Running your own show
Agi's having a girls night out tonight and is watching "Mamma Mia" with her mom and sister in law Aniko. All three of them--and pretty much every other woman I've met--have a huge thing for Colin Firth (who's in the movie) mainly because of his stoic yet sexy performance in "Pride and Prejudice."
But what I really wanted to write down here are just a few thoughts about my efforts to start up an online business. I'm just going to list them off, bullet-style.
- the freedom to spend your time however you want is both exhilarating and bewildering;
- self discipline is crucial and mine is lacking too often;
- having a talented web designer as a wife is great;
- it is the most intellectually challenging job I've ever had; you have to become exposed to, learn and do your best to become good at a huge variety of things: techie-website terms & tools; marketing; accounting & taxes; customer service.
- being an employee of an existing business is great in many ways, and "easier" than running your own; quite often, you can simply feed off the success of the creators of the business--not exactly like a parasite, unless you're in HR or Legal, like I was... :)
- the reason there are huge tax breaks and perks for business owners is that most businesses flame out and die; it is very difficult to run a successful enterprise; if your business does make it and creates jobs for others and tax revenue--the government loves you and rewards you; the wealthiest people in the world are business owners.
- it will be very challenging for us to make a big success of an online business, but my wife is very supportive and we're off to a good start.
- if I can make it happen (we'll know for sure within about a year), then it will be very gratifying, exciting and I can see myself doing this for decades to come--building a business empire, that is.
Time to get back to work...