rkeppner's blog

One of the topics I want to write about on a regular basis is diet and exercise, mostly because I struggle with it a lot. One of my biggest hurdles in building a business is having the energy and focus to do all the work required. There are a number of things that go into that, but today I just want to focus on what I eat and whether I'm getting enough (or any) exercise.

I'm almost scared to post again, even though I set a goal to write daily. I got a huge amount of responses on Facebook yesterday, but I'm worried that a lot of the posters thought my blog entry was just a status update, and so didn't read the whole post, which would have left a very negative impression without the ending paragraphs. Ah, the dangers of a socially networked world, but here we go anyway.

So, I've decided to seek full-time employment, back in Arizona. I'm trying to decide if that means I've failed at what I attempted. Certainly I haven't (yet) built a business that comfortably supports my family and allows me to live anywhere I wish, and that was the goal I had when I moved back to Idaho. But plans change—mine certainly do—and that's no longer my goal. So do I need to worry about achieving it?

Recently I've been watching the weekly webinars put on by OneCoach. They've been quite good, though mostly the same material is presented each week, regardless of the title subject. That's fine, since it tends to take me quite a few repeats to really knock an idea into my skull, so it's been worth my time. I may even have to take them up on that free business growth assessment.

But the one thing that really caught my attention and rang true with my opinions and experience is the idea that the single-page, twenty-screens-long sales page is dead, or at least not nearly as effective as it once was. I was glad to hear this, since they annoy the bejeebies out of me as a customer, and I hate writing them as a marketer. Don't get me wrong, sales copy is still very necessary, I just don't like to have to read it for half-an-hour.

I came across an interesting quote in my early-morning reading of Wild at Heart today, and it really got me thinking.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

So as I headed out the door for my morning walk, I asked myself (repeatedly) "what makes me come alive," but I couldn't come up with a decent answer. It was all just fuzzy stuff.

I haven't had access to a high-speed internet connection since I arrived a week ago. (That is, unless you count the couple hours I spent at the public library trying to catch up on email. But though it was definitely faster than my mother-in-law's Juno dial-up account, it was still pretty slow compared to the DSL or cable I'm used to.) This has left me in limbo as far as getting anything real done. I've been checking Gmail every few hours for the last few days, but that leaves me worried that anyone trying to call can't get through, since I'm tying up the phone line, and my in-laws don't have voice mail. There may actually be people trying to call me and getting a busy signal. The horror!

I guess I've always had a dream of starting from nothing and then becoming wealthy and successful by building my own business. In my mind that's the real American Dream, and that's been my goal, at least subconsciously. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, I'm now poised to do exactly that.

Well, I've been unemployed, I mean self-employed, for over a month now, so I guess it's time for a status update, like it or not. I promised myself that I would blog my journey faithfully once I was on my own, but I seem to have completely screwed that up. Here's hoping that this post is better late than never.

I have been talking about becoming an entrepreneur for so long, that the idea became more of a myth to me than an actual plan. Working for myself was always something I intended to do, but later. I became stuck in analysis paralysis, always studying for when I finally made my move, but never putting any real plans into action or setting goals with dates. In short, I never pushed through the fear and fully committed to my dream of moving from an employee to an owner. Until last week.

So many things came together at the same time that I could no longer ignore the path opening before me.

So last Friday was our company Christmas party (excuse me, I mean holiday party), and I didn't end up with any of the door prizes. That didn't surprise me—par for the course. No big deal. But all this week they've been drawing employees for various "gifts" that are given to the company. (Employees aren't personally allowed to accept gifts from other companies or vendors, so the gifts are randomly doled out.) No dice. It's not a big deal—I don't need the stuff they're giving out, in fact I wouldn't even want some of it, but the notification 5 times a day of other people "winning" the random drawings has started to grate on my nerves. I hate random! I like things where I can affect the outcome, but rigging the drawings didn't seem like a good (or feasible) idea.

Then I got an email that instead of announcing the prizes and winners, said that there were a number of items left around from various events/promotions/whatever that the company wanted to get rid of. Being a fairly avid thrifter (Hey, it's a great way to stretch a dollar!), I went to take a look. In only 15 minutes the items had already been pretty well picked over, but I found a wealth book that looked interesting, took it back to my desk, and went about the rest of my day (deleting further losing prize notifications as they showed up).

I’m happy to report I will finally be starting my first local Entrepreneur Fathers chapter—my own! I’ve been meaning to start a local group for a number of months (actually, it’s probably been over a year now), but now I’m really going to do it. I would probably still be just talking about creating one some time, but I went and opened by big mouth and announced my tentative plans to Tyson (a friend and fellow home schooling father), and he got excited enough about the whole thing to hold me to my word. I guess that was always one of the main points of the group—having other people to hold me to my commitments—but then Tyson went and proved my point for me. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that...