Greetings!
Going to keep it brief so you can all get back to work. ;-)
Work Bio goes like this:
- Poor family so hustled for cash (x2 paper routes, mowing, car detailing, odd jobs)
- Computer nut, self-taught coder by 15
- HS let me do half days and do computer consulting at a financial company the other half for Freshman & Junior year (self-paced curriculum). Also worked doing roofing, carpentry & landscaping.
- Left HS to go to college & work at a tech startup. After two years pretty burnt 18 credits + 60-70 hours at startup = no social life & never seeing the sun.
- So, off to the Marine Corps for a break and a little fresh air. First tour, ran side businesses assembling & selling PC clone & reselling weapons to fellow Marines. Second tour, had side jobs teaching a HS in the Congo & working at a Gorilla rescue.
- Had an offer coming out of the Corps to teach Game Wardens to counter snipe poachers, but decided it was time to head back to the states =)
- Landed in LA and started doing Efficiency Consulting for a percentage of the savings to the business (deal was: you pay me nothing, if my actions/recommendations improve your business, I get x%)
- Piled up some money and used it to start trading commodities (grains). Made a living, but the ups and downs were brutal (recommended: The Disciplined Trader ).
- Went back into consulting, mostly running programming teams to create custom sales systems and tie them into this new thing called 'the web' (The internet was GOD DAMN CRACK for an info junkie like me. I don't think I slept for the first couple of years after Mosaic came out.)
- So, time to move back to Silicon Valley for the internet boom. Ran big coding teams creating a lot of the stuff everyone takes for granted now. Yes, I remember a little company called Google, and a tiny startup called eBay. And when you could get a pizza for 2000 BTC.
- Next fifteen years were a rinse and repeat of 'pile up cash' then 'work on a new product/service until the cash runs out' then back to 'pile up cash'. In the meantime, my spouse contracted Lyme's disease. Serious cash and time killer.
- On the side also did fun things like early BTC mining (no I'm not a BTC millionaire, though everyone that knew me then asks me every time the price goes up). All I can say is 'a pox upon you Butterfly Labs!'.
In the middle of that, remodeled my house (meaning 'did the work' not 'hired a guy'), sold it and started moving about (sick of CA taxes and ever increasing laws). Here's the house for anyone interested: Real Estate & Homes For Sale - 0 Homes | Zillow Picked up a lot of new skills.
For anyone wondering why I didn't work on the entrepreneur stuff on the side, there are only so many hours in a day. Most of my career has been 100+ hour weeks, with the record being a 500/hr. month.
If you think that's impossible, you're wrong. 18 hrs/day 7 days a week for a month will get you there. If you want to live thru it, and stay healthy, you need STRICT dietary control, and solid sleep and dietary regimens. You'll make it, but by the end you'll think you're in hell. On the plus side, the company I was working for held a board meeting to discuss my bill for that month. =)
Random aside: If any of you serious cerebral types get chronic migraines, you may be expending all of your serotonin. You need to supplement tryptophan. Makes the blackout migraines stop.
So. Heard MJ on a podcast a couple years back and grabbed the MF. Good lord! This book could have saved me decades! Explained all sorts of business failures I'd experienced, including the BTC mining. Immediately sent copies to my entrepreneurial friends and mentees.
Had to finish the house to get out of CA, so entrepreneurial went dark while I split time between that and consulting. Moved around a bit (Santa Fe, Austin, Asheville) while trying to figure out what the next biz will be and just discovered MJ's new book at the perfect time!
I'm a grinder, and I've been exposed to the internals of a lot of businesses (all my consulting gigs have been as a 'fixer', you call me when it HAS TO HAPPEN, the buildings on fire, there's no time, and you've burned thru 95% of your budget), but I'm terrible at determining what people want (I'm not a consumer..at all. Betmax & HD DVD sounded good to me) and everything I 'know' about marketing and sales has come from reading books.
So here I am, hoping to learn a lot from all of you!
P.S. And if you see me commenting on threads too much, tell me to get the f*** back to work! Giving advice is one of the ways I procrastinate. =)
P.P.S. If this sounds braggy, my failure list is as long as my bio. I ordered a 'How To Get Rich' pamphlet out of the back of a magazine when I was ten, it said 'put ads in the back of magazines and sell them this pamphlet'. Did 976 numbers (fail), real estate investing (partner ran off with all my seed money), some random MLM my friends roped me into (fail fail fail), several business software projects, etc.
