Starting Anew In Austin

I moved to Austin, Texas the weekend of April 10. I drove a rental truck with my car in tow from Orlando, Florida, and the whole trip took about 30 hours, including a five hour stop at a motel to get some rest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Packing and getting underway was made a good bit easier thanks to the help of some good friends in Orlando who helped me organize and box up my stuff. Much appreciated!

So now I've been in Austin almost two weeks. It's gone by fast, and I'm finally just about settled in where I'm staying, a room share in a beautiful four-bedroom house up in the Arboretum area (northwest from downtown). Although my ultimate plan is business ownership and development, I have allowed myself to be courted by a couple of software companies for full-time employment. One of them had previously extended me an offer in spring '08, but I took a competing offer in the DC area instead.

Why would I participate in job interviews if I want to go into business? This is the question I am living with currently. There are a few ways to look at it: 1) I'm selling out on my dreams by pursuing full-time work, postponing the "real" life I keep telling myself I'll have someday. 2) It's something practical to do while I keep my ear to the ground and get a feel for the best avenues of business opportunity that are available. 3) It's a way to practice some of the best wisdom I've ever learned, being willing to be "open to everything and attached to nothing". (Wayne Dyer)

I am truly blessed. I followed opportunity back in 1995 and built the kind of career and skills that get me noticed in the job market for very good pay. But sometimes I wonder if this situation has also created a kind of gravity that keeps me from moving up into an orbit that is higher still. When I read the business stories of people like Richard Branson, Felix Dennis - even Bill Gates and Michael Dell - I feel like I may be settling for something less than what I have the potential of becoming by taking on a salaried position. You see, it's always a good time to take a job, and it's never a good time to jump into business. A software job offers me good money. The benefits are nice. There's a lot to like about it and I would never dishonor the value of working for a paycheck. It's just that something deep inside of me wants to the one who creates jobs, who puts capital at risk, who makes a difference (of whatever magnitude) in this world by creating and promoting his own products and services.

I was recently re-reading a chapter in Ken Fisher's excellent book The Ten Roads To Wealth where he writes about managing other peoples' money. Wealth managers make up the largest percentage of the annual Forbes 400 list of the world's richest people. Fisher himself is on the list for that reason. He was saying in his book that the most important part of getting started (from a business survival standpoint) is learning how to sell. In fact, he recommends a person interested in this path to learn selling even before learning investing. That got me thinking - maybe what I want to do is take on a sales job and get some more real-world experience there. I say "more" because I have worked as a salesman in the past - my first job was concession sales at the Toledo Zoo, after which I sold computers at KMart. Back in the '90s, I occasionally took up holiday sales work at Circuit City. Most of my friends think I have this skill in spades, but like so many areas of my life, it's mostly raw talent that hasn't been developed in a focused, sustained way.

One thing is for sure, I feel as energized now as I did when I first took computer programming seriously back in 1995, when I had a sense that the world was my oyster and only opportunity was ahead. As my dear friend Mimi Munroe would remind me, "You can't get it wrong." No Mim, I can't. I remain clear about my eventual outcome, yet the path to that destination is an unknown adventure that I embrace with abandon.