What do you want to be when you grow up? When I was a kid I remember being asked that question all the time as well. In fact, it was so intertwined into everything else, that for my senior book in high school it was a required question.
I was a B and C student and this video about hackschooling is something that I’ve been doing all of my life.
For example, I didn’t have an interest in the curriculum at school because my interests wasn’t taught at school, but I realized the importance of a piece of paper called a diploma.
So, I hacked High School. I figured out that if you read all the books and worked hard for the first half of the year, as long as I did the steps to my science project, did my homework, and didn’t fail any major tests, I could pretty much goof off and sleep during class and still pass with a B or C.
At many points times I felt like I was forced to choose a career. I was good at a lot of things and liked many things, like chemistry and music, but I was also interested in many other things like video gaming (I’m a gamer still to this day), and robotics.
Plus, I thought that by the time I was out of high school, I should already know what I wanted to be, but that didn’t work out at all. Reality hit and spent a lot of years working odd jobs to help out my parents.
The years that followed were the same. I moved from odd jobs like mowing lawns and being a farm hand, to working at a factory (chicken processing plant) and then to grave yard security.
By the time I was ready to start going to school to learn what I needed for my career, I was burned out on work, (at one point working two jobs and seven days a week) and really so far removed from my high school education that things like math felt like I was starting over.
I knew I’d end up doing something in the engineering field since it was the only field that allowed me to do most of the things I enjoyed.
Money was a problem at the time so going to school to study robotics was out of the question. The same for music. I was accepted to a few universities as a music student, but couldn’t afford it, and financial aid, for their many reasons, wasn’t an option.
Then schools like Penn Foster started offering classes online and through correspondence, and they were also affordable.
After having been denied music and robotics, I wanted to become an architect, and right before my 2nd semester, I found out that the same road doesn’t always lead to the same destination.
By that, I mean civil engineering (my chosen course), lead to being a surveyor and working on a highway. It wasn’t the same civil engineering that lead to becoming an architect.
So I dropped out. At the time my parents couldn’t understand that it wasn’t what I thought it was and that it’s not something I wanted to do and I faced the anger, but I was happy.
The line of work continued for years until I had the opportunity to go to a trade school and get into network engineering, systems administration and ultimately into Perl programming.
That was really the start of my career, then I turned around and hacked it too!
I used the knowledge of engineering and programming to build my own servers and design my own music service, Echoingwalls Music and Music Sense, and started my own IT website after my nickname, TechDex.
Suddenly my creativity exploded and I began composing again and writing too. I became a publish author with my book, Music For The Simple Man ,which then became a course, both online, and for a time, a non-credit course at a local community college.
And during all of this time, I was still working other jobs, and in one of them, a marketer got hold of me. He found out I was summarizing data for my bosses and taught me how to do the same thing for Internet traffic.
That went on to become a full time course in market research and trend analysis, and of course, later I started my own side business with that, Live Minder, where the motto is, “don’t just mind your own business, mind your own data.”
I started out providing reports for paid clients, and it wasn’t long until they were asking me to fulfill marketing services for them, and as I started learning about marketing, I found out I liked it, and started offering that.
Few more years down the road and here I am, and now people ask me a different question that I keep trying to answer, but didn’t have the answer until this moment.
They ask me, “what do you do for a living?” I could say I’m a musician, or engineer, or marketer or any number of things. Now I simply say, “I pursue my passions and figure out ways to make money doing them“.
I do what makes me happy. I became an entrepreneur.
Interested in finding out more? After you’re done watching that video, watch this one.
