Most of us have subjects we are passionate about.  When that passion develops relatively early in life and continues to be a passion as we develop our professional careers, that is what I call a Persistent Passion.

I am fortunate to have at least two persistent passions in my life.  This is a chronicle of how entrepreneurship developed into one of those persistent passions.

Chicken or the egg?

Growing up on the family farm in North Dakota, I had more opportunities to exercise my persistent passion for entrepreneurship than might be obvious.

Some of my earliest entrepreneurial activities involved one of the chores I was assigned:  picking eggs.  I collected, washed, and packed into cartons the dozens of eggs our Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds laid.

Being naturally nerdy, I tracked egg output from day to day, and drew line- and bar-graphs to correlate with the hens’ daily laying.  As the surplus eggs were given to neighbors and family friends, I began tracking that, too.  When a few of those “customers” donated a few dollars, I kept track of that as well (it was my first “earned income” though at the time I looked at it as spending money for toy tractors).

Sometimes before my Mom went to town for groceries she would ask if I wanted any treats.  I remember requesting graph paper and colored pencils instead of candy or baseball cards (or whatever it was that normal boys collected).

My parents had to have been aware that their eldest offspring was not destined to be a prom king.

Shamelessly converting family into customers

When I was done with my childhood chores, I had no shortage of hobbies. One of those hobbies was a pursuit of history:  fossils and antiques, mostly.  When I set up my museum in my bedroom closet and my mother discovered that cow bones were among the curated collection, she hastily worked with my father and uncles to acquire an outdoor venue!

“Frank’s Museum” moved into an old school bus body and then later into the century-old house which my great-grandparents had homesteaded in.  The museum became a favorite attraction among visiting extended family members (I have aunts to this day who give me grief for making them sign the guest book and for collecting $1 entrance fees–though I insist in my defense those fees were voluntary!).

At Halloween and Easter, I hoarded my own candy treasure to use as a trade commodity when my siblings’ supplies had run low.  I remember selling Smarties for as much as a penny per pack to the eager sucrose addicts.

Dominating the publishing industry of South Heart, population 300.

I never grew out of this drive to be in business and found a focused interest on what was then called “desktop publishing” using second-generation personal computers and dot matrix printers of the early-90’s.  I worked with my sisters to create a family newsletter on more than one occasion. My cousin Lucy and I collaborated on our own satire projects (as an adult she went on to build a successful content marketing firm).

When my classmates were reading Sports Illustrated, People, and motorsports magazines in the school library, I was subscribing to three or four business journals and a couple of graphic design publications.

As a Junior in high school, I collaborated with my friend, Kim, my sisters Mary and Holly, and a couple of other friends to create a community newspaper for our small home town of South Heart.  The Talk of the Town was a bi-monthly publication which consisted of articles we wrote by way of interviewing people in the community.

Our Aunt Tami generously donated use of her business’s copy machine for us to crank out each issue’s 350 copies of the 12-15 page newspaper.  In addition to her grocery store, we distributed the newspaper through the Cenex gas station and the local cafe (side note: 15 years later, my sister Mary ended up purchasing the cafe in South Heart where she had worked as a waitress part-time during school).  We sold ads to businesses in the county, and accepted subscriptions from several dozen readers who lived out of state and had found out about their home town’s new newspaper through word-of-mouth.

The Talk of the Town became a fairly big undertaking for us students, and along the way we made a lot of mistakes but learned a lot too.  With the excessively lofty title of Editor-in-Chief, I gained an incredible insight into working with a variety of personalities (all of us were volunteers), technical skills like copy editing, layout, and desktop publishing, and of course the business side of things: marketing, accounts payable and customer relationship management.

I learned that journalists have remarkable behind-the-scenes access to events and community figures.  I came to respect the quantity of labor that goes into articles which often are read only briefly and then tossed aside.

Birds of an entrepreneurial feather flock together

When my parents allowed me to attend “Business Challenge”, a week-long business camp for high school students, I recognized that I was not quite as odd as I had thought.  OK, I realized I was still odd, but I wasn’t alone in my interest in entrepreneurship!

In college, I became an active member of the Business Club, which afforded me even more opportunities for exposure to the business world. We engaged in fundraisers, toured factories, and invited local business leaders to share their insights with our hungry minds.  I had the privilege of serving as club president for two terms, and I firmly believe I learned more about small business from that experience than I did from any three or four of my Business Administration courses combined.

This eventually led to my internship with a short-lived tech startup and then founding of my own technology services firm in 1999.  Hurtdidit, LLC remains my primary source of income, though I switched focus from website development to contract work in the oilfield in 2010.

