Chapter 6. I'm Done!

"I was four businesses into my private enterprise career before I figured I'd better start working out how long I should be in that business, if I was ever going to find a way out of it in the future."

How long do you expect to be in business? Do you know? Have you even thought about it? Or, did you just wake up one day and boom—you were in business—and now you're just too focused on surviving each day to even consider what the future may bring?

When I first started in business, all I really ever cared about was what was happening today, or more accurately, how we were going to get through today without going broke. Tomorrow was all about bigger, better, harder, faster ... more! As for the future, well, I just figured it would take care of itself, so long as I kept the pedal to the metal.

Why? I don't know; it just sounded like that plan would work, I guess.

However, despite the fact that I wanted bigger/better/harder/faster tomorrow, I was not really considering what the effects that my actions today had on my tomorrow. And more significantly I wasn't aware of how some of the decisions I was making might come back to haunt me in the future.

I look back to my first real business and remember going into it with starry-eyed, reckless abandon and romantic notions. I was going to live happily ever after, and my newfound business love would surely last a lifetime. My mother (and business partner at the time) did her best to keep my feet on the ground and offer a solid ...

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