Get rid of the safety-net
I thought of starting this blog with a list of commonly known sayings about career choices, but I’m going right into business; I will start advising you to go into business… NOW! Some years ago my brother took me to lunch and presented me the idea of starting our own business; he said: “There is no money, you will work longer hours, half the time you will have no idea of what you are doing, and you may cry from time to time.” That was his best selling spiel, and as smart as I claim to be, I accepted… – Anes & Rincon LLC, doing business as Actions & Results Consulting, was born that day.
You may think that a start-up telecommunications consulting company has no room for a Marketing guy that won’t be doing a lot of marketing, but that’s where the professional-thinking process is flawed. Not because my grad-school education is in marketing (yes I’m bragging), makes me only useful for marketing; something I didn’t know at the time. Making the long story short, you will never know what you are REALLY capable of, until you get rid of the safety-net. I had no manager, no lawyers to get me out of trouble, no one to tell me if I was late or not, no HR defending my “rights”, no rights, and I ate Ham and Cheese Sandwiches every day for more than a year; but I learned that Marketing is just the tip of my own iceberg.
I learned that I am capable of programming in languages reserved for the best of engineers, that I can do the taxes for 3 people and one company, that I can write technical manuals of software worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, in short, I learned that I can do pretty much whatever I want. When you start your own company you gain perspective into what we call corporate America and how useless most of us are, how a successful company can be run by a couple of talented and dedicated people, and how useless most employees are. That’s why I have decided to continue my search for my professional limit again.
I will recommend you to go on and find that talent that makes you special, that hobby you have, or that thing you enjoy the most, I promise you that there is a market for it, and though not everyone will succeed, you will all learn from your failure (or failures if that is the case), but one thing college doesn’t teach us, is to reach our own limits. I haven’t reached mine yet, but sure have gone way farther than I ever thought in the past, so has the company we started a while ago. Some unpaid advertising would be to suggest you to visit www.ActionsResults.com, but I would never do that.
It’s our human nature of survival what makes us succeed beyond our own expectations when the safety-net is no longer there.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:17 AM
Difficult as it seems, there are ways to ‘get rid of the safety net’ without making it that risky. Having savings helps a lot. Having a strong career also helps. Having a contract in hand helps. Supportive family and partners are great.
Regardless… the concept of burning the boats is a very well mentioned one. Some other marketing professionals believe on it: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2007/07/24/sometimes-youve-got-to-burn-the-boats/
The history of Hernan Cortés implies he burned the boats. In reality he disassembled them, transported them, and then used them on a lake to finish his enemy. But for all purposes, once a boat is disassembled, it takes longer than the battle to assemble it. No running away.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:26 AM
[...] think that it was under the same premise. I did OK at that job that I mention and left on my own to start my own firm, but I would have loved some guidance at the time, and in some part I feel responsible for not [...]