I have to give a metric tonne of credit to my parents for indulging their nonconformist son in his pursuit of interests which probably would have tried the patience of a less supportive parental team.

I will probably change direction a few more times before I finally grow up. However, I don’t think I will ever outgrow my persistent passion for entrepreneurship.

As a small business owner, one of the biggest challenges is figuring out pricing.  You want to be fair to the customer, competitive with the industry, and yet of course profitable to make it worth your while.

This was a balance I struggled with and in some ways, never truly mastered.

Where pricing was concerned, I would price according to a desired hourly rate I felt my time was worth, divided by the amount of time a given project would take to complete. Most service businesses and freelancers, I think, follow this simple formula. I tended to low-ball the value of my time so I could win more contracts.  This, too, is a familiar action to most freelancers and start-up business owners.

Of course, the result was plenty of work; I never had trouble attracting new clients. However, this sacrificed profitability; I was stuck operating on narrow margins.  If a client was late to pay her bill or if she was delinquent altogether, that caused cash flow problems.

Even facing this losing formula, I had a difficult time raising my rates;  I felt at the time that nobody’s time was worth, say, $100/hour.  Worse still, I could not bring myself to invoice clients for small design tasks which took me only a few minutes to complete. I know my clients appreciated the generosity, but goodwill only goes so far when it comes to paying the mortgage.

Fortunately, someone much smarter (and much more successful) than I am hit me between the eyes with a dose of common sense business advice, prescribed in story form.

A mentor-friend of mine–I’ll call him “Robin” (since that’s his name)–shared a parable with me to illustrate the justification for appropriate pricing:

The story of the old mechanic and his hammer

The owner of a finicky automobile was having trouble diagnosing the source of his engine’s ailment.  The car just refused to start.  He spent hours attempting to repair it himself, replacing parts to no avail.

Finally (probably due to his wife’s insistence), the man asked a respected, old mechanic to provide assistance.

The old mechanic spent a couple minutes studying the car’s engine.  He produced a standard ball peen hammer from his toolbox, leaned under the hood and gave the starter a single, precise strike.

To the car owner’s amazement, this time when he turned the key in the ignition, the engine fired right up.

“That’ll be $100.” the old mechanic said.

“One hundred dollars?” The car owner gasped, “All you did was hit it with a hammer!”

“Correct.  That’s $5 for my time, and $95 for knowing where to aim.”

—

That is a short, simple story (as memorable parables usually are!), but I have always appreciated the lesson it provides.

How can you apply the moral of this parable to your professional life?  As always, we would love to hear your feedback!

It is so exhilarating when we are making rapid progress towards our goals.  For some of us, that might mean steady weight loss as part of a diet and exercise program.  Or, it might be seeing our daily word count accumulate as we develop our writing skills.

When we are making progress, it is easy to stay on track and to stay motivated.

The real challenge is when that rapid progress suddenly…stops.  It is when that scale just does not want to budge past a certain point, or when a frustrating creative block becomes chronic.

While this lack of progress may feel like being “stuck in a rut,” I prefer to think of it as a plateau in personal evolution.

Whether it’s a physical fitness goal or a skill-building objective, the angst and frustration is the same.  It is often easy to identify the areas for improvement and general ideas for how we may make those improvements. However, in practice it is not always quite so clear cut.

It has taken me a long, sometimes painful amount of time to finally recognize and accept:  plateaus are part of our personal evolution, whether we like it or not.  

Plateaus are sometimes indications that we have become comfortable and complacent again, that the sense of urgency has waned.  They are cyclical, these periods of slowed evolution. But so, too, is the period of rapid improvement. We should take heart in that fact.

So the key, as I see it, is to acknowledge that plateaus are part of the evolution process and we should not allow ourselves to fixate on this lack of progress as that will only serve to demotivate us.

A plateau should be viewed as an opportunity:  this is a time for reflection and self evaluation!  

Ask yourself:

• What has caused this period of complacency?
• Did I allow the usual distractions of everyday life to get in the way?
• Maybe I felt a sense of entitlement that eroded my discipline; the classic phrase “I work hard, I deserve a break” so easily becomes a recurring excuse, derailing the progress towards our goals.

The proactive question to ask ourselves is: how can we recapture that spark which preceded past personal evolution blitzes?

This is where daily journalizing may pay dividends by reviewing the insights we had during past experiences of self motivation.

While we don’t want to get stuck on a plateau for any longer than we must, we should not let this very normal cycle discourage us.  

We should instead remember to keep an eye on the big picture and take advantage of the opportunity to set ourselves up for another inspiring surge of rapid personal evolution.  Persistence is essential to success!

