The other day I announced my new product. If you saw my income tax statement, the first think you’d think is… huh? Why is this guy working 40 hours a week on a new product? He’s doing just fine! You obviously haven’t read about the Great Fizmo Disaster of ’08.
We’ve accumulated enough savings to survive for a year if I lose my day job since that little fiasco. I could in theory slow down. I’m not going to.
Because one of the lessons I learned was this: always have a backup plan. Since I was 21 and got my first real job, I’ve always been studying at night for the next one. Despite having made substantially more than average for most of the last 25 years, I have always studied for my next gig.
(I admit there was a three-year pause. I was a program manager at Microsoft for Visual Basic, a computer language. It was my dream job. At night I was writing articles for magazines and studying Visual C++, another Microsoft programming language. Starting a job at Microsoft is a stiff challenge. It is time-consuming. It is stressful. My wife put up with this for a while, then one night gently asked why I was studying Visual C++. “So I can be ready for the next job” “But why did you study before?” “So I could get a job at a place like Microsoft… Oh, wait a minute….” Long pause.
I stopped my preparation for a few years. However, when I quit Microsoft and bought eSnipe I went right back to the same schedule. Because what if something happened to eSnipe? This had some painful and unintended consequences I will address in a later post.)
I’m working on the next business while you’re watching Lost and updating your Facebook page. I don’t know what Farmville is, but the new product is in fact making sales while I sleep.
What’s your backup plan?