Some of this I’ve written about before in old posts, but I want to reboot my blog, and the back story seemed like a good place to start.
When I first started my blog, I had just finished up my MBA and moved to Kansas City with no job and no real plan for what I was going to do with my life. I had only been to KC two times before moving here, but several of my college friends moved here for jobs, and it seemed like a fun new adventure for me.
I was unemployed and had to prepay my entire 6 month lease on my apartment because I also didn’t have a credit score, having never taken out a loan or opened a credit card account. Funds were low and declining.
Despite the increasingly desperate situation, I was unmotivated to take any action. I would get up in the mornings, listen to the Adam Carolla podcast, then a bunch of talk radio, and at some point in the late afternoon I’d go out to buy fast food I didn’t have any business trying to afford.
My problem (one of them anyway) was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do beyond a vague notion of wanting to own my own business. I didn’t know what kind of business I wanted to own. I didn’t figure it out in college, and I wasn’t doing much to capitalize on all my free time to get something going.
I started my blog because I decided I might like to be a tech blogger. I’ve always had an interest in computers, and most of my posts over the last 5 years have been about Linux. I managed to get a couple of my posts featured on Linux news aggregators, and those translated into a lot (as far as I knew) page views. A couple of my posts have had a few thousand hits, which felt great to me, but now that I know a bit more about blogging, it’s pretty small potatoes.
As money continued to dwindle, I got a temp job at the Jackson County Courthouse, which really helped keep the lights on and gave me some purpose. By that time, I had learned to be a lot more thrifty, and mostly subsisted on potatoes and oatmeal and kept warm by burning logs taken from my parents in my apartment’s fireplace.
By December I had secured a “real job†in the Health Care IT industry, where I went on to work for four and a half years. After a couple raises and promotions, buying a house, a career change a little over a year ago, and getting married, I finally feel like a reasonably successful young middle-class American.
I love my current job in Business Intelligence, and I can see myself working for my current employer for many years to come. My boss was my RA back in college, and a few of my other close friends have come to work there in the last several months as well. The responsibilities I’ve been entrusted with allow me a lot of autonomy, and help me scratch my entrepreneurial itch from a safe, stable environment.
I’ve learned a lot in the 7 years I’ve been in the professional world, and I want to keep pushing my limits, expanding my skills, and documenting my journey to massive success. The new focus of my site will be recording and passing along what I’m learning for others on the same journey, and so that I’ll have something to look back on.
The tower of success is built brick by brick.