A Blessing in Disguise

April 18th, 2008 Posted in Personal

So I’m sitting at my desk at Credera (my old job) in a euphoric mental state. I had just recently spent a weekend with a group of guys who think very differently from the masses. I was in such an amazing mental state that the everything in the world felt like the most beautiful thing in existance. Nothing could possibly go wrong, because wrong didn’t exist.

I walked around the office with a beaming smile and an uplifted face. People were reacting to me extremely positively as if I was radiating some aura though it was probably just a simple innate human mechanism to respond to their surroundings and match the feelings of others.

I took a lunch break and went to Whole Foods. It was my favorite place in the area because it was the only place that served food that wasn’t tainted by the evils of profit (not saying profit is bad though).

Then again, Whole Foods is a corporation and you have to be very aware of what you’re doing there, but that’s another story altogether.

So I was walking around Whole Foods with my euphoric state and had a run around to see if there were any free samples. Sure enough, they did and I savored the beauty of nature. I then chatted up with some of the workers who I proceeded to have a long conversation with that started with how I don’t drink soy milk and ended up going into our personal lives. You know… how many brothers sand sisters I have and what not. In fact, this one lady was in her 60s or 70s. To think about it, I was perplexed as to why she mentioned her grand daughter randomly after trying to sell me soy milk.

I ended up checking out with a nice salad where I started a conversation with my cashier as well as a cashier who was helping someone else. One of them mentioned I reminded him of some asian cooking guy on the Food channel.

I savored the delicacies of nature and then thought… huh, there is someone I know that I am not on good terms with. It’s usually rare for me to have a negative relationship with someone due to the fact I was pretty anti social by average standards, and I did not really have the personality that flared up negativity in others. However, this one relationship I had was terrible which bothered me.

Why should this be? I decided to contact him to see if I could mend the relationship.

It would take multiple blog posts to explain why this relationship wasn’t in such a good shape, but to cut it short. We were roommates in college, and it didn’t work out. We ended up not talking to each other again.

But since I wanted to make peace with him, I decided to get in contact with him.

I used Facebook to contact him, and we setup a phone conversation. He ended up calling me, and we had a chat on what had gone on in the last 4 years. He was very receptive which I wasn’t really that surprised about. We shared our goals and desires and that was that.

Then one day I had mentioned to him the idea of just quitting and doing something crazy. In the past year, I had been trying to find what my true passion was or at least an ultimate goal to strive for. I had finally make a conscious decision that also felt right in my gut that I had to do something around education. I just knew that there could be significant improvements in the way children and adults can learn.

I threw up the idea about quitting, and he took the bait immediately. I was shocked for a bit because that wasn’t something I expected. It seemed like a fairly tale because he was in a financial position or at least that what he told me to support the costs of starting a company.

I fantasized about it until I decided that this was something I was going to do. I thought that this was the perfect chance, and I had to take action or else I might regret this for a long time.

I ended up visiting him multiple times in LA before I committed a date to tell my superiors at work that I was quitting to start my own company.

Since the fantasy of carrying out my ideals was so strong, it let me overcome my resistance to the feat of upsetting superiors at my job. Other than that, I honestly didn’t care about what I was giving up because it wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

I set a date and summoned up my courage and quit. The day I told my superiors was a day I will never forget as I was actually trembling and couldn’t think straight the rest of the day. I had basically thrown away a path I was dedicated towards for the last 4 years to embark on a new adventure I knew nothing about.

I ended up moving to LA to get started. I was pumped up to get this thing going, but I was initially slowed down to the fact that my friend and now business partner was still finishing up school. But that was only a week, so I tried to read up as much as possible about the education system and technologies that could help and also spawn creative ideas that could be implemented immediately.

To my dismay, all my friend seemed to want to do was goto this one bar in a high end shopping mall and spend the rest of the day socializing while intoxicated. Something seemed very wrong.

I didn’t quit my job to sit at bars. I brought it up and he gave me answers like we’re just taking a break before we start or I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and I didn’t know shit about business. This didn’t sit well with me as I knew that starting anew company from scratch without any real idea would take a lot of work and discipline.

He tried to pull the typical MBAish crap and say he’ll be able to pull millions of dollars from investors, and we will do it like some classic Harvard case study. I knew this wasn’t going to work. There was something quite off.

After a month, I had enough. I was living in a way that was extremely comfortable. I was relying on my friend for my basic needs, which left me with no power. I bought an overpriced ticket back to my parents and wasn’t going to turn back.

So I should have been devastated… I had just thrown away an incredible job where I was definitely on the rise to join an alcoholic with emotional problems. What a fool I was.

Was it my social incompetence that created this situation for me? Or maybe I really didn’t understand my business partner. I then realized I had ignored signs when I was in Dallas talking to him . He was doing quirky things, but I kept brushing it off as nothing of importance.

Now the problem was that I was broke. My parents felt like they were right the whole time, and I was going to hear it from them.

Honestly, they were right. I was an idiot. I had made a mistake, but was I going to bask in this mistake? Heck no. In the back of mind, I had always had a plan B which was to start my own business on the internet. This was something Ive always wanted to do but just didn’t spend enough time in that world to do it.

I ended up succeeding in generating enough money to not worry about my basic needs for a few years. I met a business partner who actually has his head on straight, and I now can see a much more positive future.

Now why is this post called blessing in disguise? My friend might have not been the person he claimed he was, and he might have not been the right guy to quit with, but he fed my ideals enough that he helped me overcome my fears and pursue a path that I really wanted to follow. I had a lot of time and energy invested in my current path, and it was going to take something idealistic and big to take me out of it.

It ended up not going the way I thought it would, but I did break out and that has been so valuable to me that I can hardly really comprehend it. So i just want to say thank you old business partner. Even though you weren’t the person I thought you were, you help med tremendously in ways I cannot imagine.

If there is a lesson in this, striving for success is messy. You’ll make mistakes, but be careful in taking a short term view. It just may be a blessing in disguise.