Happy Accidents

2 Life’s All About the Leap, Not 
the Landing

 

A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is not what it is built for.

– Albert Einstein

We didn’t know what we didn’t know. If someone had laid out the odds of entrepreneurial success to us in late 1996/early 1997, we most certainly would have been ­paralyzed into inaction. Sometimes being naive allows a person to embark on things that make little sense – especially when that person is young, open-minded, and optimistic. As a group, we most certainly had those qualities. And it was with this mind-set that we set out to start our “little comedy show” and in the process take ownership of our American Dream.

At this point in time, the show most assuredly was little. It didn’t even exist. We cobbled together $2,100 and set off to start the show that would change all of our lives. Why did we choose $2,100 as our starting point? This was all the money that we had to our names. As we always say when we teach our Happy Accidents seminar around the country, “Life is about the leap and not the landing.” We had leaped and now it was time to see where we would land.

One of the first orders of business was to determine where we wanted to start our show. Dallas/Fort Worth is a large metroplex of about five million people and growing. The two cities are separated by 37 miles, with several smaller cities in between. We all were living in Dallas at this point in our lives, so it only seemed natural that we’d find a theater space in Dallas ...