SlashChick said something a few days ago that brought a lot of things together for me in its simplicity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SlashChick  So you want to polarize? Set goals that are bigger than yourself, and work to achieve them, and by necessity, you will polarize. Yep, it's that simple. |
Over the years its gotten way harder for me to find things that I'm truly passionate about. The last two or three things that I've been really passionate about turned out to be short lived victories. Here's a (not so brief!) history:
- I was in restaurant management for years, man did that suck. My GMs were always lame, and it was just a thankless job. I wanted a computer job more than anything! The idea seemed like paradise. A computer job. I finally found one at CallTech Communications doing tech support.
- I was hired in as a tier2 at CallTech. It was a perfect fit for me. I fixed about 50 people's DSL service every day, and boy were subscribers happy that I wasn't from India. We called tier3's for questions, or when we got stuck on a call, or if someone requested a supervisor. Tier3's were leet! My next goal was definitely to become a tier3.
- I became a tier3 three months later. This job was actually really cool. There was lots to learn. I took supervisor escalations from customers, and helped the tier2s manage their calls, and sorted through thousands of tickets. Actually pretty fun, especially if, like me, you subscribe to Steve's "Life is like a game" theory. But about four months in I had learned all there was to know about being a good tier3. After six months I decided that I wanted to become a tier3 supervisor. Coolest job ever, right? The ratio of tier2 to tier3 staffing was 20-1, so there were only three tier3 supervisors for 700 employees on the project. I mean, the job was managing the tier3's. It didn't get any more 1337 that that!
- It took me about a year but I did it. I became a tier2 supervisor, then an operations supervisor, then a tier3 supervisor. And it was the coolest job ever, just like I thought! For about six months anyway. Our project manager was a great guy, but he couldn't run the center the way it needed to ran because of amazingly inept, awful, knee jerk decision making by upper management. I had moved up high enough up in the company to see all of its faults. And I couldn't move up any further without a lot of political game playing. Which is one game I don't play.
Since then, I've been at a loss. What the hell am I going to do with my life??
I started a consulting company, and I had an
excellent business partner, but fixing broken networks for 14 hours a day just wasn't my idea of a good time. It was really my partner's passion, but it wasn't mine. I kept trying to force myself to
care about fixing these people's websites and networks, but I was only doing it for the money. I couldn't seperate
working for someone from
furthering their goals, and my goals weren't aligned with theirs.
At CallTech the goal was to get people online with their highspeed services. That was a worthy cause, people were genuinely happy when we got them online. But what's so great about building a website for some rinky-dink mortgage company? Or fixing someone's shopping cart that sells postcards? I couldn't get excited about it.
It's not that I
can't manifest, because oh, I can.
It's that I don't know
what to manifest.
Set goals that are bigger than yourself, and work to achieve them, and by necessity, you will polarize.
I've thought about that a lot lately. What's the next step? What can I choose that won't be just be another empty victory when I get there?
It's been way harder to figure out than I thought it would be.
After reading all of Steve and Erin's stuff about veganism, I gave it a try, and actually liked it a lot. I was definitely really steakhouse before I started. In fact, I literally scheduled eating out twice a week around "all you could eat steak nights" at two different steakhouses in Columbus, Ohio. But once you get used to it, vegan food is better on
so many levels. On top of the better food, you're inherently shaping your life around a worthy cause. I dig that.
The only hard part is eating out as a vegan. I eat out a lot, or I used to anyway. At my old job after I went vegan, I ended up eating the same chipotle burrito for lunch five days a week because that's all that was available at the restaurants in the area. Even my favorite Caeser salad at Wendy's was way off limits. Burger King has a veggie burger, but its definitely not vegan. French fries are fried in the same grease as chicken tenders.
I've collected web domains since I was about sixteen. I started looking for available "vegan" domains, and in the spirit of the name of Erin's site
VegFamily magazine - Raising Vegan Children, Vegan Pregnancy, and Vegan Recipes I found that
FastVeg.com, FastVeg.net, and FastVeg.org were available.
That was a few months ago, and I keep processing it over and over again in my mind. What would it be like if there was a national chain of vegan fast food joints? Certain menu items could even be raw, and we would buy organic and local produce whenever we could.
I have plenty of restaurant management experience; I even still have some good friends in the industry. I'm also pretty well-versed in web development and
marketing in general. And my business sense is pretty well honed from the consulting company.
But when it comes down to it those things don't even matter. I'm passionate about the idea. I can envision it doing lots of good for many people. There's really no logical end to a fast food chain's potential. I mean, this is how people
eat.
So, that's what I'm doing.
My intention is to develop "Fast Veg" into a national, vegan and organic raw foods fast food chain.
Here goes something..