Episode 114 - Indiana Cowmeadow...

Sometimes I have to look away whilst I do the next stupid thing on my list...

The Thursday Thesis  - 30/08/2018

When I was in my twenties, I had a great idea for a business – buy a house to rent out, then use the profit from that to build a deposit to buy a second house, then rinse and repeat forever.

But -  being just a naive young cub in the world of bears – I doubted my idea and asked around for help and advice. I asked the people I loved - people who had no business experience - about my great idea and they advised me to not even try; hang on to your pennies and save, save, save.

I understood that they wanted to protect me from the risk of failure: they loved me, after all. They didn’t want to see me balls things up.

Their advice wasn’t the advice of an expert in business – they were experts on working in jobs they hated and earning just enough to get by on.

Great choice of mentor, right?

I listened to them anyway and began to doubt myself...

Pretty soon I began to assume I’d missed something in my research, because it looked great on paper. I hesitated, and years rolled past as I watched other people pursuing similar ideas and making a boatload of money as the property market boomed.

Back then the problem wasn’t the idea: the problem was me.

So it goes...

A couple of years ago I was looking at how I lived my life and what I want to do over the next few years – it’s something I’ve learnt to do every month, because I’m a loose cannon unless I keep an eye on myself.

Everything was running smoothly, I was very busy with guitar students, my book-writing was progressing and the second draft of The 9 Weird Things That Guitarists Do... was done. That left just enough time to record a demo of a new song and write some uplifting lyrics.

But there were a couple of things on my Do List that I hadn’t ventured out on, despite writing them down every month.

One of the uncompleted items on my list was starting out in the proprty business. But it was a stubborn non-mover, and I began to re-think why I wanted to get into that business at all.

Adventure: that was the call I realised I was answering with the new business start-up.

It turns out that business is like life: an adventure, a game, a dance with circumstances and the other dancers in the market.

How do you think I feel about having adventures?

Terrified, of course: but by recognising that starting that business was an adventure, rather than a life-and-death struggle. I felt better than thinking of it as me “entering the lions’ den” and it was way easier to actually take the first step in the new business and imagining myself hacking through a jungle to claim the treasure was a nice image - turns out a machete looks good on me.

Skip forward to today and I’ve been in that new business for a couple of years. It’s been challenging, rewarding, frustrating, revealing and tiring.

But most of all it has been an adventure.