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WORKAHOLIC TO ENTREPRENEUR
INTRODUCTION
I am a retired electronics engineer. I love my profession,
instead of hating work; I went to play and wondered why they paid me
for it. I spent my most enjoyable days chasing electrons around a
printed circuit board. Electronic circuits are a type of truth
table, when you get everything right it works every time. One
mistake and is crashes and burns. My love of my profession and
the feeling of accomplishment when the project performed to
specification drove me to be a fully developed workaholic. This
blog is about the journey from that workaholic to a new
entrepreneur. I am not quite sure how to do that yet but am
committed to learning how.
COMFORT ZONE
It looks like this journey starts by getting out of my comfort
zone. Being a workaholic causes your employer to load on the
work. It seems that the more you do the more you can do. In
my particular case, I welcomed the work. I took vacations when
the family demanded one. I put as much as the company allowed
into my 401K and built up a tidy sum for retirement. I can live
comfortably on my retirement and social security. My 401K was for
extras like travel and other recreational/entertainment
functions.
THE GENERATION AND COLLAPSE OF MY 401K
During my generation 401K retirement plans, came into being. They
were the first opportunity for employees to become partial owners of
the company that employed them. It was a win-win situation.
The company gained employee loyalty and the employee gained partial
ownership of the company. The usual employee (not supervision)
could accumulate large retirement funds when they fully participated in
the 401K plan. During the 70s, 80s and 90s a large number of
stocks grew, split, and grew again. Thousands of shares
accumulated with several cycles of this growth pattern.
HER PROBLEM
I have some other savings that can take care of short-term
shortages. However, there is a major problem involving my bride
of 56 years. She had a stroke several years ago, that left her
paralyzed on her right side. She had extensive speech,
occupational and physical therapy. The first function to recover
was her smile. She is generally a very happy person and smiles a
lot. She recovered enough to walk, but never regained use of her
right arm and hand. Her driver’s license needed renewal
immediately after the stroke and that motivated her to learn to write
her name with her left hand. She had no violation for many years
so we were able to renew the driver’s license by mail. I am
sure she would not have been able to get the drivers license renewed if
she had to appear in person. Of course, she has never driven
since the stroke. The lack of use of her right hand seems to
drive her back into depression. She has had five bouts of
depression since the stroke (7 years ago). The depression causes
her to stop eating and the prescribed treatment for that is shock
therapy. This last bout with depression left her with severe
dementia. She forgot to do many things that were second nature to
her. Like buttoning up her blouse, washing her face, and many
others. It looks like the enviable outcome is a nursing home for
her. Even if we can keep her out of the nursing home this time
eventually that type of care will be required, if the depression cycle
continues. Have you looked at the cost of Nursing Home Care
lately? That is enough to shock anyone out of their comfort
zone. The first of February 2007 my wife entered the Nursing
Home. The cost of the Nursing Home is $150/day. The first
20 days are paid by Medicare and the next 80 day will be paid by my
medical insurance company (Scott & White).
Finally I was forced to place Isobel on Medicaid. To qualify for
Medicaid I had to give up one half of what remained in my 401k.
However, that did save me from bankruptcy.
ONE OF SCOTTY’S PROBLEMS
The next obstacle is the fact that I am of the age that experienced the
great depression of the 1930’s. I was born in 1929 so I
guess the depression was my gift to the United States. The
depression caused great financial stress and wiped out massive
fortunes. The prosperity that led up to the great crash caused my
father to purchase a Lincoln Zephyr. Of course, the car was lost
along with his job. The employment market was a disaster.
Whole towns were out of work. Banks closed, most never
reopened. If you had money in them, it was lost. The men of
the town, towns were much smaller then, would rustle a cow and the
whole town would have the best meal they had received in months.
This was a time when you could be shot for rustling cattle. My
growth stopped and the family Medical Doctor advised my parent that I
needed more food. They could not provide the necessary food so
they farmed me out to Dad’s parents, my
Grandparents’. They were share croppers not land
owners. A share cropper is a person who farms on someone
else’s land and pays for the use of the land by giving part of
the crop to the land owner. I stayed with my farmer grandparents
for several years. There I could get enough food and be useful
around the farm. This is where I developed my work ethic.
Well that makes it very difficult for me to tolerate even reasonable
debt. I would never dream of carrying over a charge on my credit
card from one month to the next. I use my credit card to avoid
carrying cash. I only spend what I can pay when it becomes
due. I have a battle of two strong forces competing for my
attention now. I need money to develop my Internet business and
have this phobia about debt. I investigated several opportunities
but they all required the expenditure of more money than I was willing
to part with. After all, those savings must last me for the rest
of my life. I looked at the Reese Report, The Pipeline to Profit
and The 2 Comma club. Referral Ware even expected me to pay $1995
for advertisement. Everybody knows advertisement is a loosing
expenditure. That should give you an idea of where I am coming
from.
PAST EXPERIENCE
In the development of electronic systems, you had the inputs that you
could use and the required outputs. Sometimes the inputs were
only the power. It was up to us to do what ever was necessary to
provide the necessary signals. Why is this so much
different? Is it not about self-reliance? Do I have the
guts and determination to do whatever is necessary to make it work for
me? Although I have no proof I can do it, I will do it
anyway! I have no idea how I will do this but I am going to do it
anyway! It is going to be a rough ride and require a lot of
growth on my part, but I am up for it. I will not stop until I
feel the entrepreneur spirit is surging through every fiber of my
body. The plan is to go through a series of programs, developing
each one into an automated system that is self-sustaining, before going
on the next program. I will write detailed reports on what I did
and point out mistakes I make in the hope you can avoid the same
errors.
I am sure you have heard this before but let us look at it again.
We have come from the industrial age to the information age. This
is the time of the entrepreneur! In 1991, the household wealth of
the United States was 13 trillion dollars and there were 3.6 million
millionaires. In 2001, the household wealth of the United
States was 30 trillion dollars and there were 7.2 million
millionaires. The projection is that in 2016, the household
wealth in the United States will be 100 trillion dollars and there will
be 17.2 million millionaires. That is 10 million millionaires
developed in the next ten years. Where do you think that growth
is going to be? Is it going to be in industry, or is industry
going to continue exporting industrial jobs to cheap labor
forces? Is that growth going to be in the information
field? Is the growth coming from info-products? The
question is are you going to be one of the new
millionaires? Let the people that are already there help us
get there. They are willing, are we ready to follow?
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