RicardoGrande
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Hey TFF!
You can call me Ricardo, I'm a 20 something caveman that's trying to spark the flint of business and create the fire of value and productocracy!
I entered the workforce in IT after college, and immediately got smashed with the weight of the slowlane lie. I became depressed quick and tried to figure out why things were going so "wrong" when I did things so "right". Just imagine looking at yourself in the mirror on a Sunday morning and asking if your worth as an individual truly mattered in how well you could read a script over the phone and close recurring tickets.
I decided to stand up and fight, and I quickly ran into the 4HWW/bro-marketer crowd and spent almost a year trying the basic hustles (t-shirts, influencing, personal branding) and none of them panned out (Commandment E, anyone?). One day though, a book called "The Millionaire Fastlane" by one Mr. @MJ DeMarco showed up on my audible recommendations. It looked odd, a business book with great reviews, but the reviews told you directly that there's no magic bullet... but with the right framework, you could hit the "entreprenurial g-spot" and never fill out a TPS report again. Sign me up.
I had doubts but doubt turned to curiosity and curiosity to thirst.
I downed the book and Unscripted within a week, and would then listen to unscripted almost every day. It was a great kick in the @$$, but I got depressed quickly because I saw so many people executing fearlessly, starting product or service businesses, and I didn't seem to have anything. I decided to at least try taking action and did the usual upwork freelancing, made some cold calls here and there, and even built a website for a friend who owns a service business... but nothing panned out. When Corona hit, I fell down a dark hole and had to climb out with the systems in Alex Korb's "The Upward Spiral". With new systems in place, I managed to get back into a better groove, loose weight, and start computer science schooling!
Getting back on my feet though, three things almost knocked me out:
1) Due to nebulous political skirmishes by mgmt at my job, I was voluntold for a huge amount of O/T, including Saturdays, for the forseeable future.
2) My Widowed mother told me that the money I was sending her wasn't enough to help her pay off property taxes, and that she'd have to move out of the country if she couldn't find a way to make more money.
3) My cat was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma and I couldn't look the vet in the eye as he described multi-thousand dollar treatment plan to try to give him at least another year of life, not knowing I didn't have anywhere near the money to pay for it. Icing on the cake? After a normal checkup, my doctor had me go through multiple rounds of medical imaging for something they thought could've been serious, but thankfully ended up being nothing... a multi-thousand dollar nothing.
So here I am, past my quarter-century mark, working as an IT plebe with a smattering of small freelance jobs under my belt, a parent I'll be financially providing for, and a job that I've seen will put me in the splash zone for a 20-kiloton bomb for something I have no involvement in.
Is it terrible? No, it's not terrible because during all of this, I've worked on:
- Completely cutting video games from my life
- Cutting off distractions, and getting started consistently
- Cooking all of my own food and losing 25lbs since the start of corona
- Finishing about a year of online coding classes, and working my way to becoming a full-stack developer so I can at least move out of my current job if things go bad
- Writing down every idea I have or inconvenience I notice in my day-to-day life
- Started teasing out as much information as possible about business from every business owner I've come across
I know a lot of people come in here guns blazing with plenty of promises of making millions in months, but I'm not in the position to make such promises.
I admit I'll be much more of a slow burn who has plenty of questions, but I'm happy that there's 70,000 people here who respect value creation just the same. For the next while, you'll see me as I not only start local business outreach, but transfer from my foundational job to selling specialized labor as I really hit the pavement on this unscripted journey.
See you in the threads guys!
You can call me Ricardo, I'm a 20 something caveman that's trying to spark the flint of business and create the fire of value and productocracy!
I entered the workforce in IT after college, and immediately got smashed with the weight of the slowlane lie. I became depressed quick and tried to figure out why things were going so "wrong" when I did things so "right". Just imagine looking at yourself in the mirror on a Sunday morning and asking if your worth as an individual truly mattered in how well you could read a script over the phone and close recurring tickets.
I decided to stand up and fight, and I quickly ran into the 4HWW/bro-marketer crowd and spent almost a year trying the basic hustles (t-shirts, influencing, personal branding) and none of them panned out (Commandment E, anyone?). One day though, a book called "The Millionaire Fastlane" by one Mr. @MJ DeMarco showed up on my audible recommendations. It looked odd, a business book with great reviews, but the reviews told you directly that there's no magic bullet... but with the right framework, you could hit the "entreprenurial g-spot" and never fill out a TPS report again. Sign me up.
I had doubts but doubt turned to curiosity and curiosity to thirst.
I downed the book and Unscripted within a week, and would then listen to unscripted almost every day. It was a great kick in the @$$, but I got depressed quickly because I saw so many people executing fearlessly, starting product or service businesses, and I didn't seem to have anything. I decided to at least try taking action and did the usual upwork freelancing, made some cold calls here and there, and even built a website for a friend who owns a service business... but nothing panned out. When Corona hit, I fell down a dark hole and had to climb out with the systems in Alex Korb's "The Upward Spiral". With new systems in place, I managed to get back into a better groove, loose weight, and start computer science schooling!
Getting back on my feet though, three things almost knocked me out:
1) Due to nebulous political skirmishes by mgmt at my job, I was voluntold for a huge amount of O/T, including Saturdays, for the forseeable future.
2) My Widowed mother told me that the money I was sending her wasn't enough to help her pay off property taxes, and that she'd have to move out of the country if she couldn't find a way to make more money.
3) My cat was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma and I couldn't look the vet in the eye as he described multi-thousand dollar treatment plan to try to give him at least another year of life, not knowing I didn't have anywhere near the money to pay for it. Icing on the cake? After a normal checkup, my doctor had me go through multiple rounds of medical imaging for something they thought could've been serious, but thankfully ended up being nothing... a multi-thousand dollar nothing.
So here I am, past my quarter-century mark, working as an IT plebe with a smattering of small freelance jobs under my belt, a parent I'll be financially providing for, and a job that I've seen will put me in the splash zone for a 20-kiloton bomb for something I have no involvement in.
Is it terrible? No, it's not terrible because during all of this, I've worked on:
- Completely cutting video games from my life
- Cutting off distractions, and getting started consistently
- Cooking all of my own food and losing 25lbs since the start of corona
- Finishing about a year of online coding classes, and working my way to becoming a full-stack developer so I can at least move out of my current job if things go bad
- Writing down every idea I have or inconvenience I notice in my day-to-day life
- Started teasing out as much information as possible about business from every business owner I've come across
I know a lot of people come in here guns blazing with plenty of promises of making millions in months, but I'm not in the position to make such promises.
I admit I'll be much more of a slow burn who has plenty of questions, but I'm happy that there's 70,000 people here who respect value creation just the same. For the next while, you'll see me as I not only start local business outreach, but transfer from my foundational job to selling specialized labor as I really hit the pavement on this unscripted journey.
See you in the threads guys!
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