Along those lines, how is your candied nut venture going? :)
My colloidal silver machines are trickling along, but I'm doing well on the consulting front these days, Thank the LORD...
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Along those lines, how is your candied nut venture going? :)
My colloidal silver machines are trickling along, but I'm doing well on the consulting front these days, Thank the LORD...
I guess you could say we're doing ok. I've been away for a while with my "typical job" but we're pretty much in the black now (which is pretty good for being in business for less than two years). Then again, there are a lot of things I want to do with the business in order to get to the next step.
What kind of consulting do you do?
Glad to hear you're "in the black." :)
I do engineering consulting in a fairly wide range of disciplines. At the moment I'm doing a software engineering job that's pretty interesting.
I wrote a tiny bit about it in this article (just a teaser, really) and also included a photo of the device I'm interfacing to.
But I do other manufacturing consulting and can create high tech products from scratch.
I think you told me about your traveling job once, but I forgot the details... Do you think your "nut job" will eventually eliminate your need to travel? :D
I don't normally travel for my job. This particular project had a requirement for 10 months of ongoing support and I was kind of the only guy that could fulfill that requirement. It isn't something I would normally do otherwise. I do IT work for a fairly big company.
My goals for my business are pretty simple. They are as follows:
Provide a tertiary source of income in order to support more quality time with my family.
Serve as a type of education for myself for business education.
Serve as a basis of instruction for my children and more so as a way to frame their minds to think in terms of owners rather than workers. That's not to say that working for someone is bad. It's just that, I feel they would be better off negotiating for a percentage of the profit rather than a pay raise.
That probably stems from a projection of my own experiences. I have learned that when I take a job, I tend to treat it as if I owned it. While doing so has brought me a lot of success according to my own standard, I have never approached the standard of the people for whom I work. I have never once been offered a share of the profits and have only recently asked for it (I was denied). My hope for my children is that they will feel comfortable asking for it and be willing to venture out on their own if they so desire.
Consulting sounds like a cool gig. I have always considered myself a bit of an unconventional-type thinker and someone who comes up with solutions that most would not have considered.
Consulting has been a real God-send for me, and has given me more freedom than the average worker. However, my real goal all along has been total independence via ownership.
I've been only partially successful in that, but the success has made it something that I wish to pass along to my children and grandchildren.
Sad to say, the pervasive culture seems to push them strongly towards "working for 'da man" as the preferred model. I struggle to convey the significant differences to them in practical terms that will actually help them escape "the rat race."
A while ago, I came to the conclusion that our society tends to push the idea of "success" to an extreme point, at which I am uncomfortable. Since then, I have changed the metric for myself from success to happiness. I consider my job as a parent to be to teach my children how to measure happiness and to tell them everything I know about what makes people happy and unhappy. I also think it is important to foster experience in activities which could lead to more opportunities for happiness.
I think you've made an excellent distinction between the two...