What do you do, Dear Reader, when you get “stuck in a rut” that stagnates the progress you are making towards your goals?  I invite you to share your ideas and experiences in the comments below.

We are all consumers.  We are consumers of material things, of course, but we are also consumers of ideas.  Whenever we watch a movie, read a book, or play a game, we are consuming content.

Some of us take the time to actually create something new. New products, new ideas and solutions to challenges, new entertainment and content.  

Consuming content is a mostly passive activity.  Creating content takes quite a lot more effort and energy.  Being a creator can be frustrating and intimidating.  Coming up with new ideas and translating those ideas into a medium for others to enjoy can take a lot out of a person.  Presenting one’s creation to the public exposes one’s self to criticism and rejection.

Yet, being a creator is especially rewarding. Sharing the work that we have created and receiving feedback from a (hopefully appreciative) audience are rewards which are hard to quantify.  Creating compels us to innovate, to reach further and to develop our knowledge so that we may possess something which is worth showing others.  

I would even suggest that creating nourishes one’s soul.

Like most people, I generally consume vastly more than I create.  I have been working–slowly–at bringing that into better balance with my writing and entrepreneurial activities.

This website and the articles RaeLea and I write are an example; a manifestation of this desire to “create more than we consume”.  Sometimes our articles may miss the mark or even offend some of our readers.  We have been fortunate that any critical feedback we have received so far has been constructive and has originated from friends who are genuinely interested in supporting our endeavors.

RaeLea and I sincerely thank you, Dear Reader, for providing your feedback to us. Thank you for continuing to show your support in our humble quest to create more than we consume!

There is one personality trait above all others which I believe can be blamed most for lack of success among creative people.  I recognize this trait because it is a flaw I was afflicted with my entire life without even knowing it.

Creative people tend to be a fountain of imagination.  Whether they are entrepreneurs or artists, creative types produce inspiration by the truckload. A creative person is rarely lacking for new ideas.  It’s invigorating to be around people like that, and it’s wonderful to be that sort of person–but it’s not without its drawbacks.

When I was operating a web development business I founded in 1999, the World Wide Web was still in its early stages, only just recently gaining traction with the masses a few years prior.  As such, it was (and probably always will be) a field of endless opportunities for a creative professional.

I started by designing simple websites for local businesses, but before long, I had clients who wanted e-commerce features for their sites.  I later won contracts with government agencies which were mandated to create content that was accessible to vision impaired visitors using screen readers.  I had other clients who needed to share large files with customers and staff securely. Staff at nonprofits wanted to save money by updating pages of their websites themselves.  Search engine marketing was another hot commodity.  

When a client asked if I could program a sprawling custom server application I set to work learning how to make their dream a reality. Eventually, interactive 3D modeling and virtual world development became trendy and I traded even more time I may have otherwise spent sleeping or with family or with my (now ex) wife to become adept with the new medium.

My point here is that I never said “no” to a project.  

Every time a client even hinted at a new technology problem, I dove right into it.  I spent untold hours researching and learning so my company could remain a one-stop provider for my clients’ website needs.  

Over the years I learned a lot and I was decent at most of the development work I did.  I enjoy conquering new challenges, especially when the technology is new enough to still feel magical.  I like to think I provided good value to my clients.  But, what I thought was me being adaptable and evolving with a changing technology landscape was in fact a lack of focus on my part.

The one trait blocking most creative people from success is a lack of focus.

Instead of putting my limited time and energy into being the very best at something, I was in fact spreading myself thin with distractions.  I couldn’t be the best at everything, and instead I painted myself into a corner as being the best at, well, nothing.  

I was a generalist and not a specialist.  I was a classic case of that old saying: “jack of all trades, but master of none.”

Looking back on 14 years of consulting it is now clear:  while I was chasing each new trend, I was diluting my other service offerings.  While I was immersing myself with new technology, it was impossible for me to recognize what I was doing to myself (and to my clients, who I worked so hard to acquire).

This has been a painful lesson for me to learn, but a valuable one.  The pursuit of narrowing my focus now shapes my big-picture decisions.  

We have a finite number of productive hours per day, per year, and per lifetime.  It’s hard enough to succeed in business or to master a craft such as writing even with great focus.  Dividing attention to multiple interests means denying resources to all of your pursuits.

Certainly, there are benefits to being a well-rounded generalist.  However, if we wish to truly succeed as creative professionals, I think we need to specialize; we need to focus.  

Focus your efforts on just one great interest and you increase your probability of succeeding.  

Do you agree or disagree with my thesis?  I appreciate your insight and welcome you to share in the comment form below.