this was close to a child graduating. Normally, I don’t write about other people but I will make an exception today for the graduation speech that should be given. For simplicity sake, I am going to use his first name, Isaac.

Obviously, if he ended up living with us then not everything was as good as it should have been. He had the dream and capability but he needed the structure and support to reach full potential. He dreamed of helping people when he entered the world and to him it was becoming a police officer.

During the course of studying criminal justice, Isaac enrolled in the cadet program with a local police department. In the program, cadets perform auxiliary support for events like crowd control and get exposed to the life. It also puts them on a list to be hired if an opening appears and builds the resume with practical experience. So, it is a good step in goal setting and achieving the dream.

Somewhere along the way in the last year, dreams change. Isaac moved into the our little house in the back that I remodeled last year with his girlfriend of several years. Early in the calendar year, he decided that he wanted to go into a different direction and work in the social services area, not being a police officer. So, he quit in a sense.

Now, we are going to slight shift. I am pretty open minded but I try to stay arms length at other’s relationships until I know that it is going to progress into permanency. It looked like this one was going to but there were some things not quite right. You have to understand that when someone lives in your backyard, I notice a lot. And, it is not because I am watching and waiting, but I see the body language and the coming and going.

For instance, they didn’t appear to have anything in common. She had friends but they were not really his. They didn’t really do anything together, some of that was circumstantial because of school being a priority. There was a vibe that this was progressing seriously but couldn’t sustainably. I will make a long story short in that they broke up right before graduation.

The graduation party that we held this last weekend had some unspoken temperance and somberness to it. It didn’t have the unbridled exuberance that it should have had because of course, emotion was raw. When a life is built on one premise and that suddenly changes so do the dynamics. Finally, to my point.

There is a saying “When is the best time to plant a tree”? The answer is ten years ago and the next best time is today. When you quit a relationship that isn’t working or a career path that doesn’t fulfill, you are free to pursue one that does. And, ultimately isn’t that the path to true happiness?

Failing and quitting are not quite the same thing. Failing is in the act of whereas as quitting is in spite of. Our culture does hold those two things in different regards. One might be celebrated while the other might be admonished. We have all heard ‘Quitters never prosper’ but is that really true? What are they quitting? Is is toxic or soul crushing, it it preventing true happiness?

While the timing was less than ideal, we are planting a tree here. Isaac being in his early twenties is a good enough time to get started. Life is transitioning in the biggest way possible at this time. This is when he is truly moving out and up.

End Your Programming Routine: I want to say that quitters will prosper if they are looking for a better replacement or at least trying something out. There is no way to know if a career path is a good fit without trying it. If you pursue things because of sunk cost fallacy or to please someone else then you risk being miserable in the process.

We always have a choice. It may be that the cost is deep and the effort is high but that is not no choice. There is a smart way to quit, so don’t be stupid. Ask for help and support. Have a rough idea of a transition plan and hope for the best. After all, this is your life at stake.

October 6, 2020 – What does Calculus and mathematical equations have to do life?

October 6, 2020 /

Today is a deep cut. To keep you reading, this post is an analogy not actually about math.

I have been doing a lot of soul searching these last couple of weeks. I suppose that you could say that life hasn’t gone exactly to plan or maybe the way I had hoped. Math is used in science to describe or model life and the natural world. I have been thinking about what I want to change and I thought how eerie parallels some of issues in life line up with mathematical concepts.

The Equation of a Line

When you have a plot with one data point, what direction is the line going? For all you non-math types you can’t have a line with one point. A line can go in infinite directions and slopes when you only have one point.

The metaphor for life is without experiences there is not enough perspective to determine success or happiness. The only thing that you really know is where you are currently. You can have an idea and maybe even a plan to create the next experience, but that doesn’t mean that you will like it or it will be right for you. Not everyone has a supportive spouse to let you walk away without an income for over a year.

For me, I thought I knew where I was going with my life when I went to college. Once it didn’t materialize the way that I thought it was going to go, life happened more without direct deliberation than with it. I cruised along twenty some years until I figured out I wasn’t happy with my line. The problem is, I just realized that I haven’t done anything different to change the direction of my line in the last year and a half. I just hoped that it would change by itself.

Derivative Calculus

Now it is going to hard. What is a derivative? I think that the simplest definition is calculating a change. In application, you can either calculate a point on a line where a change has a particular value or you can calculate the value of a change at a particular point. I might have lost some people already here. I know that in my academic career, this is where I started to struggle with math. I took this class twice to get a better handle on the fundamentals of calculus.

Let’s put it into practice. Looking at your experiences (your line) at what point does a particular change occur. When does your life go sideways or when did the focus or desire change. The straighter the line, the easier it is to calculate or even see on a plot. Unfortunately, life has a way of having our experiences not line up neatly. This is why you need complicated math like calculus to figure it out.

I am pretty good at getting the equation setup, I might even muddle into the answer. That is all kind of useless without doing something with the data. I remember from my days studying Latin, the teacher saying there is no sentence without a verb. Action is required to communicate a thought just as action is required to make change.

Integral Calculus

I think that this one will be simpler; calculate the area under your line. What do you want the sum total of your life to be? Just like in math, positive experiences are additive and negative experiences are subtractive to get the total result. If you don’t like how it adds up, you have to go back to the other steps and make changes. Figure out where you went wrong step two and aim for different experience step one so that you can be more satisfied overall, step three.

So, the truth… I have unknowingly hidden in my Toolbox Fallacy. I like to analyze my situation and pretend that I am planning my next steps without any real results or changes. I have been fearful of moving onto my next professional career steps without acknowledging or even realizing that I was already in one. I have been doing small jobs and handyman work without embracing this might be who I really am.

I wanted to build a lifestyle business because I wanted a creative outlet with practical business deductions and control of my output and life. I already have a lot of that. My fear of failing (or running out of savings) has caused me to not put out effort in marketing and working on what is already paying working. I like the work, I like the freedom,

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to build a lifestyle business. Just maybe doing handyman type work isn’t what I am doing in the meantime but another point in my line.