Going to keep it brief so you can all get back to work. ;-)
Work Bio goes like this:
- Poor family so hustled for cash (x2 paper routes, mowing, car detailing, odd jobs)
- Computer nut, self-taught coder by 15
- HS let me do half days and do computer consulting at a financial company the other half for Freshman & Junior year (self-paced curriculum). Also worked doing roofing, carpentry & landscaping.
- Left HS to go to college & work at a tech startup. After two years pretty burnt 18 credits + 60-70 hours at startup = no social life & never seeing the sun.
- So, off to the Marine Corps for a break and a little fresh air. First tour, ran side businesses assembling & selling PC clone & reselling weapons to fellow Marines. Second tour, had side jobs teaching a HS in the Congo & working at a Gorilla rescue.
- Had an offer coming out of the Corps to teach Game Wardens to counter snipe poachers, but decided it was time to head back to the states =)
- Landed in LA and started doing Efficiency Consulting for a percentage of the savings to the business (deal was: you pay me nothing, if my actions/recommendations improve your business, I get x%)
- Piled up some money and used it to start trading commodities (grains). Made a living, but the ups and downs were brutal (recommended: The Disciplined Trader ).
- Went back into consulting, mostly running programming teams to create custom sales systems and tie them into this new thing called 'the web' (The internet was GOD DAMN CRACK for an info junkie like me. I don't think I slept for the first couple of years after Mosaic came out.)
- So, time to move back to Silicon Valley for the internet boom. Ran big coding teams creating a lot of the stuff everyone takes for granted now. Yes, I remember a little company called Google, and a tiny startup called eBay. And when you could get a pizza for 2000 BTC.
- Next fifteen years were a rinse and repeat of 'pile up cash' then 'work on a new product/service until the cash runs out' then back to 'pile up cash'. In the meantime, my spouse contracted Lyme's disease. Serious cash and time killer.
- On the side also did fun things like early BTC mining (no I'm not a BTC millionaire, though everyone that knew me then asks me every time the price goes up). All I can say is 'a pox upon you Butterfly Labs!'.
In the middle of that, remodeled my house (meaning 'did the work' not 'hired a guy'), sold it and started moving about (sick of CA taxes and ever increasing laws). Here's the house for anyone interested: Real Estate & Homes For Sale - 0 Homes | Zillow Picked up a lot of new skills.
For anyone wondering why I didn't work on the entrepreneur stuff on the side, there are only so many hours in a day. Most of my career has been 100+ hour weeks, with the record being a 500/hr. month.
If you think that's impossible, you're wrong. 18 hrs/day 7 days a week for a month will get you there. If you want to live thru it, and stay healthy, you need STRICT dietary control, and solid sleep and dietary regimens. You'll make it, but by the end you'll think you're in hell. On the plus side, the company I was working for held a board meeting to discuss my bill for that month. =)
Random aside: If any of you serious cerebral types get chronic migraines, you may be expending all of your serotonin. You need to supplement tryptophan. Makes the blackout migraines stop.
So. Heard MJ on a podcast a couple years back and grabbed the MF. Good lord! This book could have saved me decades! Explained all sorts of business failures I'd experienced, including the BTC mining. Immediately sent copies to my entrepreneurial friends and mentees.
Had to finish the house to get out of CA, so entrepreneurial went dark while I split time between that and consulting. Moved around a bit (Santa Fe, Austin, Asheville) while trying to figure out what the next biz will be and just discovered MJ's new book at the perfect time!
I'm a grinder, and I've been exposed to the internals of a lot of businesses (all my consulting gigs have been as a 'fixer', you call me when it HAS TO HAPPEN, the buildings on fire, there's no time, and you've burned thru 95% of your budget), but I'm terrible at determining what people want (I'm not a consumer..at all. Betmax & HD DVD sounded good to me) and everything I 'know' about marketing and sales has come from reading books.
So here I am, hoping to learn a lot from all of you!
P.S. And if you see me commenting on threads too much, tell me to get the f*** back to work! Giving advice is one of the ways I procrastinate. =)
P.P.S. If this sounds braggy, my failure list is as long as my bio. I ordered a 'How To Get Rich' pamphlet out of the back of a magazine when I was ten, it said 'put ads in the back of magazines and sell them this pamphlet'. Did 976 numbers (fail), real estate investing (partner ran off with all my seed money), some random MLM my friends roped me into (fail fail fail), several business software projects, etc.
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